Song in the Desert

Fr. Samuel Dow in his Trinity sermon today asked a fruitful question: when will we be able to get off the wild merry-go-round of our daily lives and rest in the presence of God? English writer Ronald Blythe, in The Circling Year: Perspectives from a Country Parish, gives as one of the qualities of Wisdom the ability to know when to continue, and when to stop. And Jesuit writer C. G. Valles, in Sketches of God, recalls that in his own experience, when God retreats, there’s no use to hold on, for God, like the waves of the sea, will always return.

            After the Trinity service I had an idea to go to Ikea to buy some linen: bad decision. Standstill traffic queues on Victoria Street; a stuffed and arcane car park; a labyrinthine shopping centre, with loving guidance provided by sparkling arrows on the floor. I found myself with far too much company in the form of families pushing shopping trolleys, children in pushers, and many feet both large and little. Having got what I had come for, I sought the cashier, following an even more serpentine route through (only apparently) acres of clotted departments of far from free-flowing populace. At lengthy length I arrived in the high-ceiling final hall, full of flat packs on warehouse pallets, approaching the cashier lines which proved to display their own delays and dismays. But before I arrived there, I heard singing.

            A man walking nearby, a man in a green turban, was singing in the language of Punjab, the place from which he had come, not loudly, just pleasantly singing to himself as his young son walked beside him. “That’s a good song,” I said. “Where does it come from?” “We?” he said. “We come from India. I was just singing to pass my time: it’s a big place.” His wife, walking ahead of him, turned to me and smiled, and his son, maybe nine or ten years old, skipped along beside him, smiling. “It is: I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said. “It’s a good song. I liked it.”

            So here in the desert of the modern industrialised shopping centre was living music, God’s presence in the human voice. A man singing, a man in a green turban, his wife, and his smiling son. A man just singing to pass his time. So when, as Fr. Dow asked, will we be able to get off the wild merry-go-round of our daily lives? God was present today, even in Victoria Gardens.