Smiting Times

It is very fortunate for me that the Rectory in Swanvale Halt and its garden are so ridiculously overlarge for my requirements, as I will be seeing very little else for the next week. I have had a tickle in my throat for a couple of days – though nothing more – and today this turned unmistakably into a cough accompanied by intermittent tightness across the chest. I will be the first test of the church’s ability to help those in isolation! The symptoms are fairly ambiguous and if it turns out to be nothing at all and I get the Plague at some future point instead I will be most annoyed. Humans being what they are, I spent the time while I had the tickle trying not to cough in an attempt to justify not taking any action, and now find myself consciously coughing to justify doing so.

Equally, at the moment we don’t know whether the Church will interpret the Government’s advice to avoid ‘unnecessary social gatherings’ as including public church services. I can’t see why it wouldn’t.

‘I’m not telling you what to say in your sermons’, said Margaret, who lives in the sheltered housing flats next to the church, ‘but I spoke to someone about the epidemic and they thought it was God’s punishment on us and I don’t think that’s right!’ I may now not get a chance to deliver any such sermon in person, though it might emerge in another form. I wonder whether she might have spoken to Sandra who made some remark about the Horsemen of the Apocalypse as we were setting up for Messy Church on Saturday, and has a habit of coming out with the odd provocative statement. ‘I’ve decided I will die of a stroke’, she happily informed us once as we were getting ready for Church Club at the Infants School.

The ancient Israelites looked at their history and interpreted it in terms of their rocky relationship with God: they were unfaithful, they got smited. Gradually their views became less simplistic as they realised that not all disasters that befell human beings could easily be interpreted in terms of their own sinfulness. They did, though, retain a sense that divine justice lay beneath cosmic events, holding both beliefs in tension.

The sense that disaster is not a visitation upon sin but a consequence of it is there in the story of the first sin of all; ‘Cursed is the ground because of you,’ God tells Adam, ‘through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life’, and so on. The disruption in the fabric of creation results from the humans’ action, not God’s: it arises from the violation of the very nature of the Garden, and God doesn’t need to sit outside the event, sending down thunderbolts from a distance.

Many of our epidemics, and not just the current one, arise when viruses which are endemic in animals make the leap to human hosts. Our relationship with animals, as with the whole of the natural world, is deeply awry. We caused the earth to be cursed, and spent most of our history regarding it as an adversary from whose grudging hands we had to wrest the means of our survival. We have kept on behaving that way even though our increased numbers and power mean we have greater and greater scope to damage the world which alone sustains us. Someone eats a bushmeat chimp in Kenya and contracts the virus that turns into AIDS; a seafood market in China packs together animals in tiny cages that would never normally be anywhere near each other and another microbe makes the jump from them to the humans using them. Neither of these things should be happening.

And the global economy we have created over the last sixty years or so transmits the infections around the world at lightning speed. I and former BBC economics correspondent Stephanie Flanders overlapped at Balliol by a couple of years: the other day I heard her remarking that the coronavirus hits the modern world precisely at its most vulnerable points. The international system of trade and, in fact, culture, rests on lengthy supply lines, swift and inexpensive travel, consumer demand, and cheap food: the virus feeds on all of them. Our vulnerability is the dark side of the benefits of the global economy, and though we may protest that we haven’t imprisoned pangolins in a marketplace cage, we haven’t treated the world as our cesspit, we haven’t regarded the entire globe as an entertainment played for our benefit, our individual innocence cuts no ice: we are, individually, part of the race that has, and as a race we stand or fall.

I have a suspicion that the economy which emerges from this crisis will be, in significant ways, ruined. Vast areas of demand and supply will have been sucked out of the system: people won’t be spending as much money or making things for them to spend it on if they had it. Airlines, manufacturers, entertainment and catering companies, will have gone under in their thousands and their tens of thousands. We will, probably, find ourselves having to remember that money is a useful fiction, and that we can only rebuild by governments agreeing to change the rules of the game of money quite radically, and by the rest of us discovering the unsustainability of the system we built. ‘There is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed’, I read this morning in chapter 8 of Luke.

‘I do genuinely think this is the best fighting chance we have had yet. We needed a miracle and this just might be it’, commented my eco-campaigner friend Lady Metalmoomin on LiberFaciorum, looking forward to the virus's more salutary effects. I wonder. We have had epidemics before and usually we are so relieved to get through them that once they're past we begin trashing the world again with renewed energy. The situation is different this time – we have never lived in quite this kind of world before – but human beings are the same as ever.

Ah well: here in Swanvale Halt the magnolia is coming out. The blooms blaze. My little magnolia seems to be thriving, though I will see no blossoms this year.