Viaticum

For a resistance fighter, a spectacular victory becomes the moment of great danger.  Once the convoy or the oil field or the ammunition dump is exploded, those responsible are targeted men. 

So it was for Elijah.  At Mount Carmel, he humiliated the apparently all-conquering Taliban-like prophets of Baal in fire brought down from heaven and then he slaughtered them.  It ignited Queen Jezebel, no less, who swore his destruction - and he fled for his life.

Being hunted down and under the stress of trauma, he went a hundred miles south to the edge of the Negev, then a further day’s journey into the desert itself.  There he collapsed under the shelter of a rare tree, prayed for death, and, mercifully, fell asleep.

At which point (the exquisite five verses from 1 Kings 19.3-7 were read on a recent Sunday) God’s messenger-angels touched him.  They did so twice.  They provided warm bread and cold water. 

One might have hoped they would also provide an answer to his final despairing prayers – you are safe, the likes of the prophets of Baal and Jezebel will be defeated.  

But instead their message to the man at the extremity of coping seemed simply to be – go further into the wilderness.

And there, alongside those whose bereavement or depression or pain or mental illness or approaching death seems unremitting and unbearable, I was glad to stop reading. 

To stop reading with the second angel-touch and the words ‘take the sustenance here however tiny, else the journey will be too much for you’.

If we read on we find Elijah has indeed traversed the Negev and Sinai deserts for forty days, come to a new experience of God and a new understanding of what he should do.  But that isn’t yet, and we didn’t read that far.

We only read the verses in which God’s messenger-angels found him in wilderness, touched him, and told him that he needed to go deeper into the desert, a journey which would be almost too much for him.

So, I thought of Paul asking God three times to take away whatever the thorn in the flesh and the message of Satan which beset him might be, and get only the answer ‘my grace is sufficient for you’ (2 Corinthians 12.9).

And I thought of the viaticum - literally, the things which pertains to the ‘via’ (the ‘way’).  The word comes from the necessary supplies granted to a Roman ambassador as he set out.  It is used in the Catholic church particularly of Communion give to the dying.  Way-bread.  Food for the journey.

It seems vastly insensitive and crass to say to those facing what is unendurable that God’s message might be stick with this, go deeper into it, and you will see that it can bring you to fresh insight into God and enhanced self-understanding.

But always simply to pray instead that the all-powerful God will be heal, defeat evil and take it all away seems to miss what the messenger-angels were saying to Elijah.

It is something just hinted in my own comfortable and untraumatic experiences - from an occasional willingness to stay with difficult questions rather than settle for the first obvious or more comforting answers through to learning tiny things about myself through hardly challenging experiences of fasting.  So it is something I just might more fully recognise if and when debilitation comes or I am granted a final illness.

And Jesus’ own ministry began actually being led by the Spirit into the wilderness for forty days, and ended with going deeper into suffering rather than magicking it away.  That can't be a coincidence.

The poor pictures are young Palestinian dabka dancers from Bethelehem in Halifax a few days ago.

Updated 25th August.  Another clergyman's Blog has a new post partly about his own depression and then adds the following, with the highly relevant strap line 'with, through and beyond':  A small group in my benefice have been working on a liturgy we are going to be offering for the first time in October. The aim is to bring sufferers together in gentle solidarity in the hope that we learn, together, to live ‘with, through, and beyond’ depression and anxiety.