Images of Calm in Anxious Times

The tenth day of going Lazaretto (in self-isolation) and the first of lockdown. It’s a strange existence for all of us and a worrying one. I’ve been aware of the anxiety I’ve felt in the face of Covid19’s relentless advance. The fact that this threat is silent and invisible adds to the unease. When the Prime Minister spoke to the nation last night about what lockdown must mean, I wondered whether this is what it felt like on the morning of 3 September 1939 when another PM told Britain that she was now at war.

I guess my response was much the same as yours. I thought of the people - so many of them, young as well as old - whom the virus has touched and made sick, mortally so for some. I thought about the courageous men and women on the frontline of health care who are facing impossible life-and-death decisions about where to allocate resources and seem inadequately protected themselves. I thought about the countless people whose finances, livelihoods and homes have suddenly become immensely precarious. I thought about our own locality, our neighbours in this agreeably ordinary village community. I thought of our friends in other parts of the world and here in Britain. I thought of our family, our grandchildren who can barely comprehend what is happening to them, and whom we may not see for months. And yes, of course I thought of ourselves too, quarantined in our home, so lucky to be safe and well (so far), and provided for and with each other to support and love.

It’s hard not to be troubled by turbulent thoughts. The virus extends a force-field over all of us. We are caught up in a kind of psychic instability. Maybe I’m just a natural worrier. I find it easy to imagine, no, expect, the worst. ‘What if...’ this happens, or that, or a thousand other possibilities? Anxious times feed such Puddleglum reveries. Almost all of them are fantasies that take me nowhere except deeper into the slough of despond. Or they are imagined threats I can do nothing to mitigate, tomorrow’s bridges there’s no point in trying to cross today. And the longer we have in lockdown, the more time there is to fill with morbidity.

There’s a spiritual task here. It’s about quietening the spirit, cultivating equanimity, nurturing a more even temperament. As the well-known text Desiderata has it, that adorns many a living-room wall, ‘Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.... Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself....’ Which is not far away from the wisdom writers’ encouragement to live not out of fear but out of trust, echoed in Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Do not worry about your life’ (Matthew 6.25-33). Living trustfully is a key insight of the scriptures.

All my life I’ve found solace in music and art and they are great travelling companions through these febrile times. As is photography. When we first decided to go Lazaretto, I began to sift through my catalogue of photographs looking for images that might provide a focus for meditation. And then I thought: why not share some of them online? So I began to put some favourites on social media (Twitter and FaceBook), just one image each day using the hashtag #ImagesOfCalm. A bit corny, I know, but I couldn’t think of a better one. I’m delighted that a few others are now doing the same. I can promise that I have more than enough photographs to see us through at least twelve weeks of self-isolation.

You’d expect images of nature to feature. There’s something reassuring about landscapes, skies, water, trees, flowers, animals and birds. As you’re drawn inside an image of the natural world, you’re reminded that you belong to the created order, that the good earth is your home, and you’re helped to rediscover your place in the scheme of things. Walking in our peaceful Northumberland valley has been both calming and poignant this March. Daffodils and blackthorn blossom, new-born lambs and birdsong all remind us that with or without us, springtime is as fresh and abundant as ever.

Other images feature human creativity. Buildings, sculpture and paintings play a large part in my own imaginative life, so expect to see some of these in my choice of photographs. I believe there’s a special place for still life. This image (taken at Washington Old Hall) suggested itself for the simplicity of its forms and the
quietness of its colouring. The pewter candlestick and ewer are beautiful objects in themselves. But I liked the way they are lit against the curtain and the window, a light-and-shadow chiaroscuro that is so suggestive of these times we are experiencing. And faith can perhaps see in the ewer the implication of life-giving water, and in the candle, the light of grace and truth.

Some images may be more intriguing, perhaps disturbing. Take today’s photo on the left. I was in a cafe on a bleak day in the Port of Blyth and saw this table and chairs on the deck outside the window. It could not have conveyed a more forlorn scene, reinforced by low contrast in a dull even light. Few of my photos have unnerved me more than this one with its hint the surreal, even the dystopian. I wondered whether to post it this morning. Yet this empty table seemed to fit this first dislocated day of lockdown, representing our enforced abandonment of social life, laughter and the love of friends. Undeniably calm, it’s true, but it’s the ‘dead calm’ so well described by Tennyson in In Memoriam, his elegy for the friend he had lost: ‘And in my heart, if calm at all, / If any calm, a calm despair’.

Yet I also found a more promising ‘calm’ in what I saw. As I gazed at it, the furniture seemed to issue an invitation, or at least the possibility of one. For now, they were in a dormant state, tidily and symmetrically stowed on the decking to provide material for photographers like me. But, I thought, it would not be long before they would be peopled again. Like the wintry trees in another image I shared, it was only a matter of time before the scene would be brought back to life, animated by living, breathing people sitting at the table and enjoying the food and drink placed on it. An obvious allusion to the eucharist, of course, the celebration we are denied for now while our churches are closed for worship, but which remains at the heart of the spiritual life for all who follow Jesus.

Finally, I'm including more explicit images associated with faith. You'd expect that from a God-botherer like me, whose understanding of things has been shaped by Christianity all my adult life. On St Cuthbert's Day I posted a distant view of Durham Cathedral, his shrine, with a contemporary interpretation of an Irish high cross in the foreground. On Mothering Sunday I shared a perspective of Joseph Pyrz's Annunciation sculpture of Blessed Mary the Virgin in the Galilee Chapel of the Cathedral. I've long believed that photography can open up perspectives on faith and the spiritual life in ways that can surprise and enchant us. I don’t think I’d realised how potent a tool it can be until now.

So I'd like to think that these 'images of calm' could reassure and strengthen us when things are fragile and we are living through times of risk and danger. 'Go placidly...' I hope too that they may in turn put their questions to us, and encourage us to look again at the assumptions on which we base our lives and how we face a crisis. And maybe, just maybe, they could challenge us to try to live more authentically not least in reaching out to and helping those who need support and care so much.

Gathering Fragments One Year On

It's the autumn equinox. Night has overtaken day. Up here in Northumberland, the leaves show little sign of turning. But the rose-hips are swelling in the hedgerows and the rowan glows bright red alongside the magenta hawthorn and deep purple elderberries. The scent of coal fires re-lit in village hearths now hangs in the still September air. Golden stubble fields are ploughed chocolate-brown ready for winter. The new academic year has begun: children file past our front door morning and afternoon chatting excitably on their way to and from school. 

The year has come full circle. This time last year, I was in my last few days in office as Dean of Durham. It was a week of high emotion. I was filled with real sadness at the thought of leaving a place and people we loved. I blogged about it here: http://decanalwoolgatherer.blogspot.com/2015/09/the-deans-last-blog.html?spref=tw. At the same time, we were looking forward to our new life across the hills in the Tyne Valley. It would, we imagined, be quieter and gentler than Durham. Cathedrals are wonderful and exhilarating but they are fast places. You need to be intellectually and spiritually agile; you need plenty of stamina. It's not that I was running out of steam (whatever Mrs S says), but I did think I should retire before it became apparent to me and to everyone else that I was overstaying my welcome. And I wanted to be able to have something to give to church and community in retirement, try different things, volunteer in new ways.

It has turned out to be an eventful, not to say turbulent, year. If you've followed this blog you'll know about Storm Desmond and how it invaded our home last December at precisely the same time as one daughter gave birth to our second grandchild and another was rushed into hospital for an emergency operation. Having fully recovered, she sensibly got married in the spring and is now expecting a baby. But then in the early summer my 93 year old mother fell ill and died a few weeks afterwards. All this on top of laying aside a life's work, moving home and beginning again in a new place in an entirely different role, that of being "retired". Oh yes, and the EU referendum campaign and the awful prospect of Brexit.

It's the first anniversary of my farewell in Durham Cathedral next Tuesday. By coincidence (is there such a thing?), I am giving two addresses to a clergy conference that day and the next on "Ministry for the Long Haul". I asked the Bishop why he thought I was qualified to speak to his clergy on this topic. After all, I had never lived or worked in the demanding urban environment that is mostly the setting of their ministry. He replied, "Well, you've completed the long haul. Tell us what's kept you going and sustained you over forty years. Tell us what's been important to you". Fair enough I thought a year ago when we spoke. I'm now trying to work out what to say to these good people. No spoilers! You never know who is reading this blog. I'll post the talks next week. If they've gone well, that is.

But it's been valuable to have to undertake the exercise of thinking about forty years of public ministry as I look forward to the anniversary. I might not have done it otherwise. I had never tried to articulate to myself, let alone to anyone else, what I'd found to be central in inhabiting the vocation to be a priest, though I suppose some of it got expressed in the ordination addresses I gave a few years ago that later became my book Wisdom and Ministry. So I went back to my farewell sermon in the Cathedral on 27 September 2015 (how hard I'd worked on that one!): http://michaelstalks.blogspot.com/2015/09/all-in-end-is-harvest-farewell-sermon.html?spref=tw. The clues are all there, I realised, for I'd intended the sermon to be a valedictory not only to Durham but to all the places where I had served as a priest. My text was the words of Jesus in St John after he has performed another of his "signs" and fed the crowd: "gather the fragments so that nothing may be lost" (John 6.12). So that is what I've tried to do in these two addresses, share some harvest gleanings in a way that I hope is helpful and finds echoes in what others have experienced in ministry. 

It's always important in life to do our best to make sure that "nothing may be lost". I believe it to be a key spiritual task, and especially in later life. One of the gifts of retirement has been to have time (even amid the dramas of the past year) to look back and ponder. I've blogged under the "woolgathering" title for some years but this is the first time in my life when it feels as though it can mean something creative because proper time and thought, reflection and prayer can go into it. 

But the more wool I gather, the more I realise that what I think and say on this first anniversary is still provisional. At this early stage, my musings on the story of my ministry are no more than a ballon d'essai, a first go to test whether I've got it even partially right. Who knows what themes may emerge later on in retirement when the foreground has receded a bit and distance lends perspective? 

That last bit was a photography-inspired spoiler, by the way....