Ed Sheeran + Ecclesiastes = ?

Ed Sheeran has a new album out. Wahoo! So of course, that's the music of choice en route to playgroup on a rainy Monday morning. We've already been listening to "Sapphire" on repeat over the summer - it's one of our toddler's favourite dance tracks at the moment (in fierce competition with Peter and the Wolf).

The first song starts, called "Opening", and then I hear these words through the car speakers...

There's a time to cry, there's a time to fold

There's a time for holdin' on, but then let it go

There's a time to run to the arms of hope

And the day bursts wild and open

Ed Sheeran, "Opening"*

And they're very similar to words that have been absolutely crucial in my life.

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,

...

a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,

Ecclesiastes 3: 1-2, 4-5.

A few years ago, right around lockdown, I had my first experience of true anxiety. Heart constantly racing, intrusive thoughts, struggling to engage with others. My body was in permanent flight or fight mode. At the root of it was what I can only call pure existentialism.

I'd had something similar on a family holiday when I was 16. I'd been reading Birdsong by Ian McEwan for my English A level - I was about halfway through the book when I was hit by a sudden realisation that I was either going to die into oblivion, or live forever in an heavenly eternal afterlife. I was and am a Christian, but still. The idea of an everlasting heaven was just as overwhelmingly scary as the idea I would someday, somehow, not exist. At 16, this was a half-hour panic, managed with the reassurance of youth. Cut to a decade later, the feelings stuck around. Surely the global pandemic had something to do it with it. Others might have looked at me, newly 27 and gone, yep, late twenties? Saturn return time.

As anyone with anxiety knows, it feels endless. I never thought I would feel normal again. I count myself incredibly fortunate that my experience was relatively short-lived. I turned a corner six months in, and for that, I thank God, my husband and C. S. Lewis. When I heard Ed's lyrics this morning, it reminded me of the words that were my turning point.

I was on holiday with friends and had picked up The Screwtape Letters on my way out of the house, thinking it might contain something helpful. I was sitting outside in the late afternoon, sun setting over Lake District mountains, when I read a passage from Chapter 15. For those who haven't read The Screwtape Letters, please do - it's brilliant. C. S. Lewis imagines an ongoing conversation between two devils; one older 'mentor', and a younger devil in training. Their task is to win humans over from following their "Enemy" (the God of the Bible), and entrap humans into the service of Satan (their "Father"). This is the bit that got me. The older devil is advising the devil-in-training about how best to keep humans anxious.

"The humans live in time but our Enemy destines them for eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things; eternity itself and to that point of time they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity...in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present - …obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.

Our business is to get them away from the eternal and the Present...it is far better to make [humans] live in the Future...thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it, we make them think of unrealities...The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity...the Past is frozen and no longer flows, the Present is all lit up with eternal rays...Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust and ambition look ahead...We want a man hag-ridden by the Future - haunted by visions of an imminent vision of heaven or hell on earth."**

When I read that, it was the most powerful experience of being moved through the written word I have ever had. C. S. Lewis was exactly describing my experience. I was hag-ridden by visions of a future I couldn't imagine - an endless nothing or an endless something. I cannot tell you the immense relief I felt reading those words. That someone, this man writing almost a century ago had known exactly what was keeping me in my permanently anxious state. And he offered a solution - it was staring right at me. To live in the Present, assured that the God I believe in knows what's best for me now, and in the future.

And why? Why is living in the Present (with a capital C.S. Lewis "P") the answer? Why is it in so many mental health blogs and therapeutic self-help books, as something that actually helps people? C. S. Lewis addresses it - because it is the closest thing we experience to touching eternity. Living in the Present is how, C. S. Lewis believed, God intended us to live. In the Present, we experience transcendence where we are not bound by time, a taste of forever that the God of the Bible promises.

A few weeks after reading this chapter, I went back to the earlier Ecclesiastes passage and found these words further down the page.

He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end (Ecc. 3: 11)

For me, this not only explained why I was experiencing existential anxiety, but also told me how I could continue living in this world of time and seasons without falling into despair. If God has set eternity into the hearts of humans, it explains why I respond to the Present so positively, and the Future with so much fear and trepidation. There is an inherent desire to continue, to live, to exist - the "eternity" in my heart. But there is also the fear of time and the inevitability of death. Ecclesiastes reminds me that I cannot fathom what He has done. If I try - if I force my imagination to come up with visions of what death or an afterlife looks like, it's only going to go badly. But the future isn't real. It's a mirage. The only true reality we experience is the Present. That's where joy is, love is, truth is. In Ed's words, the present day "bursts wide and open".

And so the task? To appreciate and be in each Present moment, each time, each season. Knowing there is a time for everything. That there is a time for grief and anxiety. And there will be a time, finally, to "run to the arms of hope". Thanks for the reminder Ed.

*Songwriters: John Mcdaid / Edward Christopher Sheeran / Henry Russell Walter / David Orobosa Omoregie / Omer Fedi / Blake Slatkin. Opening lyrics © Universal Music Corp., Songs Of Universal Inc., Warner Chappell Music Ltd, Two Hands And A Bit Publishing, Omer Fedi Music, Cirkut Breaker Llc.

** C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 15.