Judaism teaches Christianity the power of lament. Sometimes, all we can do is weep and rage. Sometimes, God and faith have to navigate our agonies. My parents-in-law lived many decades close enough to Dunwich Heath and RSPB Minsmere to be constant visitors; walking the sandy paths amidst heather, gorse and birch. We scattered their ashes here. Now, ash is all there is… *
Lord, do you choke as the smoke turns the sky dark and smothers the sun? Do you feel the heat that rises in waves from soil baked hard as rock? Do you see the leaves igniting? Do you hear seeds popping and explode as generations yet to be die? Does the fierce wind blow at your command in judgement and disgust at our carelessness? Do you hate what we are making of Eden?
Dear God, you have given us over to the havoc of a world that burns. The horrors and losses hem us in. We are caught and fearful like the badgers sensing a glowing disaster they cannot outrun. The horizon is red. Clouds rise in a wall ascending.
Creator, are you also destroyer?
So much lost; centuries undone in days. Such precious cargo…
Woodland and Heathland and Dartford Warblers and Night Jars and Red Deer and Ant Lions and Meadow Pipits and Red-Footed Falcons and Skylarks and Stonechats and Whitethroats and Grayling Butterflies and Norfolk Hawker Dragonflies and Rabbits and Beauty and Work and Treasure and Hope and…
We sit in the silence after the storm; walk amidst the ruins of so many lives, smell the smoke that still rises from a blistered ground, see ash floating like snow, know that death has visited. We can record the loss. Can we ever calculate the cost?
Do not close your eyes and ears, Lord.
In your mercy, help us.
Teach us of more.
Because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed. Your compassion never fails. New each morning is your love. Restore us to yourself, Lord, that we may return. Renew our days.
* Towards the end of July and on into the start of August, wild fires raged across more than 350 acres of Dunwich Heath on the Suffolk coast, destroying one of the only remaining areas of such habitat in the UK, the only place in which some rare species have flourished.