I have a favourite line of prose that I’ve been wanting to use in this blog. It’s James Joyce again: “A day of dappled sea-born clouds.” However this has not been a day to use it. It’s not just that Crich has a chronic shortage of sea-born clouds anyway, but today the clouds have had the texture of an old soggy piece of underfelt beneath a rotting carpet. At least the unremitting rain removes the problem of choices. We can’t sit in the garden or go walking and I can’t continue with the hedge cutting. Indeed I spent the afternoon discovering that I can’t print off this blog, or I can’t work out how to do it, or to change my modal verb – it won’t let me do it.
We’ve become accustomed to ‘can’t’. For three months we’ve been reciting the actions we can’t do like some mindless mantra. Now we’re experimenting with ‘can’ but with considerable unease and reservations of ‘can’t’. Today I helped formalise ‘can’t’ by taping off the areas in the church where any visitors can’t go. They can’t touch bibles or hymn books, cushions or hassocks, because we’ve locked them all away. For 72 hours between opening days they can’t come in at all because the church will be locked. They can’t enter the chancel, the loos, the kitchen, the font area or the north aisle because they are taped off. However they can sit and stare, or pray or think or be. Their spirits may lift or sink, they may exalt or despair, they may try, they may fail, they may seethe they may laugh. Note how I’ve shifted to ‘may’. For many, church is a place where you must or you mustn’t or, in more liberal places, where you should or you shouldn’t. I prefer ‘may’ which permits but doesn’t judge.
For some people hazard tape firmly states that they can’t, even if they would or want. For others the sense of the commemorations of community life, the history of prayer and praise are enough to speak of sacredness and hope, tape or no tape.
Some years ago Deirdre and I visited Sagrada Cathedral in Barcelona. The floor was heaving with ticketed crowds, chatting and photographing, selfie sticks probing everywhere and workmen in hi-vis. But looking upwards at the 200 feet of intersecting columns and geometrical forms catching and changing in the light we were caught up into silence and transcendence. The crowds, the building work and the taped off areas simply disappeared. Instead of considering what the tape is telling us we can’t do, go with the eyes and heart to where you can.
Today Deirdre has been re-booking accommodation in Ireland on conditions that if we can we will and if we can’t we will postpone again. We can’t have the long evenings of May and June but we can have the softer light and the slightly warmer water. There will almost certainly be moments of “dappled sea-born clouds.”
We’ve had a lot of clouds these last few days, dark, thundery, low clouds. We might be frowning up at the ‘can’t’ go walking clouds, the can’t go barbecuing clouds or the can’t do gardening clouds, but we’ve arrived at a stage of a few more ‘cans’ as lockdown loosens. We are nervously entering a ‘Cloud of Unknowing’, which coincidentally is the title of an early medieval mystical text which has something to say to us as we stare up beyond the hazard tape in church. We may be disappointed in what we’ve done or not done and unsure of our future, but,
“It is not who you are or what you've been that God sees with his merciful eyes, but what you want to be."