A View From The Vicarage - April 2021
Dear Friends
Back in 1981 a British gangster film was released which went by the intriguing title: “The Long Good Friday”. Sadly the content of the film had nothing whatsoever to do with Christ’s Passion and Death. It seems to me, however, that the title “The Long Good Friday” probably feels more descriptive of our own life experience this Lent than it has done for any year perhaps since 1945.
For many people it seems the last months of national lockdown since Christmas have been the most traumatic and testing of the whole experience of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Is it, because, we’re all beginning to feel a sense of desperation of emotional fatigue, craving the return to the close physical interaction with our families and the mundane activities which perhaps we took for granted? As one illustration of that, I think a great many people miss singing together, in a way I am sure they wouldn’t have conceived before last March.
This may not perhaps have been a Long Good Friday but I’m sure that it has felt like a very protracted Lent. Deprived of some of the activities and experiences which provide colour and variety, life can begin to feel very bleak and unpromising. I’m absolutely convinced that all of you are striving for the end of restrictions and a return to at least comparative normality.
Like a nation of jack-in-the-boxes we’re all eager for freedom, for normality, for the engagement with those we love and that, of course, is a perfectly natural, entirely normal human reaction. But, it seems to me that if we rush too fast heading into the post lockdown environment then we’re in very grave danger of missing one of the most vital lessons it has to teach us.
It’s rather like what we do in church on the real Good Friday. We’re so keen to have our churches looking at their best for Easter that, as soon as possible we put aside the sombre trappings of Holy Week and Good Friday and out come the flowers etc of Easter.
I remember once visiting a Church in Norfolk where they stripped it for Good Friday before the Service on Good Friday and dressed it for Easter immediately afterwards. It felt rather as if Good Friday was nothing more than an unwelcome interruption to the natural course of events.
Now, before a battalion of our wonderful flower arrangers think that this is criticism of them: it isn’t!!
But if we’re to truly rejoice in the joy and the triumph of Easter, then we have to spend our time focussing on the sorrow, the grief and the trauma of Good Friday.
In the same way, if we really want to relish the prospect of a world in which Coronavirus restrictions are lifted permanently then we need to approach changed circumstances with care and caution, exercising a degree of patience which may feel unnatural and for some unnecessary
By the time that you read this I expect that over 130,000 people in the Country will have died from Covid-19. That’s 130,000 lives cut short, that’s 130,000 grieving families and that, of course, excludes the 1000’s of others who’ve died from different causes during this extraordinary 12 months.
Let’s not allow ourselves to paper over the suffering, to relax our guard and caution before it is truly safe to do so, because if we can together guarantee that this lockdown really is the last then finally the Long Good Friday will be over, and we can truly rejoice in the triumph of a world made new which is the real and abiding Easter Joy.
With that, I’d like to wish you all a happy and blessed Easter.
With my love and prayers as always,
Ben