Easter Sunday, 12 April 2020 - Churches closed
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‘They left the tomb with fear and great joy’
Easter Sunday - with all its light and joy - can come up rather quickly after the sombre notes of Holy Week, the stripping of the altars, the hour by the cross, the eerie silence of Holy Saturday. No more so than this year when the prevailing mood is - I’ll call it - ‘Easter Saturday odd’. There’s a strange combination of fear and anxiety, frustration and stoicism in the air. And yet also in the air are the sights and sounds and fragrant smells of spring. It’s lambing time here in the Dales and, although that means a massive amount of sheer hard work for our farmers, for everyone it also means signs of new life all around in our fields, as the trees begin to blossom and the gardens start to bloom.
Fear and great joy - these may seem juxtaposed. And yet we can carry them together in our heads and hearts, just as Mary Magdalene and the other Mary did on that oddest of mornings in Gethsemane.
Maybe a wise thing for us to do to help us through these days, is to be comfortable with holding fear and joy together. It’s natural to be anxious about this terrifying virus and how it may impact on us, our loved ones, our world; it’s also faithful to be joyful that as Christ is risen, so we all can rise, and will rise, each day to reinvent ourselves, to reacquaint ourselves with the good news of a God who can bring light out of the darkest of places.
Holding fear and joy together. This is an antidote to the fallacious idea that we can beat Covid-19 if we have a fighting spirit. As journalist Emily Maitlis firmly put it this week,'You do not survive the illness through fortitude and strength of character, whatever the prime minister’s colleagues will tell us.’ [1] Our fears are well-founded, for the unpalatable truth is that the virus doesn’t take anyone’s ‘spirit’ into account. But our joy is well-founded too, for we find flashes of joy in the many, many examples of medical skill and dedication, good neighbourliness and a strengthening of community which go hand-in-hand with our struggle, our suffering.
This is ‘new life’ as we experience it today. We pray particularly for those who live in tower blocks and small flats who will find the lockdown so much tougher than those of us in the countryside; that there may be joy in new discoveries for them too. We pray especially for those on the front line right now – bus drivers and shelf stackers, nurses, care home workers, hospital staff and shop keepers, for those who work in manual jobs, unable to work from home - each of these disproportionately the lowest paid members of our workforce. As Maitlis emphasised on Newsnight, “They are more likely to catch the disease because they are more exposed.” We pray for moments of joy, new life to penetrate the anxiety of their days also.
Notes
[1] Colin Drury, 'The disease is not a great leveller': Emily Maitlis praised for frank assessment of social impacts of coronavirus. Independent, 9 April 2020.
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