A Prophecy

The chapter of the Bible I read in the morning was Isaiah 22. As so often, I found something my eye must have skated across innumerable times without really registering. 'Look away from me,' says the prophet, not apparently to God but to others:

Look away from me - 
Let me weep - 
Do not comfort me
For the destruction of my beloved people

My first thought was how well that related to our times: how I dislike the attempt to pretend that everything is all right, that nobody has suffered over the last months of restriction, that death is not a threat, that faith means loss is not genuine. If you think that, you aren't paying attention. You must weep. Only then can you advance to hope, once the pain has been accepted.

Then later I sat with a bag of bits and pieces Cora's husband passed to me. Cora, one-time Pastoral Assistant at Swanvale Halt church and Chair of the diocesan Mother's Union, has been dead nearly two years now: the bag in question contained packets of photographs of the Spring Fair and a flower festival at the church, letters, news sheets, and flyers. I sat and looked at the faces of so many people who have died over my ten years at the church, from long before I knew them. The beloved people of the priests before me, and myself, because they are Christ's first.

The phone rang. Brenda had 'some devastating news', and so it was - her granddaughter Sasha had taken her own life by walking in front of a train. I don't know her that well. But the savagery and waste is something I know very well indeed. We human beings need sensitivity and imagination, but the price is that sensitivity and imagination will kill some of us early. In my mind's ear I hear Job's comforters and I throw the words of Isaiah at them, with some anger.

I send a card to Sasha's parents and include what Isaiah said twenty-seven centuries ago. His feelings are not theirs, but they are cousins to theirs. They are part of the great and terrible inheritance of being human.