We've learned to live with Covid over the past two years. But that first lockdown. The shock of learning a life threatening disease was spreading; the perplexity engendered by the unreality of immediate restrictions on when we could leave the house, go shopping, visit family and friends, go to a concert, attend church, play a round of golf and almost everything else that was ordinary, normal and routine.
The one concession was an hour's exercise, but within a set radius of home. So we walked. And walked. We varied the route, half an hour outwards, half an hour return. Right, that's it till tomorrow. Where we live, ten minutes takes you to the edge of town and into rural Aberdeenshire.
The photo is of a broken down fence, two concrete posts, the steel reinforcing bent and rusted, the wires only just holding them up. A crazy cruciform wreck of a fence, no longer needed to keep animals in the field which for several years has been intensively farmed.
I remember quite clearly taking this photo. The digital date shows it was April 17, five days after Easter Sunday which was April 12 in 2020. It was the first and only year since 1967 I wasn't in church on Easter Sunday.
On 17 April 2020, the date of this photo, there were 54 deaths from Covid in Scotland, and the 7 day average was 48 and rising. The sadness and anxiety were palpable. It was hard not to be scared. Each day we, and most other folk, went out for our walk, came back, watched the news briefings, found something useful to do or interesting to watch. Then there were the reinforcing rituals of face-coverings, sanitiser, and the new aversion therapy called social distancing.
So at the turning point of our walk down to Skene village, there is this crazy broken down fence, its ruined posts an Easter conspiracy, an emotional ambush, like a mocked up Calvary, but witnessing to something deep enough to bear the weight of what had befallen us. I had cycled past that broken cruciform wreck so many times and didn't notice. But walking down that day, living now in a changed and chastened world, those concrete posts took on concrete significance.
Behind them the outer edges of the Highlands, and visible to the left, a glimpse of Loch Skene. The looming, hard-edged grey posts, stark against a light sky, were making a statement, or so it seemed to me. In all the suffering that was unfolding in the world, here, right at the turning point of the path, a Cross. We were troubled about illness and an increasing mortality rate, praying and cheering and willing on our medical scientists and virologists working flat out to find treatment and perhaps a vaccine, anxious on behalf of Health Service staff under increasing pressure and knowing worse was to come. And this broken old fence pushed us back to the previous Sunday, Easter Sunday.
Amongst the first casualties of a pandemic, if we're not careful, is hope. Followed quickly by faith. In a way too strange to explain, two accidental fencing posts interrupted whatever I was feeling - probably anything between self-pity, being more scared than I admit even to myself, and that inner guilt of those who are still safe (so far as we knew) when so many others were not. Corroded steel reinforcements, rusty wire, and crumbling concrete had conspired to demand my attention, and turn my mind to the Easter Christ, crucified and risen.
In all the suffering of our world and our lives, there is the not always discernible reality of the Easter Christ, whose suffering for our broken world takes us, and our suffering, into the heart of God. I still pass these fenceposts on foot, on the bike, in the car - I cannot un-see what I've seen.
Inscribed upon the cross we see
in shining letters, 'God is love';
he bears our sins upon the tree;
he brings us mercy from above.
The balm of life, the cure of woe,
the measure and the pledge of love,
the sinner's refuge here below,
the angels' theme in heaven above.
And to finish, two brief sentences from Jurgen Moltmann's The Crucified God, one of the theological masterpieces of the 20th Century. The first one could not be more apt for the photo!
“In concrete terms, God is revealed in the cross of Christ who was abandoned by God."
“The theological foundation for Christian hope is the raising of the crucified Christ.”
Comments