A Voice in the Wilderness
Geoff Maitland
In thinking about the wilderness many of us will have experienced since Lent last year, as a result of coronavirus and the restrictions it has brought, a song from 1960 by Cliff Richard came to mind. It is a song of lost love, of regret, of apology and forgiveness. It tells a very human story with a haunting melody – give it a listen above – but the words that always stick with me are:
And though there was no one, nobody to see,
A voice in the wilderness brought comfort to me;
Believe me and you’ll hear it, the voice from above,
A voice in the wilderness, the voice of true love.
The wilderness can be lonely and dark but ultimately it can be the road to light and love. So as I sit down to write in the midst of our third Coronavirus Lockdown, I reflect on the devastation that has been wrought by Covid-19 over the past year and ask ‘What light can we find amidst all this darkness?’.
In our journey through Lent during ‘normal’ times, amidst the hurly-burly of everyday life we would aim to set time aside for personal reflection and self-examination, and maybe imagine the solitude of our Lord in the wilderness as he prepared himself for his ministry and for his ultimate sacrifice. This year, there is no shortage of time to ourselves, trapped in our own version of ‘Not Going Out’, and we are experiencing that solitude with Him. There have been ups and downs of course, but for long periods we have been isolated on our own extended retreats. So perhaps this year we do not need to think too much about what to do without, or to do differently, to bring us closer to Christ as we travel with him through the wasteland on the way to the cross. This has been a year of personal and collective sacrifices and deprivations; so perhaps we can build on these for our Lenten journey. How does Christ’s light shine through our darkness in lockdown? I have picked out three rays of hope.
One shining light has been how so many people are helping each other to get through this - how in isolation and our socially distanced world we have been surrounded by so many examples of people caring for one another and of communities coming together. From the front-line workers in the NHS and key services working to exhaustion to save lives, to neighbours helping with shopping, door-stepping for a chat or picking up the phone to check on people unable to get out – we have all seen or experienced ‘love thy neighbour’ in action. By being apart and experiencing what that means, we see more clearly what others may be experiencing all the time. Coronavirus has been a great leveller; we are all in this together and for so many the priority has been looking after each other, physically and mentally. The focus on self has changed to how we as a community cope and survive. So one legacy of all this will hopefully be a greater awareness of the mutual value of caring and how many different ways we can care for each other. Lent helps us see how important a part prayer plays in this as well.
Another beacon shines a bit more in the distance – what might happen as and when we all emerge from this? We all comment that the world will not go back to where it was – is it too much to hope that ‘every nation may be directed in the ways of justice and peace, that we may honour one another and seek the common good’? The opportunity for the world to re-set arises rarely – is it too much to expect that, as in the 1950s, the 2020s will see a re-setting of the world, a chance for the fruits of the Kingdom to have greater visibility here on earth? Just dream for a moment: a more caring society which seeks the common good, between cultures and between nations; justice and reconciliation starting here at home let alone in countries torn by oppression and strife; a global determination to prevent catastrophic climate change and embrace the sustainable stewardship of our planet and its resources - clean water, sufficient food, education and social opportunity for all; and unconditional respect for every individual whatever their background. We have been to the abyss, to the edge of the precipice, had the biggest wake up call for almost a century – will we listen? In the face of such challenges, as individuals we seem so helpless to make all this happen. But Jesus in the face of similar massive challenges showed the way – how everyone can be loved because God loves us first. In the wilderness he charged his batteries to achieve his mission – we can do the same. We are charged to reflect that love, a beacon out of the darkness, fuelled by his sacrifice in which we prepare to share. We can emerge from the darkness of lockdown renewed and refreshed to bring about His Kingdom here on earth.
A third ray of hope in the darkness is the fruit of the creativity and ingenuity of humanity. This has brought us the vaccines and will help us overcome all our challenges. The green shoots of a sustainable, caring and inclusive post-Covid era are there; we just need to direct our individual and collective energies to loving our neighbour in all we do, through our actions as well as our words and prayers. As individuals we can all play our own small part to drive this re-set. More than that, just as through this last year we at St Bene’t’s have loved and supported each other as a community, so as a congregation we can do so much more together. We may only scratch the surface, but chaos theory tells us that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can ultimately affect weather patterns in Europe; in our complex world, small changes can ultimately give rise to large effects. So our unpromising immobile life as a caterpillar in lockdown can be transformed into a thing of beauty whose flight knows no bounds. St Bene’t’s Development Action Plan is a blueprint of what we can do together; when we finally emerge from the solitude of this pandemic, let us pool our individual learnings and insights and put this plan into action as our small part of the world’s re-set. We have given up enough over the past 12 months, so this Lent let us not necessarily give something up…let us give something back.
