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Available for over a year

It’s Monday and whether we’re working or furloughed, on the frontline or multi-tasking at home, many of us are beginning the week tired after another, ‘not quite’ weekend. It seems our initial energies to find new routines and ways of coping with the challenges of this virus and its restrictions, are running low as it begins to dawn on us just how far away the horizon might be of a return to some kind of normal life, and just how many phases of adjustment there may be ahead of us. We are grieving things large and small. We try to find meaning in it all, but exhaustion sets in. Hitting that wall myself last week, I stood up, somewhat wearily to lead evening prayer on Thursday and found myself saying aloud the words from the prophet Isaiah: They that wait for the Spirit shall renew their strength: they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. The image took me back 12 months to a walk along the Potomac River downstream from Washington DC to the nest of a bald eagle. I found it because others were already looking at it – a nest the size of a bathtub with two huge chicks in it – we watched and waited and eventually an improbably heavy bird tipped itself out of the nest, dipped below it and then gradually began to climb. His clumsy fall into flight reminded me of a line from a poem of Rainer Maria Rilke’s: ‘Even a bird has to trust its own heaviness before it can fly’. I was struck then by the trust that’s needed in order to let go into flight for the first time, and now I’m struck by the trust that’s needed to risk stopping trying to hold it all together. Can we trust that if we let go we won’t simply fall? Can we risk being overwhelmed if we stop trying to keep the chaos at bay? Others have been this way before us. In the Hebrew thought of the Old Testament, chaos is often expressed in the language of inundation and flood; overwhelming despair is expressed in the language of the abyss. In both images God is the one who sets our feet on solid ground. A friend of mine who lost a child once reflected with me on the kind of ground that God offers when we fall. ‘It’s not a feather bed’, he said. ‘It’s more like a concrete floor’. There’s little comfort in it, yet you can trust it to hold you.’ Most of us prefer to hold ourselves together. Holding it all together is something we want and need to be able to do most of the time… and yet we are far more likely to if we can allow ourselves a break and trust that even if we let go, we will not fall; that if we can stop and wait and feel, our strength will be renewed.