麻豆社

Good morning. March 8th, schools go back, March 29th, travel allowed, 12th April, shops open, 21st June, freedom. Or not. The problem with having a road map is impatience. We have experienced lost time as a kind of robbery and we yearn to get back what was taken away. Spring is full of restless energy. Our spirits too beat against confinement.

Since autumn my screensaver has shown a dark sea just fifty yards away from where I live. Above the sea a black cloud with a few thin rays of sun peeping through. Last week I replaced this with some untidy daffodils blown about in the wind, their heads bowed, but still defiantly bright. Perhaps next week I鈥檒l change them for purple crocuses. The spiritual issue for me is how do we live with transience? So much of our personal and political thinking is about securing a future for ourselves, saving and spending time and energy, bricks and mortar, as though if we got our calculations right we could last for ever.

But the flowers of the field tells us otherwise. Surely the people are grass, says one of Israel鈥檚 prophets, and Jesus spoke of the lilies, clothed with more glory than Solomon and yet lasting only a day. Time is against us, all the time. And we cannot simply put back time lost in the classroom or in the care home. Instead, we must improvise, do something new.

In Japan the cherry blossom season is beginning. Under normal conditions hundreds of thousands of people go out to gaze at the fragile blooms. It is a chance to reflect on the brevity of life and the beauty of things which change and pass away. The wonder is tempered with melancholy. There鈥檚 something in our culture which resists this nagging duality. We can just about cope with the imprisonment of lockdown, but then we want everything back all at once. What is much harder is to accept the mixture life deals out to us; that the most radiant beauty and the deepest sorrow are sometimes intertwined.

In the Church of San Clemente in Rome there is a brilliant mosaic from the 12th century. It depicts Christ on the cross, but the cross is not the bleak, dead wood we might expect to see. The mosaic is golden and the cross is alive, sprouting branches and shoots and tendrils, a tree of life between earth and heaven. At this time in our pandemic saga we are somehow caught between death and life. I think we should try to resist our impatience for what we think of as normality and explore the sheer potential of now. The spring blooms are fragile. Yet they blow with grace, they are precious as we are, and they are loved with a love beyond themselves.

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