In the prayer we just had, Dwight Brown quotes the “ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times.’” Well, I suppose you could say that we live in “interesting times.” When we say that times are or were “interesting”, we generally mean that they are “interesting” to look back on from a safe distance. True, some times are both interesting and good to look back on – I can think of some – but more often than not, what makes times “interesting” to look back on was not at all pleasant to live through, hence the Chinese curse.
Although social historians try to convince us that people’s everyday lives in the past are the most “interesting” aspects of it, in the main those lives appear to us have been as uneventful and unremarkable as ours mostly are. Sadly, therefore they are often neglected and overlooked. But what usually makes history “interesting” – even exciting, fascinating and compelling – are the times when humdrum, everyday life was interrupted by social upheaval, natural disaster, war, revolution, plague and pestilence.
Of course, it takes time for such things to become “interesting” – often many years, even decades and centuries. While they are happening they are frequently nothing less than disastrous, with great suffering, great misery, even great evil and cruelty. But as all personal involvement with such times fades away then we come to see them as “interesting” – the fit subject for scholarly studies, historical novels, films, plays, “historical” re-enactments and television documentaries – even comedy. Try these things when the human suffering is still fresh, though, and the cry goes up that it’s “too soon.”
The time of pandemic that we are living through will one day be counted among those “interesting times.” The pandemic is indeed a “curse” and few would use the word “interesting” to describe it now. Hundreds of thousands, even millions, dead is not “interesting”, it is catastrophic – not to mention all the personal suffering it has caused and is causing over and above the stark statistics of the death toll alone. Our response to this may be shock and horror, depression and despair, grief and sorrow, compassion and resilience, courage and resolve, or any number of exceptional responses to exceptional circumstances – but “interest”? Few would rate that as an adequate term to describe their feelings. Today the interest lies in finding ways to halt the pandemic, to alleviate the suffering it brings, and to defeat – or, at least, suppress – the virus that is causing it.
Much is rightly said about the pandemic’s effects on physical and mental health, but what about our spiritual health? Our sense of purpose, our confidence in who and what we are, our rootedness in something that underpins our lives in all their fragility and vulnerability? By throwing our lives into varying degrees of confusion, by blighting our plans and hopes for the future, by undermining our confidence in the structures on which we thought our lives rested: our society and we, as individuals within it, have been challenged existentially.
We are not, after all, safe and secure in a bubble of comfortable self-confidence. Our bubble is fragile, perhaps increasingly so, and for all too many people it has burst altogether – or will. And it doesn’t take too much thought to realise how easily this could be true for all of us, even if we haven’t really suffered too much ourselves so far. We have been fortunate that vaccines were developed so fast – imagine what things would be like if they hadn’t been. But can we be sure that future viruses, or even further mutations of the Covid 19 virus, will be so easily contained – not that “easily” is the right word, of course! Even the present virus, in its various versions, is still far from ending its depredations. And this is especially so in poorer countries without the best modern medical facilities and ready access to adequate supplies of vaccine.
Another disturbing factor is the link being made between the pandemic and the wider – indeed, greater – environmental crisis that we face on many fronts. Our upsetting of nature’s balanced systems, our tearing apart of its web of life, our reckless confusion of things best kept distinct – all this and more will bring manifold new threats to human health and wellbeing, to our ways of life around this one world.
Of course, humanity has a way of surviving and surmounting challenges, of finding resources – including spiritual resources – with which to survive those “interesting times”, but the combination of threats we now face is unprecedented. There is certainly no guarantee that we can somehow emerge from them unscathed, even emerge from them at all in any state that could be called satisfactory.
In the far future, historically-minded folk may find these times of ours “interesting”, but the prospect for all too many of those doomed to live through them is anything but. Which is why it is up to the present generation of earthlings to see that our “interesting times” don’t get any more “interesting”, and instead become mercifully uninteresting and humdrum: a normal succession of life and death, of everyday dramas of no great consequence, of events which make for happiness and content but which won’t detain future historians overmuch. We want stability, a future we can have some sense of certainty about, a world of peace and order, sustainability, health and simple pleasures. Not heaven on earth, perhaps, but at least an earth beautiful, vibrant and pleasant to live on. Is that too much to ask? Not really, but achieving this modest aim requires us all in these “interesting times” to adapt our ways and lifestyles, to change our priorities and technologies, our economic systems and methods of doing business, and so make more secure the basis of our increasingly unstable existence. But, of course there can be no guarantees.
Lent is a good time to reflect on such things. When Jesus was “driven” into the wilderness after his baptism he was forced to re-assess his life and its purpose – an existential shift portrayed mythologically as his triumph over the temptations of the devil. It was this that set him out on his ministry, and ultimately on the road to Jerusalem and the great crisis that awaited him there. It was that ministry, that crisis and what followed, that set out a new spiritual path for humankind. That path still offers us a world at peace with itself, with nature and with God, the eternal basis of our existence.
Reject that path, take the ways of greed and destruction, and life gets rather too “interesting”. Follow it and something more important than mere “interest” comes into play. It is the world where, as the prophet Micah says, “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid.” (Micah 4: 3-4) Not very “interesting” to historians but no bad way to live out our human existence.
In the wilderness Jesus confronted himself and found a new path to follow for the good of humanity. As the model for Lent, that wilderness experience, that time of fasting, bids us to put aside our usual assumptions, to renounce our petty ambitions, and instead seek a deeper understanding of our life’s purpose, rooted in loving kindness and the will to be a saving and healing presence in this wounded world.
I suppose this past year of pandemic has seen us all driven into the wilderness in one way or another, and we are not out of it yet. Some have confronted their interior demons as well as external tribulations, and come through – battered but unbowed. Some, sadly, have not done so well. Others, of course, have not survived at all. We give thanks to those who have borne the brunt of this particular wilderness and its trials and temptations for the sake of us all. And let us resolve to learn from the wilderness ourselves, finding there a deeper assurance, a clearer path and a better way to be human in these troubled and all too “interesting times.”