Over the last few weeks, I have ordered some food from Amazon. The last of four orders arrived and I felt sheepish – a dozen cans of boneless sardines. It was a haphazard assortment of non perishables. We all have stocked up at the grocery in the last couple of weeks, and the stores are showing the effects of everyone preparing for an unknown future.
Lately I have been reading through the Gospel of Luke. I read Luke 5, about the enormous catch of fish, after a hard night of fishing with no catch whatsoever. Also in the opening chapters of Luke, I read about the healing of a leper, a woman with high fever, and many others. It made me realize how little real danger or disease I have encountered in my lifetime, and how smoothly God has provided through my husband’s and my employment. I wish I was a stronger person. But for now I am taking life one step at a time. Trying to make my steps obedient and kind ones.
Along with Luke, I have been simultaneously reading The Stranger in The Woods, about the North Pond hermit. Christopher Knight lived from 1986 to 2013 in the woods of northern Maine, stealing from the cabins in the woods there to find food to survive. The journalist who writes his story, Michael Finkel, suggests it is good to be a hermit – it enables creativity, and it grants respite from the ills of society. He also admits that many people who go through enforced solitude for too long go crazy. He alludes to our hardwiring to be communal. Furthermore, he grants that neither Christopher Knight nor any other hermits in history were genuinely able to survive completely on their own. Knight stole everything he used to survive, and many hermits in ancient times had servants who took care of all their physical needs.
Jesus would often slip away from the crowds to spend time talking with his Father. But then He would re-engage, and He cared about the crowds of people who were often an annoying bunch of strangers to his disciples. In the great catch of fish, he indicates that Peter’s ministry future would involve many people. The apostles, including Paul, did not live out their lives in seclusion, but in often difficult engagement with both sweet and surly congregations of people, opponents and critics.
Ironically, we are all in forced seclusion now. I heard from my brother and sister-in-law who are global ministry workers in Spain that Spain went into lockdown well before the US. No one is allowed to leave their apartments for the foreseeable future, except to go to the grocery, pharmacy or to walk their dogs. Police are present to enforce. Only doctors, sanitary workers and other essential workers are allowed to go to work. Italy was already doing this. Other missionaries we know, Ron and Rosa, are in Italy, both around 75 years old, and have written to say they are fine. They asked for prayer that they can minister to others during this time, and they have virtual meetings to encourage others in their church there. The ministry I serve, Princeton Christian Fellowship (PCF), has gone virtual. Our students are grieving their separation from one another, but figuring out how to make technology work for keeping them meaningfully connected. The impulse to connect with and be of help to others is showing up everywhere. I believe Michael Finkel is correct in saying we humans are wired to be communal.
It is nice to talk to friends and family members more often these days. I don’t know what the next few weeks will be like, but I hope we will all keep walking in kindness and faith. As fascinating as Christopher Knight and other hermits are, I believe the best creativity is relational. I resonate with Genesis 2:18 – “It is not good for man to be alone” – spoken by God at the outset of human existence, even before sin and evil entered our world. The first way God resolved aloneness was with the giving of marriage, but that was only the beginning of the community He wished to create. Many centuries later, the New Testament continues to affirm this, and points us to the necessity of being a part of Christ’s family. The New Testament is full of commands of how we are to love one another, encourage one another, rebuke one another, be generous to one another, to gather with one another. I am grateful for the technology which allows us, even now, the opportunity to be together. I will close with some of my favorite verses from the Letter to the Hebrews (10:16-25), which urges us first to be in relationship to God and then to do so in the company of others:
“Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” (Hebrews 10:16-25)