Steps walked: 15061.
Furthest point travelled: 1
mile. North Middlesex Hospital Chapel to support the Chaplaincy Team.
Face to face non-household interactions*:
18.
Track of the day: ‘Land of
Hope and Dreams’, Bruce Springsteen.
*On reflection, it was a bit
misleading when I was describing the things I was counting as ‘conversations’.
It rather risked giving the impression that I wasn’t taking social distancing all
that seriously. In fact, what I’m counting, includes talking to the cashier at
the supermarket checkout, thanking a delivery driver, saying “Hello” to the staff
in my local park. I’m counting them all, because right now it very much feels
as if they all count.
I’d been invited to go and pray with members of one of
the teams at the North Middlesex Hospital this morning, as they prepared to
start their shift. They’re working at the sharp end, and the sharp end of
anything can be painful. I felt quite inadequate to be there with them, almost
like an imposter.
How would I begin to speak? How would I move from their daily
briefing, into a space of prayerful silence and benediction, before they then
went out to the ward and the realities of their days?
I went to bed with something of a ‘script’ in my mind,
but it had changed by the time I woke up. What follows is what I would have
said if I was a more eloquent speaker. What I did say was a kind of ‘dragged
through a hedge backwards’ version of the words below – still largely recognisable,
but not precisely the same:
I have two children, they’re aged six and eight. They’re dealing
with this changed world remarkably well in this strange time. But my eldest,
James, he runs deep, and although he’s fine during the day, it’s almost a
nightly occurrence now that around three or four in the morning he’ll wake up,
become restless, and then come into bed to sleep next to me. He stays restless,
until I hold on to him; when I hold on to him the restlessness ends instantly and
he falls deeply to sleep.
We all need to be held sometimes, and that can be a
difficult thing to think about in this time of physical distancing and separation.
For people of faith, there is that deep sense that we are
all held; by God, or the Creator, the Great Power, whatever name we use: love,
love is as good a name as any for what holds us, and which never lets us go, no
matter what we go through.
We’re also called to hold on to one another. Holding on
to people in your thoughts, your prayers, in your practical actions of healing and
care. I’d imagine that’s something you’re very good at.
And we also need to let ourselves be held sometimes; to
be held by others, to allow them to look after us. People whose work is caring
for others, aren’t always quite as good as that. You are our NHS heroes; on Thursday
nights at eight I ring the church bell vigorously, my boys stand on the
doorstep cheering and clapping. But sometimes when we’re heroes, it’s quite
difficult to be human too, and to face the frailties of our humanity, the parts
which can get tired, which can be vulnerable, afraid sometimes.
And so I hope that his moment of silence that we’ll share
now, will be a moment when we can be human, when we can hold on to one another in
prayer, and when we can be held, a moment when we can allow ourselves to be
held.
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