With

“Why do you think you need to go?” my counsellor challenged me. Grenfell was still burning and I was heading straight there after my appointment with him. Perhaps a bit too much of me wanted to be useful and to try to fix it, a notion of which I was soon disabused by the significant numbers of people already helping out. But, in large part, I just wanted to be there, with my community. 

In this Coronavirus era, we are all learning – in new ways – that same longing for and importance of simply being with. 

Being with is the thing I still miss most about Mum. I miss being in the same room as her and sitting next to her on the sofa. I even miss being with her through those hard end times in which our withness felt like that season’s only saving grace. And it’s the thing I miss most about the others who are no longer here. I remember Uncle J offering me a G&T on one of my visits in his final months. “It’s only 11am!” I protested half-heartedly. “Yes, but you won’t be here later,” he twinkled back at me as I poured us a drink. We clinked our glasses and enjoyed our withness while we still had it. What any of us wouldn’t give for just another hour with someone who has gone and can’t be brought back. 

It’s unsurprising that social distancing seems to bear so many hallmarks of bereavement as we mourn the withness we used to enjoy and grapple with what being together looks like in the new normal. Without children at home, significant caring responsibilities or any symptoms, the new normal hasn’t (yet?) hit me hard. I ‘see’ friends and colleagues so regularly that on occasion I’ve had to beg for phone calls over video conferences to save my weary eyes. And I’ve had some happy moments like a time of communion and prayer with my goddaughter and her family, and watching a National Theatre performance on one screen with Ruth on another, laughing together and chatting during the scene changes.

It’s a skewed kind of with when, mediated by my screen, my friends in Mexico are as close and as faraway as those in Mile End; I can speak to them all in real time but can’t hug any of them. The bittersweetness of long distance friendships is nothing new, it’s just that its scope is one of the few things that has been extended in this time of shrinkage. The local withnesses are in some ways the only real ones: only someone physically there can pick food off the shelf and take it to a person nearby who needs it. The only actual human I’m seeing – really seeing – is my next door neighbour as we have coffee together on our balconies, the requisite distance apart. 

On the first Sunday in Lent, which feels like a lifetime ago, I preached at a friend’s church on ‘who is my neighbour?’ In this weird Lockdown season as the local and the global, the physical and the virtual, feel particularly distorted, I wonder what that sermon would look like now. Lent is drawing to a close and, while the world feels a very different and much more precarious place that it was six weeks ago, we turn to the familiar and constant Holy Week story as a timely reminder of the reasons for the hope that we have.

And it’s a story that’s full of both withness and absence. Jesus – the real, historical, touchable Jesus – arrives in Jerusalem on a donkey. At first celebrated and welcomed by the crowd, yet within days he will be dead. Remembering my own experience of being told that Mum had days left to live, I’m not surprised that by the time they got to the Garden of Gethsemane the disciples were out for the count, exhausted by sorrow. The world as they knew it was coming to an end. The incarnate, Emmanuel, God-with-us God wouldn’t physically be there much longer, and Jesus tries to prepare them for it. Even Zoom couldn’t mitigate that separation.

“Don’t let your hearts be troubled, trust in God, trust also in me… In my Father’s house are many rooms. I am going there to prepare a place for you… I will come back and take you to be with me so that you also may be where I am… It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the advocate will note come to you; but if I go I will send him to you… Are you asking one and other what I meant when I said ‘in a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me’? You will grieve but your grief will turn to joy… Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.”  

They didn’t have much time to get their heads around all this coming and going, even though it’d been on the horizon for a while. But they got through the rollercoaster ride that is Holy Week – the betrayals, the fears, the eternal plan, the cross, the death, the abandonment, the resurrection of Jesus – and came out the other side. “Come and have breakfast,” he told them as he met them on the beach after a long and fruitless night. Reinstated, reassured and commissioned, they, like us, hear Jesus’ promise before he’s hidden from sight yet again: “And surely I am with you always”.  

That promise has echoed in my heart and mind over the past couple of years as I’ve missed Mum more than I could’ve imagined. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; through the valley of the shadow of Mum’s death, of Grenfell, and the many other sadnesses along the way. And even now, surely you are with us as the Coronavirus tsunami washes away a world we took for granted, levelling and exposing in the process, cutting us off from the fullness and possibilities of the relationships on which we rely, and further battering the most vulnerable who are always disproportionately affected by the stripping away of safety nets.

And yet, that little voice asks, is withness now what we really want? It’s all well and good that God is with us in the rubbishness, but wouldn’t it be preferable for him to make the rubbishness go away instead?

While one of my friends recently appreciated the comfort it brought her mum to have a strong sense of Jesus’ withness and presence in the noisy, isolating and claustrophobic MRI machine, she couldn’t help but feel it would be a billion times better if her mum didn’t have to be there at all. Likewise, while the Grenfell residents valued the support and love of others, I’m sure they’d have given anything to not have needed it; to revert to how things were before their homes burned down, their friends and families died and their possessions went up in smoke. Ditto for NHS staff as they serve on the Coronavirus front line and bear the brunt of its brutality. 

“If I was desperate enough to try praying, you’d be the first person I’d ask to do it with”, another friend told me graciously in response to my offer to pray together because I couldn’t see any solution other than God. However, as we sat on the sofa and wished that she wasn’t having to go through so much hard stuff all at once, it just felt too much for her to take a punt on the existence of God. Why seek his presence, hope and comfort when really what she needed was for everything bad to come to an end? “I know it helps you,” she offered back, “but it’s not for me.”

Her reluctance is hardly surprising as I know that the hope and comfort I derive from God’s withness only make sense in the context of eternity and the face-to-face withness that will come in time. Without a concept of ultimate destination and reunion, no wonder my friend saw no added value in asking God to journey with her now. And yet Holy Week reminds us that there is a bigger narrative and a certain future in which there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain because the old order of things will have passed away. And that this is made possible by a God whose isolation and forsakenness was unimaginably worse than that which the world is currently enduring.  

Sara and I spent last Palm Sunday in a small village in the middle of Chile’s Atacama Desert where we followed the lively congregation’s procession through hot dusty streets as they enacted the triumphal entry with palm branches and song. This Lockdown Palm Sunday, I sat on the rug in my bedroom, joining people from London and around the world for a virtual church service, enjoying glimpses into the musicians’ living rooms and this illustration of worship as the sacred and quotidian aligned. With them, but not with them. 

Next Sunday, scattered yet gathered, we will regroup around our phones and computers for Easter. Next Sunday, so near yet so far. In this new era, a week is a long and life-defining period: it’s the time it takes to transform a conference centre into a field hospital; it’s the time it takes to rob families of people they love, of jobs, of security, and goodness knows what else. Little knowing what today will hold, let alone the week, we journey through Holy Week with perhaps more empathy than usual for those first disciples facing the end of the world as they know it. As I’ve written about elsewhere, this is already a hard and weighty season. Let’s see what it looks like this year. 

Yet, next Sunday, we’ll be reminded that through death comes life; through confinement, birth; engagement, consummation. Through uncertainty, faith; through loss, hope; through fear, love. We’ll remember that we’re in the already but not yet and will perhaps feel the longing more than ever. And, mirroring the way that the localised Jesus had to leave so that, by his spirit, the global church could grow, perhaps those of us who will grieve our inability to be together in person will draw some comfort from the fact that our virtual churches are likely to be even fuller than our buildings would ever have been. Endless is the victory. 

Now we see in part, as on a screen. Then we shall see face to face. With; forever.