Quarantine: a meditation on the first Sunday of Lent.

I experienced the desert, once, for about an hour.  It was at Masada, that huge rock that rises 800 feet sheer above the western shore of the Dead Sea.  In AD 66 it was held by Jewish insurgents for more than four years in a last defiant stand against the Roman Empire.  After a long siege the Romans breached it, and nearly a thousand Jews killed themselves in a suicide pact leaving behind just a handful of women and children.  They destroyed everything except their stockpiles of food, to let the Romans know that the siege had not starved them into submission.  

I was one of the leaders of a diocesan pilgrimage.  We had travelled down from Jerusalem to Jericho, past Qumran of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the oasis of En Gedi.  At Masada there are cable cars to whisk pilgrims to the top.  But my mind was full our experience the day before when we had been to the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem.  It had moved me deeply, for members of my mother’s family had died at Auschwitz.  So here at Masada, this site of an earlier holocaust, I wanted to do more than just enjoy the view.  I wanted to make some small gesture at this extraordinary place.  

Two of us set out to walk to the top.  Our Israeli guide looked at us as though we were deranged.  In temperatures of more than 40 degrees, he declared that he took no responsibility for our safety.  Even Josephus, writing about the siege in his Jewish War, saysyou take your life in your hands on this rock.  We could see the steep path called the snake winding upwards.  We thought: a few hundred feet, half the height of the Simonside Hills where Northumberland people hop up after Sunday lunch; there are benches on the way up; we have water, sun hats, creams.  Five minutes in, we knew what we had taken on.  The sky was like brass, the air motionless.  The heat pressed down on us as if to pin us to the baked skeleton of the planet.  Nothing lived here.  Our colleagues waved cheerfully from their cable car.  We walked at a distance from each other: this was not a place to talk. I could think of only water, shelter and rest.  We stopped often.  

So this was the desert: terrible in its beauty, godforsaken, capable of driving you mad, not a little fearful.  We staggered to the top, and suddenly there was concrete to walk on, ice-creams and souvenirs on sale, and a man collecting tickets: a moment of true bathos.  Soon it was back to our buses, a salty photo-call in the Dead Sea, and drinks and salads to die for in an air-conditioned spa.  For an hour, we had ceased to be tourists and participated in the desert, experienced its grasp, its fierce demand.  We had taken a tentative step into a place of truth – an hour’s isolation from the reassuring skein of civilisation.  An hour does not give God much time.  Yet I did glimpse unforgettably, I think, how the very godforsakenness of the desert is its gift, how it strips the spirit bare of pretence and illusion, creates room for the shriving and purgation of the human heart the Bible calls ‘truth in the inward parts’.  

Jim Crace, in his strange, compelling novel Quarantine, imagines some first century travellers going into the Judean wilderness to pray and fast for forty days in order to save their souls.  Among the hot stones and scrub they encounter a mad sadistic merchant, a satan whose evil grip over their lives is complete.  But there is another character in the story, a distant figure living alone in a cave.   He comes from the fertile lands of Galilee so they call him Gally.  His real name is Jesus, and it is said that he can work miracles, heal people.  He has his own quarantine to keep in this wilderness, for he has work to do, heart-work.  ‘He’d put his trust in god, as young men do. He would encounter god or die, that was the nose and tail of it.  That’s why he’d come.  To talk directly to his god.  To let his god provide the water and the food.  Or let the devil do its work.’  The novel has Jesus as a minor character, an effect that is startling.  But in fact all the characters in the book are minor compared to the one you remember when you have forgotten the rest.  I mean of course the desert itself.  

So it is in the Bible.  Here the desert is friend, there it is adversary, but always a major presence in the story.  Always there is the memory of how Israel was born in the desert, how they entered into marriage there with Yahweh; how they were tested, faltered and fell.  But Yahweh will rerun this desert history, says the Old Testament.  There will be a new exodus journey, a new deliverance. Here, in the wilderness, the glory of the Lord will be revealed, and a redeemed community brought to birth.  All this is recalled and relived, in St Luke’s temptation story.  Jesus goes out into the wilderness to face the same ordeals that defeated the Hebrews, the same fundamental questions of Israel’s life: who and where is God, what is the bread he must live by, where does his loyalty belong, what is his vocation and destiny?  

This is heart-work.  It needs quarantine from the carpenter’s shop, even from the bodies and minds that cry for healing, the teaching of truth, and Sabbath rest by Galilee.   We sing ‘Forty days and forty nights’, surely one of the most successful marriages of dreary words and dreary music in the hymn book; and hardly grasp what even an hour in this terrible quarantine is like.  In the gospels, it foreshadows the cross, a first passion and death that is the consequence of the baptism Jesus has just undergone.  But like the cross, it is presented not as defeat but victory.  Here is the true Israelite, not like the Hebrews, who triumphs in the wilderness and emerges ‘filled with the power of the Spirit’ to proclaim the word and works of God.  The desert sets the stage for the reign of justice, truth and peace.  It prepares the way of the Lord. 

The desert fathers, those extraordinary men who turned their back on the world in order to offer their lives to God, understood that the desert offers the best education on earth for holiness.  A younger brother recently arrived in the desert went to see an elder and asked him for teaching. The old man sent him away and said: ‘Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything’.  The desert will be your teacher, and it’s all you need - that’s what he meant.  Go and face it: the hunger, the thirst, the silence, the loneliness, the desolation, the mountain madness and whatever cravings the wilderness throws at you.  Face the demons that come up from the depths of your soul, however frightening they are.  You will learn.  You will grow.  You will find the kingdom forming within you.  You will seek.  You will find.  You will see God.  

Quarantine is for our protection.  It guards our health by focusing on the issues of disease, contagion and wellness.  The forty days of Lent are a spiritual quarantine, an opportunity to attend to our spiritual wellbeing, allow the diseases of the human spirit to work their way safely out of our system.  The desert as an image of quarantine recalls us to the foundations of Christian living: dying to ourselves, turning away from sin to follow Christ, the cost of discipleship. It nurtures in us a hunger to be more serious.  

But the desert is also a place of promise and grace.  It holds the seeds of renewal and joy.  Here arid lives are watered and our desire for God is reawakened. St Augustine said that it was through longing that our hearts are made deep. Here’s to a Lent when we find ourselves longing to live in a more profound way, filled with a new desire for God. 

The EU Referendum: why we shouldn't walk away from our promises

Earlier this week, on her wedding day, I walked my daughter up the aisle of the church where I had been Vicar in the 1980s. It was a proud and moving thing to do. She was beautiful in her wedding dress. Well, what bride's father wouldn't say that? It was a lovely service, solemn but joyous. The words and music all felt exactly right. Our hearts reached out to this young couple, so tender and so happy together.

I wasn't (for once) thinking about the European Union that day. But afterwards, I thought about what the preacher had said in his fine homily. He spoke about the marriage vow, and how a few words said in public change everything. I've quoted the philosopher J. L. Austin before in a blog. He wrote a famous book called How To Do Things With Words. He took the marriage vow as an example of a "performative utterance", words that change things, make a significant difference. When the bridal couple process out of church at the end of the marriage ceremony, they have taken on a different status from what they had when they came in. They now have new privileges, duties, responsibilities. It's their promises that effected that change.

What's that got to do with the EU referendum? 

Simply this, that as members of the European Union, we have signed treaties that bind us to this family of peoples. We have given undertakings and made promises to our fellow EU nations. Like marriage, a treaty is a kind of covenant. It commits us to fidelity, to being true to our word. We British take pride in behaving honourably and being trustworthy. It isn't only Englishmen (and women) whose word is their bond. I'd like to think that our neighbours in Europe thought they could safely trust us to honour our undertakings. I'd like to imagine that to them, whatever shortcomings the British may exhibit, unreliability and bad faith were not among them.

Thanks to the referendum, we are now considering walking away from commitments we have freely entered into. I find this deeply disappointing. It's not that any treaty is irrevocable, or that situations may not change so drastically that old undertakings need renegotiating. But to me, the very possibility of Brexit feels like the threat of a divorce. It would be the un-saying of promises that were made in good faith, in an environment of trust that pledged our nations to work together for the common good and our mutual flourishing. It would be the unraveling of the bonds of friendship and loyalty that held our peoples together. It would be, I think, to break our word which our neighbours had come to trust, and on which they thought they could rely. 

Am I making too much about "honour"? Christian wisdom would say not. In the Bible, the vow or promise is sacred, born witness to not only by human beings but by God himself. Covenant-breaking is one of the worst of sins you could commit: maybe this lies behind the gospels' condemnation of Judas for betraying - handing over - Jesus to be crucified. "Let your yes be yes, and your no be no" he teaches: "anything more than this comes from evil". Theologically, pledging our word is to imitate the God who in Jesus, pledges his living Word to humanity and in him utters his final Yes to the world he loves. Honour is a central idea in all religious faiths. A word once given is solemn and binding. 

Like any marriage, our relationship with the EU has had its ups and downs. It has been tested beyond what was originally anticipated. When a marriage is under pressure, it's tempting for one or both partners to walk away. Many do. But marital therapists tell us that to begin with at least, staying in the relationship and facing its difficulties openly and honestly in the hope of achieving a better life together is better than the easy option of escaping. It's not a perfect analogy, but the point is that our relationship with Europe is not an abstract connection with some faceless entity, "the EU", that we're talking about. It's a "marriage" to twenty seven other nations. It is they we would be disappointing and letting down, people to whom we have obligations of neighbourliness and friendship, particularly the most needy among them. 

There isn't anything about this in the Government leaflet on the referendum that will drop on to our doormats in a few days' time. That focuses mainly on whether we are better off in or out, with a postscript on how the EU can achieve things (such as security and climate change) that no nation can do on its own. I don't have any quarrel with its contents. But it doesn't go far enough, doesn't probe the very reasons we belong to the European Union at all, and doesn't ask us whether we think it matters to honour our treaty commitments or not. 

But surely it does matter that we commit to our undertakings and keep our promises. In one of the Psalms (15), the virtuous man or woman is someone who, having made a promise to a neighbour, does not go back on that word, even though it was troublesome and inconvenient. As individuals we want to be trustworthy and thought of us reliable. Fidelity is a value almost everyone shares. So we ought to uphold it as a nation too. And not turn our backs on the very many people of other European nations who are begging us not to walk away.