FROM THE VICAR
A year ago, the patience of our esteemed editor was being put to the test as the emerging Coronavirus pandemic led to a whole host of last-minute changes to the magazine – including several re-writes of the Vicar’s column. I imagine that few of us thought then that we would still be living with such significant restrictions a year later.
The amazingly rapid development of several highly effective vaccines has provided a ‘light at the end of the tunnel’, but it has been a long and at times very dark tunnel through which we have all been travelling. When I last wrote this column myself, back in the summer, it looked like things were improving – but as we all now know, that turned out to be only temporary. The darkness of the winter months has brought with it the darkness of many thousands of new cases, and sadly thousands of further deaths. Most of us reading this will know somebody who has been ill with Coronavirus; many of us will know somebody who has died with it. All of us have had our lives profoundly affected.
As regular readers will know, I have been away from active ministry for some months. What fewer of you will know is that it was due to quite serious mental ill-health. As well as the dark tunnel we have all shared, I have personally been in some very dark places. I am grateful to everyone who has sustained the life and work of the church in this benefice during that time, and I am pleased to say that I am recovering well and am now returning slowly to active ministry.
During this difficult time I have been particularly sustained by a prayer of St Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Spanish nun and mystic theologian (here in a translation by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow):
Let nothing disturb thee,
nothing affright thee;
all things are passing,
God never changeth.
Patient endurance attaineth to all things;
who God possesseth in nothing is wanting;
alone God sufficeth.
As we hopefully now begin to emerge from the collective darkness of the Coronavirus pandemic, Easter reminds us that there is no darkness, not even the darkness of death, which cannot be conquered by the light of God. No matter how difficult life gets – and at times over the last year it has been very difficult indeed – there is the promise of light and life beyond all things. Sometimes that promise is all we have to keep us going, but if we hold on to it, then keep us going it certainly will. Sometimes, as for much of the last year, patient endurance is necessary; but if enduring is what is needed, then enduring is enough. When all else seems lost, God alone suffices. May he bless us all.
Fr David