Overture.

Looking back, it feels as if last weekend was a kind of overture to the days which would follow; last weekend all sorts of grim themes were first properly sounded.
I remember coming back from my usual early Saturday morning whizz round Sainsbury's, astonished at how busy the supermarket had been. Five days later I was shopping again, with a short list of very ordinary items - satsumas, bananas, chicken, chickpeas, bread, milk - and I hadn't been able to get any of them.
On Saturday night Susie and I had gone out for an all too rare 'date night'. The restaurant was almost empty and felt very quiet. Tonight it will be silent, with all restaurants and bars now having been closed.
And on Sunday morning, even though we had two baptisms as part of the Parish Eucharist, there very very few 'bums on pews.' It felt so awful to anoint the children being baptised, with a tissue over my finger. And then during Communion, to bless the children who came forward with my hand a foot above their heads felt numbing. I watched my sons come forward, and knew I couldn't touch them either, and tears tried to rise.
On Tuesday the Archbishops of Canterbury suspended all public worship.
In so many different ways, were in a time when touch, when contact, is being suspended, forbidden - and for good reasons, I know, I understand. But this will be a hard long Lent we will be making a pilgrimage through over the months ahead, and nobody seems to know when new life might come, when we might know an Easter.
This morning I woke up to the sound of a helicopter hovering somewhere nearby. I lay listening, it didn't seem to be moving, and I felt an anxiety in my heart - what did the sound mean? What painful new reality was this sound an overture to?
And then I heard my six year-old, gustily singing one of his favourite songs: 'I won't fear what tomorrow brings, with each morning I'll rise and sing.'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reAlJKv7ptU