Just over a year ago I sat in on a quiet day at the School of Theology, University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee. I picked up a book of poetry by RS Thomas and came across the following line:
Does the tune exist when the instruments are silent…
It’s a good question. And, in the current viral-caused exile, I might want to press it in a different direction: Is the tune still discernible when the ambient noise tries to drown it out? Or, as the Psalmist put it: How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
For that is the current task for Christians in the Covid-19 world. The kingdom of God, shaped by sacrifice, compassion, love and mercy, and coloured by defiant hope, courageous realism and grace-filled generosity, does not change. Amid the fear and threat, the invitation to subvert the running bass of restlessness struggles to penetrate the noise and sound a different melody. But, as we are discovering from the stories of individuals and communities giving themselves to the service and care of others, the whispered tune has a habit of breaking through. Listen for it.
For many Christians the shape and contours of worship have changed. In a week. But, the altered reality challenges us as to what lies at the heart of our hope. A building? A sacramental discipline? A devotional formula? Or the sometimes-distant reality of the God who let his Son give it all up until, on that cross, he had nothing left. Then, through the questioning of abandonment, he discovers what is left of God and faith and hope.
RS Thomas also wrote in ‘A Welsh Testament’:
History showed us / He was too big to be nailed to the wall / Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him / between the boards of a black book.
Do we really think he can be confined in a book? Or a box?
