Steps walked: 18,598.
Furthest point travelled
to: 1 mile – North Middlesex Hospital.
Face to face non-household
interactions: 2.
Track of the day: ‘The Sun
Danced’ – James MacMillan.
I’d been invited to give the talk at The Latymer
School’s Foundation Day Service this year. I had to decline on the basis that I
was going to be in Iona. Well, Iona didn’t happen, and neither did the service,
but an online version was produced, and as I was still around I was asked to
record a talk to go online. This is what I offered.
Foundations;
what are our foundations? What’s fundamental to us?
On Good Friday, Christians meditate on the Crucifixion
of Jesus, and naturally it’s a time when we remember those who are suffering
today. It was therefore a great privilege for me to be invited to go and pray
with staff at the North Middlesex Hospital on Good Friday this year. I was very
aware that I was amongst people who know more than I can imagine about the
faces of suffering right now. To ensure social distancing, the floor had been
marked with black and yellow tape at two metre intervals, and those markers had
been made in the shape of crosses. For
me it was a tremendously powerful image, seeing those people at the heart of the
fight against this pandemic, standing on crosses on Good Friday; it made me
think about the ways in which, for me, the self-sacrificial love which the
Cross represents for Christians is something I’m called to make my stand on,
something that is foundational, fundamental.
The coronavirus pandemic is leading all of us to assess
and re-assess what matters most to us – what is truly fundamental, and what’s
ephemeral, what we can live without.
There’s been a lot of talk about the importance of our
key workers, our essential services, and largely speaking they’re people whom
we’ve tended to take for granted, and many of them are amongst the lowest paid
workers in our society: my goodness, haven’t we discovered how important the
people who stock our supermarket shelves are? How essential the staff at care
homes and nurseries, the rubbish collectors, bus and train drivers, doctors,
nurses and everyone else who works in healthcare. People who have often been on
the margins of our attention, are now being recognised for the fundamental
contribution they make to our common life.
And
that leads me to wonder if what we’re discovering about society might also be
true about ourselves as individuals too? What I mean is, do we necessarily
notice and value the things about ourselves which are foundational, fundamental
to who we are as human beings? Do we see, do we see and properly value all that
is amazing, and beautiful, and good and true about who we are and the
difference our lives can make? I’m a priest, I take a lot of funerals, and I
can tell you, when people reflect on a
loved one’s life, amongst all the things they remember and treasure, exam
results and salary have never, ever in twenty years been mentioned to me once.
What is remembered is humour and generosity, kindness and wisdom, creativity
and courage, what is remembered is love.
And lastly, those magical words, I’d just like to
return to what I said at Foundation Day six years ago: it’s also good to know
where we’re not so strong, know where our foundations have the odd crack or
two. I spoke then, and for the first time, about my experiences of depressive
periods and how that has shaped me. Nobody has perfect foundations. Nobody is
all strength and no vulnerability. Having vulnerabilities is not a problem, if
we know what they are, and we treat them with respect.
We are rediscovering whose contribution really is
fundamental to keeping our communities going, and lots of those key people have
often been undervalued or barely noticed. Perhaps we can use these strange long
days of isolation and distancing to get to know ourselves better, to see and to
treasure all that is best in ourselves, especially those qualities of our
character which in the past we might have overlooked or simply taken for
granted.
Look after yourselves. Look after each other. Take care
of your foundations, build, grow, dream, hope, and flourish.
And if you want the version
including jokes – you can find it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8WMCl18jJ8&feature=emb_logo
Thank you very much for this entry!
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