I read the news today. Oh boy. Some days, I wish the news really were fiction and today is a morning like that, because it’s a morning, like too many these days, when the news seems barely believable. The dreadful fire now burning in West London is too awful to contemplate, and the thought that the world is capable of such random caprice too terrible to dwell upon.
It’s one thing when people behave in a way that is unpredictable and fickle. We don’t like it but we’re used to it. The Bible is full of them – faithless, capricious, inconstant people – it’s part of our shared humanity, part of our inherent imperfection.
When the story of human imperfection, though, is matched, overmatched, by the apparent cruelty of the world, things sometimes seem too much to bear. We might call it the fickleness of fate and it is an appalling thing to contemplate.
But the world’s capriciousness, like our own, is mirrored by another, opposite narrative: the story of God’s absolute faithfulness. Again and again we read of God’s unchanging nature, his unswerving commitment to humanity. As the writer of the book of Lamentations puts it: the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies never come to an end.
That’s a hard thing to grasp on a day like today, but I reckon that God’s steadfastness, God’s constancy does more than serve as a neat, literary contrast to our fickleness and the seeming fickleness of the world.
Much more importantly it gives us somewhere to go and someone to go to when the worst happens – and not just to be loved and comforted, but also to be angry and confused, somewhere to shout and someone to shout at. God is steadfast enough to take all our rage and sadness, all the incomprehensible grief that overwhelms us, and to take it not impassively and not impersonally but with the deep empathy of someone who has himself suffered, who has himself experienced pain and loss.
So, perhaps, even now, even on a morning like this, there is something of hope, not that somehow the circumstances will somehow change and that ‘everything will be alright’ but that in the steadfast, faithful character of God we can find a steadfastness of our own, and more importantly, the capacity, when things are at their very worst, to be steadfast for one another.
This was written in place of a very different script as the news filled with images of the appalling fire at Grenfell Tower in west London. One of the principles of the Pause for Thought slot is that it is not, except on very rare occasions (Bowie’s death, for example), responsive to the news. That morning’s events seemed impossible not to acknowledge. It is to our national shame that so little has changed in the three years since.