Many Waters: floods and faith

Here on the Durham peninsula, we live with water all the time. As the River Wear, it flows round the rocky acropolis on which Cathedral and Castle sit. When it is in spate, you can hear it in the cloister, tumbling noisily over the weir between the Mill House and the Old Fulling Mill. When the river is very high it goes quiet again, for then the weir becomes just a wrinkle across the smooth fast surface of the flow.

However, all this is happening far below. The river remains confined to its gorge, kept in its place as rivers are meant to be. What we have seen in Somerset and across the south of England is water that bursts out of its proper bounds. And then it is not simply unwelcome but frightening, a power that is as relentless and destructive as hurricane or wildfire.

When I am walking past the mill, I sometimes think about one of my favourite novels, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss. In that story, the mill is Tom and MaggieTulliver’s home. Never mind the plot (read it for yourself) in which river and mill play a central part. During the story, Tom and Maggie become estranged. At the climax, the river floods and the mill is swept away. Tom and Maggie’s boat capsizes and sinks, but not before Tom and Maggie are reconciled and drown in a tender embrace.

The novel is set in the Lincolnshire fens, not the Somerset Levels. But it captures so much of what people have been suffering in Somerset where life is imitating art in a terrible way. But there’s a point at which art and life differ. In the book, the flood brings about a reconciliation, and by implication, something new and better is coming to birth. It’s the same in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung where the old order of the gods is swept away by fire and flood and a new humanity is born. But in Somerset, there is no redemption, at least not yet. People continue to be overwhelmed, week after week, submerged beneath cold, filthy, hateful waters that simply refuse to go away.

George Eliot and Richard Wagner were drawing on ancient mythological archetypes in their art. The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis story of the flood are among the oldest narratives in the world. The Bible is witness to the primordial fear the Hebrews had of waters that transgressed their limits and would not stay where they belonged. ‘The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice, the floods lift up their roaring’ (Psalm 93.3). To them, the flood represented chaos in its worst manifestations, monstrous, terrifying, powerful.

So it is not strange that in the New Testament, one of Jesus’ most memorable actions is to calm the storm, reassure the boatmen and instruct the waters, like a ferocious wild animal, to ‘be muzzled’ (Mark 4.35-41). It echoes the psalmist’s faith: ‘more majestic than the thunders of mighty waters, more majestic than the waves of the sea, majestic on high is the Lord!’ Or as another watery psalm says, ‘be still and know that I am God’ (Psalm 46.10).

But to those who are victims of the waters that are despoiling homes and farms and livelihoods at present, these words may not yet bring encouragement, still less hope. It will require a huge act of faith to hear them in any way other than as a cruel mockery. But we who are dry and warm in our own homes should try to pray imaginatively for the children, women and men who are on our hearts right now. We can stand alongside them and on their behalf, hold on to our belief that there is no chaos, however awful, where God is not already present, sharing in the pain of victims, knowing in his crucified self the waste and the loss and the pain. They need us to hold on to our belief that in God’s time and in God’s way, not least through the care of those who are bringing help and support, they will find hope once more, and be given back their lives. 

'Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it' says the Song of Solomon. I am writing this on Sunday, the day of resurrection. May it come for us all - soon.

Birth and Death In Lent

Jenny and I are like Simeon and Anna in the temple, getting old while we wait for a child to turn up. Not that we are quite ready to say Nunc Dimittis just yet. The child in question is our daughter’s first baby, and our first grandchild. I blogged when we first heard that a birth was on the way. He or she (the parents have opted not to be told which) was due on Shrove Tuesday, so was inevitably nicknamed Pancake. Now it is ten days into Lent, and still there is no nativity. We are learning a lot about waiting.

Meanwhile, a friend and his family have also been waiting in these early days of Lent.  For them, it was the last illness of his mother; the waiting was quite simply for her to slip away peacefully, as they hoped her death would be. We talked about these different kinds of waiting, one of us for a birth and the other for a death. Like T. S. Eliot in The Journey of the Magi, we had seen birth and death and thought they were different.

 

But perhaps they aren’t.  When we keep vigil by a loved human being going through one of life’s sacred passages, when we wait for a birth or a death to come, we realise how similar they are, to people of faith at any rate. We are born, we die, we are re-born in some new and unimagined way. Both usually involve waiting and pangs, and generous helpings of patience, endurance and hope. There is often not much else that we can do than be present to what is happening and to those who wait with us: we must allow things to take the time they take.  

This theme of how we spend time has a Lenten aspect to it. This Lent, a Durham idea about trying to live in a way that is less busy has captured the imagination of a surprising number of people. It was stimulated by Stephen Cherry’s recent book Beyond Busyness. There is a website with resources: www.notbusy.co.uk, and even a red wristband to wear as notbusy people. The Twitter hashtag #NOTBUSY is being well used. All this is to open up space in our lives so that we pay more attention to God and to one another; perhaps, in the words of a slogan we coined in my Coventry days, ‘do less well’ (read those words several times putting the accent on different words).

I’ve found in the first two weeks of Lent that waiting for our grandchild has instilled a keener sense of wanting to be less busy so that I can concentrate on this great event that is about to happen, be present to the experience of anticipated delight and joy.  Of course, everyday life doesn’t stop when someone is born or dies, though it can feel like it – ‘stop all the clocks’ said Auden in a brilliantly observed line of poetry.  For time does change in the way we experience it, which is why we find it astonishing that the world goes on as if nothing has happened to us. 

This different and more sacramental quality is what I am trying to notice.  I want to try and embrace what we might call ‘God’s time’ with its gift of a deeper experience of being alive. And I want to allow this glimpse to make some difference to my ordinary days.  Lent with its intertwining of mortality, springtime, renewal and resurrection hope is an exquisitely rich season. So, waiting and preparing for Easter, and waiting and preparing for a birth or a death, belong together. Lent gathers up so much of life, its shadows and its light and everything in between.

And if ‘death is swallowed up in victory’, then birth too is an act of defiance against all that is deathly and deadly in our world. A birth brings not just delight but hope for the human race: life begins again. The old English word ‘Lent’ means spring. Soon the green blade rises.  

For my recent sermon on not being busy in Lent, see my blog of sermons and addresses at 

deanstalks.blogspot.com.