Five years ago, during the pandemic lockdown and all the chaos of that summer, I remember struggling to find words for a sense that kept echoing through my body.
It was something like this: A pivotal point in history has arrived, and I am not ready for it. Or maybe this; A pivotal moment in history has arrived, and my self has not been formed to respond. Or even: A pivotal moment in history has arrived, and I only know two responses: anger/despair, or distraction/distance.
Maybe you can relate, maybe you can’t. But five years later I feel even more certain that the self we form in the daily acts of our lives becomes critical and clear when a season of crisis comes. Is our sense of psychological wellbeing grounded in the conviction that all will continue on as normal, or is there space for uncertainty and grief? Do we try to soothe our anxiety with words like, “Don’t worry, that won’t happen” or are we able to live with, “Yes, that could happen and yet…”
If I look back over my writing in the past five or six years, I see many themes emerge. One of the clearest is this search for God within the brokenness and wreckage, a belief that beauty and sorrow often walk hand in hand. I can see that I have been trying to practice the tension of accepting all possibilities, and still finding peace. To not remove myself from the sorrows of the world, but to be unshakable in the midst of them. To find a peace, in other words, that is not a withdrawal from painful realities but a looking through them. To find God there; to face the worst and be unafraid. “What can man do to me?” the Psalmist asks. In truth, he can do much – but as the martyrs and many other holy people remind us, no man can truly harm someone whose Self is secure in God.
“God is there at the point of greatest tension, at the breaking point, at the centre of the storm. In a way despair is at the centre of things — if only we are prepared to go through it,” writes Metropolitan Anthony Bloom.
“As Christians we are always in tension —in anguish and at the same time in bliss. This is mad, ridiculous. But it is true — accepting the dark night just as we accept the brilliance of the day. We have to make an act of surrender — if I am in Christ, there are moments when I must share in the garden of Gethsemane. There is a way of being defeated, even in our faith — and this is a way of sharing the anguish of the Lord. I don’t believe that we should ever say, ‘This cannot happen to you.’ If we are Christians we should go through this life, accepting life and the world, not trying to create a falsified world.” (Beginning to Pray)
Last September, I was at the tail end of a difficult year, and many others around me were walking through layers of grief. All the terrible things people feared were indeed happening to them. And yet – the apples were ripening, the roses were magnificent, and the end point of all of this was the Resurrection of the world.
And so I wrote this poem. I hope, at least, it is the continuation of an attempt to accept “the dark night just as we accept the brilliance of the day.” And I hope it reminds us all, even as terrible things keep happening and happening, that instead of skirting around the edges of despair, we must be prepared to go through – and find Christ there deep in the heart of it, burying the seeds of resurrection roses.
May we learn to be people who are wise and unafraid.
Jenna
Downwind of Grace 