“HOW has it been for you?” You only have to ask the question and the floodgates open to release stories and the whole spectrum of emotion. The pandemic has touched all our lives.
For many of us, it has been the sense of time losing meaning, of not being able to get together with family and friends, of profound isolation and loneliness and the feeling of being robbed. For some, it has been the agony having to say goodbye on the phone to loved ones dying in hospital, or the inability to visit those in care homes.
Funerals with a limited number of mourners socially distanced were particularly hard. Memories of Her Late Majesty the Queen’s sitting alone in black, masked, and with her head bowed at the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral remain a stark image of the searing pain shared by millions in that same situation across the world at that time.
Much has been made of the marked impact of the closure of our churches during the lockdown. People were unable to go to church, say their prayers, and take part physically in the eucharist. All of this is true; but the wider Body of Christ is bigger than we can number. As John Robinson reminded us in his book The New Reformation: “The house of God is not the Church but the world. The Church is the servant, and the first characteristic of a servant is that he lives in someone else’s house, not his own.” In terms of serving others, there are many stories from the days of the pandemic of those helping with foodbanks and feeding the homeless, or teachers and school staff visiting pupils at home, day by day, to make sure that they were fed and safe.
AS WE look back over the past three years and our particular experience during the pandemic, the story of the encounter of Mary Magdalene with the Risen Christ in the Easter Garden in St John’s Gospel provides an important theological lens.
The grief-stricken cry of Mary to the two angels — “For they have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him” — is one of the most profound laments of lostness, dislocation, and emptiness. The words speak on various levels. We might be reminded of the recent scenes from Turkey and Syria, of people desperately digging in the rubble of the earthquakes with their bare hands. Or the countless families of “the disappeared” throughout the world. Those words of Mary Magdalene echo a sense of losing any sense of God. Where is God in all of this? Why is he hiding himself? Never mind the real presence, what about the perceived real absence?
The pandemic was a time to dig deeply into our treasuries. For many of us, words became few. For some, it was the repetition of the Jesus prayer or arrow prayers, such as “God bless us and save us”, that kept us connected. For others, it was the words of a hymn such as this from Bishop Heber to give us hope:
O, most merciful!
O, most bountiful!
God the Father Almighty!
By the Redeemer’s
Sweet intercession
Hear us, help us when we cry. Amen.
The Gospels are a series of annunciations; the pronouncement of the name “Mary” by the Risen Christ, and her Galilean accented response “Rabuni!” made all the difference in the world. All the memories of past conversations and experiences came pouring back, and hope was reborn. Archbishop Rowan Williams’s poem “Post-Vax: Splott Community Health Centre 2021” begins with the words:
Face the wall. Fifteen minutes sitting
(are we there yet?).
I am sure that I was not the only one who felt moved while waiting those 15 minutes in our surgery, reflecting on all the care: those who developed and made the vaccine; the members of the local Rotary club who guided us into the surgery; the nurse who called me by my name and vaccinated me; and the kind staff who made sure that we were all right afterwards. The story of the Bible is God in search of us, in the most extraordinary of ways, and finding us as he did with Mary in that dawn Easter Garden.
One of the most famous pictures of the Johannine encounter of Mary Magdalene and the Risen Christ in the National Gallery is Titian’s Noli me Tangere, meaning “Do not touch me” or “Do not cling to me”. Mary’s desire to somehow grab hold of Jesus is completely understandable. Perhaps this conclusion to this particular annunciation, and the command to go and tell those first disciples, is a reminder that we are called always to see Christ in new ways.
Our worldview can never be the same again. The Czech philosopher theologian Tomáš Halík quotes Jan Patocka and his description of the dark forge of death and suffering as the “solidarity of the shaken”. We have all been shaken.
In her book Encountering the Depths, Mother Mary Clare of the Sisters of the Love of God had this to say: “We are called to stand. Wherever we may be, as fortresses in the darkness, in the night of the church as we know it and as it has for centuries been known. To stand in the day of martyrdom, whether of blood or of mind, unconquerable in our dependence upon God. God calls us to nothing less than to stand unshakeable as the shakeable is being shaken.”
Bill Vanstone’s final book was Fare Well In Christ. Like all of his books, it is a reflection of his years of service as a parish priest. Typically, it finishes with a poem “Joseph of Arimathea’s Easter”, and, as usual, the clue is in the last verse:
“He’s gone!” cries Joseph, at the empty tomb:
But Mary says, “He’s left a word for you:
He cannot rest to be your past,
So he has risen to be your future too.”
The Ven. Peter Townley is the Archdeacon of Pontefract, in Leeds diocese.