Time for prayer: the request of a presenter in pain
I nearly missed it in this gloom: a sorrowful footnote to the story of a world increasingly at war with itself. But amid the encroaching darkness – the testing of missiles, the carnage of bombs, the open sewer of abuse – a personal, self-contained tragedy caught my eye.
Simon Thomas, a former Blue Peter presenter turned football coverage host on Sky Sports, lost his wife this month to a vicious, rampaging form of leukaemia. Suddenly, unexpectedly, from out of the blue. One horrendous week was all it took to detonate a life and blow the surviving family to pieces.
“Today,” tweeted Thomas in the aftermath, “I am crushed with indescribable pain... If you are a prayer, pray for my boy Ethan. 8 yrs, precious and in bits.”
It is the peculiar property of evil – and, let us not mince words, acute myeloid leukaemia is precisely that – that it is simultaneously unique and banal.
The banality comes from its ubiquity: one out of one dies, in George Bernard Shaw’s catchy statistical analysis, and the end is often hideously abrupt. The startling death of Gemma Thomas is nothing new under the pallid sun. But the uniqueness is felt in the effects; in the utterly singular impression it makes upon the fabric of life.
Nicholas Wolterstorff, the American philosopher, lost his 25-year-old son to an accident in the Austrian Alps. The resultant avalanche of grief was poured into Lament for a Son, a series of brief vignettes reflecting the author’s ongoing struggle to walk redemptively through the valleys of pain.
“My life,” he later wrote, “has been divided into before and after... The book is extremely particular; I do not speak about death, only about Eric’s death. That’s all I could do. But I have discovered, from what readers have told me, that in its particularity lies universality.”
For all that, however, pain remains largely a sealed room: the light that penetrates it is reflected, passed through the imperfect prism of experiences other than one’s own.
“Pray for my boy,” pleads Simon Thomas. Yet prayer, if it is to be anything more than just a frantic beating of wings, requires a reliable object of faith. Like what? What – or who – could possibly help a father in the run-up to Christmas, cruelly and iniquitously deprived of the mother of his son?
Something more, surely, than the reflected light of human empathy, drawn from the shallow wells of universal experience. Instead, it would need a love that penetrates the particular – the suffering of the unique individual – with the acuity of intimate knowledge.
There would need to be someone both able and willing to unite the human and the divine; to slip silently into the world clothed in mortal flesh; to plumb the depths of loneliness and pain and resurface triumphant, conquering even over death itself. And there would need to be someone willing to do all this for you alone, as if your private agony was the only serious thing on Earth.
Thank God there is.
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