A View From The Vicarage - February

Dear Friends

I can see clearly now the rain is gone.

I can see all obstacles in my way

Those famous lines summarise it seems quite neatly what all of us at the moment are hoping and praying for during this time of a global pandemic.  I heard a leading British Virologist describe the current position in the UK as “a pandemic within a pandemic”.  During such times the ability to see clearly what lies ahead seems tantamount to impossible.

Yet although circumstances such as these exacerbate our inability to see clearly what lies ahead, what they actually do it seems to me is to accentuate what is present all of the time by making what is true for us as individuals true for us as a wider society indeed as a global family.

For the most significant influences upon our lives we generally neither have the clairvoyant powers to see precisely what lies ahead or indeed the ability to radically alter even what we can.

In general terms, those things in life which we can see are the insignificant and insubstantial.  Our health, changes in society or even family are often unseen and even less anticipated.

In a famous passage St. Paul describes the conundrum better than Johnny Cliff:

“For now we see clearly, but then face to face, now I know only in part, then I shall know fully even as I have been fully known”. 

This sense of uncertainty is nothing new rather, as St. Paul discovered, it is an integral part of being human.  It strikes me that as Christians we have the perfect answer to the paradox.  We’re reminded that the here and now what seems so permanent and unchanging is actually what is transient.  To find permanence and immutability we must look “with the eyes of the heart” because taking that very long view we begin to appreciate what is valuable and worth focussing upon.

The price which Covid-19 has inflicted upon the world has been truly horrifying with a death toll which seems almost incomprehensible and our hearts and prayers must surround all those who have been infected and all those who have been bereaved and all those whose lives have been devastated in other ways as a consequence.

Perhaps, however, when we can eventually see with complete clarity what we will also discover is that as well as its appalling impact, Covid-19 has also had some positive impacts in helping all of us to re-focus our attention on what really matters on the permanent rather than the transient and if that is so then we will I’m sure all be able to proclaim.

“I can see clearly now”.

With my love and prayers as always.

Ben