The Second Sunday before Lent, 20 February 2022
Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth
The Creator of all things says: I will calm your storm.
Do you ever find yourself wondering why the world has drifted so far from Eden, where everything was once so peaceful, an idyll for the creatures and the creation living harmoniously, and for man and woman united in this life of mutual care. Adrift from Eden now, it can often feel like we’re on the wild seas, hit by storms.
Although we live in a time and place of comfort and wealth, nevertheless somehow life seems to have got harder for so many, the troubles of life more exacting for both old and young. Whilst Covid may have hastened some of this, it was happening already.
How we long to be travelling through calm waters, how we yearn for a place of peace in our life and in our world.
What unites today’s two bible passages is a sense that the Creator of all things is the source of all calm.
There’s no going back to Eden but we can take inspiration from the picture in Genesis of a benign world, a beautiful garden full of trees pleasant to the sight and good for food, home to every animal of the field and every bird of the air, from whose soil man and woman were formed and from which sprang the sources of the world’s great rivers.
The Creator of all things is the source of peace and unity.
And we can’t be on Galilee in a boat with Jesus but we can be moved by the scene which Luke depicts: the vicious gale, the storm-tossed boat, the fearful fishermen and the simple, direct words of Jesus which returned peace to the waters.
The Creator of all things says: I will calm your storm.
What welcome words these are as our society continues to be tossed by the storm of the pandemic, with the devastating loss of life, the social isolation and the panic and uncertainty over work, money and the future which leaves so many individuals and families suffering.
We long for calm, and here in the UK the word CALM is an acronym for the Campaign Against Living Miserably, a male suicide prevention charity, whose helpline saw a 36% increase in demand last year with someone contacting them every 62 seconds. During the pandemic CALM created campaigns to help people cope with lockdown and later devised a ‘roadmap’ for people anxious about a return to ‘normal’ life as restrictions eased. [1]
Might it be true that the crisis in our society’s mental environment is as profoundly serious as the crisis in our physical environment? The writer Mark Grief says, ’This is midnight in the century, and mental dysfunction is the new norm for just about every one of us’. [2]
Since before Covid but exacerbated by it, there has been a huge rise in concerns around personal mental health as a result of things like loneliness, unemployment, housing and income stress, domestic abuse and grief and loss. [3]
If it’s true that virtually all of us are affected by mental dysfunction, then maybe it’s not us that’s the problem. Maybe it’s the world we’re in. The psychologist R.D. Laing famously proposed that ‘insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world’, a world in which ‘people are willing to obey social rules, even if the commands are inhumane and irrational.’ [4]
This is why CALM work hard to help young men break away from the social rules of damaging stereotypes about men always having to be strong and laddish, self-reliant and emotionally repressed, and to promote positive depictions of men – ‘men who are good at what they do and good dads and also open, vulnerable and emotional’, and to normalise getting help: for, as CALM’s Assistant Director Rachel Clare says, “Being silent isn’t being strong, and that goes across the board to men and women. To ask for help is an act of bravery, it’s not a sign of weakness.” [5]
And if it’s not us that’s the problem, it’s the world we’re in, its structures and systems, then these can also be challenged and changed. In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck’s classic tale of subsistence farmers forced into destitution in 1930s America, the land agents explained to families that it wasn’t them, but the banks who were forcing their evictions: for the bank was a ‘monster’, they said, a creature which ‘breathes profits’ and ‘eats the interest on money’. ‘It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does,’ the land agents said, ‘and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men… It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.” [6]
Yet financial systems can be bent towards the common good, as community credit unions and ethical investments attest, and today many are calling corporations to account for their destructive activities. Thanks to the work of legal campaigners governments are starting to recognise ecocide as an international crime: ‘mass damage and destruction of ecosystems – severe harm to nature which is widespread or long-term’. A pioneering barrister, author, and environmental lobbyist Polly Higgins once said, “The rules of our world are laws, and they can be changed. Laws can restrict or they can enable. What matters is what they serve. Many of the laws in our world serve property - they are based on ownership. But imagine a law that has a higher moral authority… a law that puts people and planet first. Imagine a law that starts from first do no harm, that stops this dangerous game and takes us to a place of safety….” [7]
How we long to be travelling through untroubled waters, how we yearn for a place of peace in our life and in our world. We may need to struggle to reach that point, but reach it we can.
However troubled we may be by the big issues or the small problems of life, we each carry with us the means to overcome them. Our practice of faith helps us to reach that point. The spiritual writer John O’Donohue once beautifully wrote, ‘Your identity is not equivalent to your biography. There is a place in you where you have never been wounded where there's a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. The intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.’ [8]
‘Master, Master, we are perishing!’ … The Creator of all things says: I will calm your storm. [9]
Let us embrace this word which Jesus speaks to young and old alike: I will calm your storm.
Notes
[1] CALM Impact Report 2020-21 [PDF].
[2] Mark Grief, Environmental Movement of the Mind. Adbusters #147, Vol. 28 No. 1, January/February 2020.
[3] CALM Impact Report 2020-21 [PDF].
[4] Richard Sennett, That madness is a sane. The New York Times, 3 October 1971.
[5] Interview: Rachel Clare [Campaign Against Living Miserably]. Soundspheremag.com. Accessed 16 February 2022.
[6] John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath. Chapter 5.
[7] Polly Higgins quote from the Stop Ecocide International website.
[8] Krista Tippett, John O’Donohue: The Inner Landscape of Beauty. On Being, 28 February 2008, updated 10 February 2022.
[9] ‘I will calm your storm’, inspired by Billy Bragg, ‘I will be your shield’ from The Million Things that Never Happened, 2021. [Official Video on YouTube].
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