We are now in the season of Lent – the 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Maundy Thursday (Sundays don’t count) when faithful followers of Christ voluntarily give up wine, chocolate, or crisps, as a spiritual discipline (other options are, of course, available – or none at all; it all depends on your tradition). This is the season for fasting, for conquering those temptations to self-indulgence which are inherent in our humanity. For others, Christian or not, Lent is a good enough reason to begin that post-Christmas, pre-summer-holiday beach-body diet. But, for most of us, it is best remembered as the Easter Egg buying season (These must not be eaten before Easter; Cadbury Crème Eggs don’t count).

But, this year, Lent has come to us (as it were) on steroids. We have been thrust into the wilderness, not just for 40 days, but, according to yesterday’s government announcement, perhaps for another 6 months. This is Lent without end, for Covid-19 offers no resurrection. Like Narnia, this is winter with no Christmas. After all, what is the point of a beach body if you can’t lie on a beach? We have given up more than we ever imagined. Front-line health professionals are frightened; the rest of us are bored. 
 
In the UK it has been little more than a week since Lockdown. The previously unimaginable is the new normal. As of 5pm yesterday, 1,408 people have died from Coronavirus in the UK. The US President who had been predicting a swift end to the crisis now sounds less sure. It’s life… but not as we used to know it.
 
It was as an undergraduate in New Zealand that I first discovered the poetry of T.S. Eliot, but there are some lines from his 1940 poem, East Coker, which now make sense to me as they never did before:
 
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
 
Eliot penned these lines just a few months after the start of the 2nd World War when no one had any way of knowing what the outcome would be for Britain, Europe or for Western Civilization. Around the same time, he wrote in a letter, "We can have very little hope of contributing to any immediate social change; and we are more disposed to see our hope in modest and local beginnings, than in transforming the whole world at once...”
 
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing. 
 
And so, it is in the darkness that we must wait; it is in the darkness that we encounter spirit; and it is in the darkness that we must make our ‘modest and local’ contributions – bringing change, showing kindness, helping one person at a time. 
 
But first, ‘be still, and wait...’ As the ancient Hebrew singer-songwriter put it,
 
Where can I go from your spirit?
    Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
    if I make my bed in the grave, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
    and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 
even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
    and the light around me become night’,
even the darkness is not dark to you;
    the night is as bright as the day,
    for darkness is as light to you.
 

Chris Denne