Useless.

Steps walked: 1633.

Furthest point travelled: Front door to get the post.

Face to face non-household interactions: 0.

Track of the day: ‘Wrecking Ball’ – Bruce Springsteen.

            Useless.

            The first person I heard use the word in this new covid-world was a hospital worker. It was four or five weeks ago, and they were frustrated at and exhausted by the scale of the suffering they were seeing around them on every shift. The frequency with which the coronavirus was defeating their immense efforts to bring healing, led them to say to me, ‘Sometimes I just feel useless.’

            Now it feels like a word that I’m hearing almost daily. Friends say it, colleagues say it, I’ve experienced  it, the times when we just feel useless.

            It’s probably worth acknowledging that there’s some honesty in feeling useless at times, because at times that’s exactly what we are. For me, that sense of uselessness is most keenly felt when responding to bereavements just now. So many of the things that are central to my ‘normal’ response to bereaved parishioners are no longer possible; no visits, no arm around the shoulder, handshake or hug, no opportunity to offer a service in their church. I find myself trying to offer solace down a phoneline, and then standing in front of a handful of mourners all sitting in numb isolation, and the two metres between them is a gulf.

            I take a strange kind of hope in the uselessness of so much that I do.

            The pilgrimage I’m supposed to be making right now from Lindisfarne to Iona; what would the use of that have been? It would have been good for my physical fitness (and good for Scotland’s hospitality sector), but what is the use of visiting sacred places per se? Why be in Lindisfarne rather than Lewisham? What’s the use?

One of ‘The Rules’ (https://pilgrimscairn.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-rules.html) I’m trying to follow involves stopping to pray at fixed points throughout the day, but where is the actual ‘use’ of that at a time like this?

            My faith is, that some of these seemingly useless activities are amongst the most important things I can do with my time. There is a deep human need to have and to honour sacred places; places whose stories and whose soil give us fertile ground in which to root and interpret the stories of our own lives; so wishing no disrespect to Lewisham, it can’t quite be for me what Lindisfarne is.

The discipline of stopping to pray, and making that place of stillness and smallness part of the rhythm of the day, helps us to recognise that giving value to our ‘being’ helps us most fully to achieve the things that we’re supposed to be ‘doing’… and also helps us to find the grace to know that we can’t do everything, and that’s okay.

            To be made ‘useless’ from time to time can help to remind us that we are loved and valued not because of what we can do, but simply because there is a God Who loves us anyway. Rooted in that love we can survey the chaos again, and see with fresher eyes the use that we can be.