The Same, But Different

Although I haven't been anywhere since the middle of Monday, I still intend to keep Thursday as a sort-of day off, because that's what Sabbath means. I will mark it by wearing non-clerical clothes (in so far as I ever do) and not saying the Office. The last three days have been quite dramatic enough. Monday was the beginning of the really biting social restrictions across the country, and of course they continue; Tuesday was closing-churches day; and today has been wedding-fallout day. On all three I have tried to keep up with a waxing tide of announcements and emails and our response to them. I feel most for our wedding couples, five of them this year. At the moment they seem to want to go ahead, but further restrictions over the coming days may make that impossible. The Church of England nationally reminds us that only five people are legally required in a wedding service: the couple, the clergyperson, and the witnesses. This is true, but I fear the archbishops may be forgetting why people choose to get married in church. 

My cough has remained that. It comes and goes and isn't accompanied by any other symptoms. I don't know whether I have had the Plague at all and perhaps never will; contrast my experience with that of two friends in Birmingham one of whom got the dry cough and a four-day fever, pneumonia-like symptoms, and racking pain, while his partner got a bit of a tickle in her throat. It would be a great relief if this minor cost is all I pay for immunity; but without being tested, I can't confirm what I've had. 

Marion is saying Morning Prayer for us at the moment and when I am able to get out again the evening office will join it, as well as keeping the church open for prayer when we can and possibly a restricted mass on a Sunday just, as I am telling people, to keep the church's pilot light flickering. But I am feeling the loss of routines. There isn't anything quite like being a parish priest, and the relationship you develop with your church building, the people who go there, the wider parish, and the liturgy of prayer and eucharist which seems to lock the other elements together into one, bringing them to God and God to them. No matter what structure I impose on my days at home, I can feel my landmarks sliding, and it will be a relief at least to get back to the church, to make that journey up and down the hill again. Today, of course (well, just yesterday really) we learned that the school will be closed. They'd already decided to have their Mothering Sunday singing in the school hall as they couldn't join us in church; but I can't be there for the last event before the school shuts down - for how long? 

On Tuesday the Archbishops issued a statement calling on the Church to become 'radically different'. Well, in one way, yes: you can't shut down public worship and claim that everything is the same. But in more important ways, this is the same mission the Church has always had, to serve and to pray. And while any crisis brings growth, don't pretend that this is anything other than a terrible deprivation. 

As for serving: the crisis reveals how precious few people this church actually has to do any serving. Knock out the over-70s and there's next to no one left in the church community who doesn't need help themselves.