Each
day, we will post a short article by one of Darton, Longman and Todd’s amazing
authors, offering a personal reflection on our current situation in life.
Sometimes this will be written with reference to one of their books, and sometimes
about how they are living in response to the coronavirus, COVID-19 and our
current world situation. We hope it will give you a taste of the depth and
diversity of DLT’s list – books for heart, mind and soul that aim to meet the
needs and interests of all.
Today’s
post is by Lucy Berry, author of Where the Lost Things Go, a Lent course based on the file Mary
Poppins Returns. You can buy a copy
of the book here.
Meditations
On The Recurring Wilderness
We’ve
been set down in a place we’ve never seen before. It is bleak, secluded and
frightening. If not alarmed for ourselves, we’re concerned for others. We have
lost control of things we took for granted: freedom to meet, to travel, to
follow our own will. Suspended in this colossal, extended moment of outward and
inward disruption, the terrain is entirely unfamiliar.
Or
so it is tempting to think. Actually, our fore-mothers and fathers have been
here already. From the time of Hagar onwards, the threatening and life-changing
wilderness has called out our weakness and our strength. Christ was, is, and ever shall be here.
Emanuel, God with us.
I
recently heard someone on the radio talking about our situation as having
‘biblical proportions’. He was using the very word loosely, to mean that we are
in huge, shifting times. But if ever there was a time for us to read our Bibles
deeply, now is that time. As you read, however, I’d beg you not to search for
mere ‘relevance’. Looking solely for relevance minimises what we read. It
nudges us into a defensive position, a fearfulness. It implies a mistrust in
the utility of the Bible; as if utility is the only function of that enormous
glorious library of right and wrong. A relevance-hunt through the Bible limits
us to reach only for the comfort of parallels. It does not lift our eyes to the
hills.
My
firm conviction is that we are witnessing, at this moment (at any and all
moments, good or evil), a recurrence of Bible. All that we go
through has, to my mind, an echoing biblical aspect. One
day - if I have the nerve and live long enough – I’d love to go into this in
more depth ... For
now, let’s limit ourselves to looking at our recurring wilderness, as it
appears in Hebrew Scripture, in our New Testament, and as the current
landscape.
This
doesn’t pretend to be a learned article! It’s more a jumping-off place for
meditation. We are in a time of viral trial, approaching the end of Lent, the
beginning of the road to the Cross. We
know that a terrible time can also be a sacred time. As you read on, I hope you
might pause at each following section, place yourself in it, and listen for
echoes?
Un-negotiable
Wilderness
What
we are contemplating is enormous. Living here is hard. We cannot fully
comprehend what we are in. It is beyond our power to control. It is not a terrain in which we may exist
with ease.
To
deny it is dangerous. We are up against it. Alone, we are not enough.
We are in enforced withdrawal; many of us feel entirely alone. In
this remote place, many of the routines which keep us in balance are gone. The
people we rely on are at a remove. Neighbourhoods feel empty or emptying. We
have a growing sense of our vulnerability; around us there is a powerful,
ancient quiet.
Temptation of Wilderness
We fear everything will be taken away. We hunger for certainty. We
hunger for power to manipulate our situation. We hunger to know the future. We
yearn for exemption from what is. We deny.
Wilderness as Paradox
All wilderness is the removal of our choices, but also the facing
of others; the cessation of one way, but the source of another. Consider all
the Bible people abandoned, and then re-established. Think of those moving
though wilderness from slavery to freedom. Think of all those wandering and
then found. Think of the Man who turned away from Power towards Influence.
Where are we in this?
Wilderness Between Places
We didn’t choose to be in this place, on this unwonted
journey. It is uninhabited; a
no-man’s-land between where we were, and where we want to get to – or get back
to. It is a place to be got through. But we don’t know how long that will take,
or what is on the other side. Perhaps
there will be new things to face there too. How strange to be moving when we
cannot travel. Where are we going?
The Wilderness as Otherness
To state the very obvious, the wilderness is where we don’t belong.
It is where most of us choose never to go.
We reject it, but can’t avoid it. It shows up our smallness, our
vulnerability. It is the place where we have no resistance to knowing
ourselves; where self-reliance is useless. It is empty of what we wish, and full of listening.
The Intangible Pillars
Exodus 13:21–22: By day the Lord went ahead of them in a
pillar of cloud to guide them on their way, and by night in a pillar of fire to
give them light, so that they could travel by day or night.
We are in a situation where we must trust and follow something
which cannot be grasped. This hasn’t changed: we are always being called to
follow something incomprehensible. We always live in fog and by light; but we
forget that we do. The Wilderness shows it to us again ….
These are short thoughts on a long road. We seem held in a global
‘No’, which is very hard to face. But it is not (as some would have it), the
spiteful message from a tit-for-tat, retributive god! Jesus, and His love for us, is our ultimate clue to what our
Creator is like. Do not be tempted to cling to nasty ideas about God. Cling to
God as revealed in Jesus. If we hold to that loving God, then we can see that
the ‘pestilence-as-divine-vengeance’ nonsense is merely one more sad example of
humankind’s ability to create gods in its little likeness.
We
cannot share bread and wine right now. Instead, we can commune together, with
Christ in the wilderness, in the knowledge that it is the Bible,
recurring. Stay well on the way.
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