I am endlessly fascinated by the silent River. When was it last bereft of craft as it now is? Probably not since the Frost Fairs of the seventeenth century, and before then perhaps not since the Romans first spanned the Thames with a wooden bridge.
Walking through the silent city early in the morning before hunkering down to a day of zoom meetings, teleconferences and electronic communication one is struck by the extraordinary beauty of so much. I find that I see details that I have not notice before. I took a photograph walking through a courtyard just off Fleet Street through which one can see five different designs of City of London bollard. In the usual rushing about one would not have noticed such a thing.
The peak of silence is the point at which to begin to look forward to the future. As I write the first hopes are beginning to stir that the lockdown might soon be eased and eventually lifted.
There are many, too many, for whom this lockdown is terrible. Those who lack space or who are crammed together with people who are difficult or threatening or downright abusive. Those who have seen their livelihoods dissipate. Those who have faced loneliness and fear. Those who have been sick and those whose mental health has been deeply adversely affected. This has taught us that we need each other; that our atomised modern society needs for the wellbeing of us all to find how we can connect more effectively and well; that we need to open the doors to one another again, and more widely than before, as quickly as we can. But there is a paradox that in the midst of lockdown there has been beauty. Things usually hidden have been revealed. Not only terrible things, but good things: beautiful things. This time of incompleteness has been a time when we have seen more.
Fr George Congreve, an influential Anglican spiritual writer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, taught that beauty and meaning are to be found in the very incompleteness of creation. In its incompleteness creation apprehends its need of God and reaches out to its creator.
This time of lockdown has been a time of massive spiritual interest and in some ways renewal. When for a moment the incompleteness of our life and its fragility is revealed we see and know the suffering more clearly, but also the beauty of God and our need of Him. This is the fascination of the silent streets and the still River. We must work and pray that it be over as soon as possible; but we shall miss the terrible and wonderful beauty of the lockdown when it is gone, when the river is churned up again, the pavements thronged, the roads clogged with traffic and the sky scarred with vapour trails.
Congreve wrote:
“God flashes revelations every day, by which he makes you aware of a mystery, of something you call beauty … which passes from some external object you look upon into your intelligence, by which you become assured that love, and not mechanical necessity, governs the world. There was something just now in the play the waves that for an instant arrested you, you could not tell what it was, you could not trace or analyse it; while your eye followed and sought to seize it, it was gone, but for the instant it filled your whole being with joy and desire. Desire for what? There was something in the light touching the rocks yonder, the flowering shrubs, and the waters, which awakened a feeling of beauty which human nature could not bear if it were completely unveiled. It is but a glimpse, but it was as much as you could well stand under. But though it is gone now, and you could not tell anyone what you saw or felt, yet you know that the moment’s glimpse of an immaterial perfection was one of the most real impressions of your life. That glimpse revealed to you, with an assurance that could not be questioned, what is the true basis of your own and of all created being. Now though you have to live among common and commonplace things which never rise to perfection, and where there is nothing lovely, yet you have learned by this hint of the joyful mystery of beauty in created nature something of what God is, and what His purpose is for yourself and all the other imperfect people amongst whom you live.”[1]
On one of my morning walks on one of these gorgeous spring days of lockdown I saw what I thought at first was a cormorant in the waters under the Millennium Bridge; I looked closer and am convinced was a seal playing. I tweeted about it and someone replied. And that was the inspiration for what follows.
– “I thought at first it was a cormorant but it was too sleek and furry.”
– “A sleek and furry cormorant would be a wonder to behold.”
A sleek and furry cormorant
Would be a wonder to behold
Flitting in the early swell
Of shimmering sunlit gold.
But yet a greater wonder is
Glimpsed by weary morning eyes
Now straining hard to look upon
A joyous dawn surprise.
Silence in London’s City
Has brought back birds betimes, and beasts.
While humanity is sickening
The world knows some relief:
And rising in the water
Amidst the dappled swirling pools
A fleeting flitting playing seal
Who takes us all for fools.
He’s sure we cannot see him
Unexpected in the Thames,
But though the river’s silent now
And ripples gleam like gems,
In despite of noisome pestilence
We’re voracious for the light
Praying for the end of lockdown
When there’ll be no seals in sight.
But we glimpsed the Lord of beauty
In what lockdown revealed to see
And what is lovely now predicts
life soon new in His City.
Luke Miller is Archdeacon of London
