The Tendency to Fix

 

We humans have the tendency to grip happiness and positivity the moment it peeps out of the ground.  For good reason; we all want to look forward to something.  An NHS Manager described the desperation to put the bad past behind us as “banking something before it has ended” and that really, that is not the right thing to do.  I love BBC1’s ‘The Repair Shop’ but humans are not fixable as easily as a musical box or leather bag.  Our permanent state is fragile with the capacity to be broken.  Pain and exhaustion cannot be ticked off like another task on the ‘to do’ list.  Adopt Leonard Cohen’s thought – we’re all full of cracks, that’s how the light gets in.

C. S. Lewis writes in The Four Loves: “Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God.”  The embodiment of that couldn’t be much more evident than in the nailing of a human to a make–shift wooden cross at Golgotha – meaning ‘skull’.  Some years I’ve sensed the sigh of relief amongst some Christians on Easter Sunday when Resurrection is celebrated and the weight of torture is behind, almost to the point of “let’s forget all that nasty stuff”.  A bit like our attitude to the pandemic at times.  But that’s not reality and nor is it particularly helpful for those still on crosses. 

R.S. Thomas reminds us –

When we are weak, we are

strong. When our eyes close

on the world, then somewhere

within us the bush

burns. When we are poor

and aware of the inadequacy

of our table, it is to that

uninvited the guest comes.

 Easter is a short period of time when all of life’s long spectrum of experience is encapsulated – the darkest and most painful of experiences take place and can remain with us, while simultaneously hope and light filter through.  A theme expressed so beautifully by Annie Dillard, alluding to that dark Golgotha as being also home to hope, in Pilgrim At Tinker Creek: “Cruelty is a mystery…But if we describe a world to compass these things…then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light, the canary that sings on the skull.”

Anna Wheeler. Theos