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Good morning.

There’s a scene in Act 1 of Shakespeare’s Macbeth just after Macbeth has encountered the witches and heard their prophecies about his future advancement. When they vanish into thin air, Macbeth cries out, ‘Would they had stay’d’. He wants to hear more. Seamus Heaney took this plea as the title of a poem published in 2001, lamenting the recent deaths of four Scottish poets. Would these great voices in Scottish literary history had stayed, what more would we have learned and understood from them? Their presence is as fleeting as the herd of deer he suddenly glimpses, standing ‘like the air agog’.

On this day last year, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that a national lockdown would begin from midnight. We were to ‘stay at home’. Life as we knew it was to stop. As we look back on that day, we might reflect on what we have been through since then, and form our thoughts using a similar construction of regret and amazement: ‘would we had known’: the lives lost and the lives changed; the restrictions borne and the loneliness endured; the frustrations and the longings and the blessings too. But we did not know, perhaps a blessing in itself as life had to be lived day by long day. As the vaccination process continues and this year lies ahead, full of promise, today we might lament of those we have lost, ‘would they had stay’d’.  And we might consider what, if anything, we would have done differently, ‘would we had known’ what was to come.

Living God, we pause to reflect on the past year, with all its hopes and regrets and blessings. Be a lamp to our feet, a light for our path, today and always. Amen.