Editorial

I am writing this editorial in August 2020, on a breezy and bright summer’s day, peering into the future and what it might hold. The precarious nature of things seems more acute this year, perched as we are in what might be the middle, the beginning or the end of a pandemic that has challenged so many aspects of life, along with the things that we have, inevitably, taken for granted.

As I write this, I cannot help but wonder where we will be when this edition of the journal is published. As you read this editorial and the articles that make up this edition some time in January 2021, how will you be thinking about the COVID-19 crisis? Will it be over? Will a vaccine have been found? Will that possibility still be a long way away? Will the anxiety of this time continue to take its toll on individuals, families, societies and the governments trying to combat its effects? Will it be a time of continuing anxiety or a time of possibility? Will we, at last, be addressing our relationship with a planet that seems through this tiny virus to be drawing our attention to the lack of control we have over our world and our lives? Will we be on the way to giving up on the temptation to ground the meaning of our lives in the things that we can buy?

This is a time of anxiety. It is also a time rich with possibilities. Sometimes the two sit closely together.

Some of the deepest-held prejudices of our society have been challenged by the reality of living through a pandemic. Those who are all-too-often considered to be of little value – shop workers, care workers, nurses, refuge collectors, childcarers, cleaners, delivery men and women, teachers – have been shown to be the ‘key workers’ without whom we cannot survive.

Our personal lives and the construction of the political world have been challenged by the virus. On the one hand, not being able to hug or touch or be close to another person has made us realise how much we need physical contact. On the other hand, our individual health has been revealed to be dependent on the health of others. Here, we see the value of public health, and it is telling that, at the time of writing, it is the United States with no National Health Service (NHS) that has found it much more difficult to control the spread of the virus. We are being taught an important lesson: we need each other if we are to live well, and we need a politics that puts that fact at the centre of its policy making.

It is not just our relationships with each other that need to be put right. COVID-19 is forcing us to correct our relationship with other animals and plants with whom we share this planet. We were shown the reality of the effect our actions have on the natural world in the early days of lockdown. As we stayed at home, the air became clearer, nature more noticeable, birdsong louder. We know that our actions are killing the planet. We need a different way of engaging with the world around us.

So many of us were, as the virus took hold, grateful for the solace of the natural world. In the early days of the first (hopefully the last) UK national lockdown, the park at the end of my street became, literally, a godsend. I’d taken it for granted over the years. Now it became more important than I had ever imagined it would be. I would get up at dawn, head for the park and take in its stillness as the sun came up and life slowly returned. I found myself paying attention to it in a way I never had before. I noted the subtle changes as spring shook off the last vestiges of winter. I took note of the slow coming out of the blossom as March turned into April.

I can never see blossom without thinking of the playwright Dennis Potter’s ¹ reflections on it. In the final stages of terminal cancer, the passing beauty of the blossom outside his window called him to participate in what he called ‘the nowness of everything’. He knows he will not see the blossom bloom again; but rather than feel despondent that this is so, this knowledge brings with it new wisdom: ‘things are both more trivial than they ever were, and more important than they ever were, and the difference between the trivial and the important doesn’t seem to matter’ (1994: 5). The fragile beauty of a constantly changing world that will be there long after he is gone puts everything in perspective: even the imminence of his own death.

Why does something as transient and fragile as blossom offer him – and us – such solace? Perhaps it is because in the blossom that we are ‘brought to our senses’. What an often misread and misunderstood phrase this is! ‘Sense’ is not about accepting a grim realism that forces the rejection of hopes or dreams. It is not in money and status, the things we acquire and accumulate, that ‘sense’ is to be found. In the vision of blossom, we are brought to our senses. We see what really matters, and it is the blossom’s beauty, its gentle scent, the touch of its soft and fragile blooms, the sound of wind in the boughs from which it springs, and the taste of the fruit which grows out of it. Here is life in all its fullness, offering us an intimation of our connection to a world that is so much more than we are. The senses tell us all this if only we pay attention to them.

Variations on these themes are to be found in the articles that comprise this edition of the journal.

Challenging ourselves and our habitual ways of thinking runs like a thread through articles that ask us to pay attention to well-known biblical figures. Cat Quine directs our gaze to the significance of Pharaoh’s daughter as the adoptive mother of Moses. Sarah Harris considers the experience of the haemorrhaging woman who touches Christ’s robe. Kai Moore draws attention to the broken body through a reading of Paul’s possible disability.

Acts of attention have the potential to create radical possibilities for our practices and relationships. Emilie Casey thinks of the possibilities of resistance contained in the ‘objecthood’ of women preachers. Katerina Koci explores the complex ideas that underpin the feminine sacrificial self. Rachael Huegerich describes how ‘living out one’s authentic gender’ and the transitions many will undergo as a result open up experiences of the sacred.

Even interpretative frameworks that have become precious to us for their ability to support complex ways of thinking require critical challenge. Christopher Kepler offers a bold exploration of intersectionality, arguing that while it has been important for the development of complex feminist thought, it must now ‘develop and contribute to other new and pertinent discursive methods, applicable to the times and people’.

We are living in a time that challenges us all and that holds out the promise and necessity of thinking again about what makes for the flourishing life. We do well to listen to those voices that are calling us to new ways of being, for in them is the future.

Beverley Clack bclack@brookes.ac.uk