Parochial Concerns

The last Clergy Study Day hadn't left me very enthused. The advantage of doing it over Zoom is that you don't have to go anywhere, and when the clergy colleague who was talking about sports ministry began lecturing us on the connections between bodily and spiritual strength I was able to turn him off until it was safe again. I don't want you to get the impression there was nothing interesting, but - well, I was relieved not to have to engage any more than I did. 

This afternoon's 'webinar' I'd completely forgotten about. Marion the curate 'went' and reported that the question 'What is God telling us in the COVID crisis?' was apparently mainly answered with 'To use Zoom more'. People talked about the 'productivity and creativity' the restrictions had brought. I asked her whether anyone had mentioned the tens of thousands of people who had died, the colossal economic damage we will be living with for years, the families suffering, the businesses going bankrupt, the impossibility of many of the things that make human life worth living, and whether God was trying to tell us anything from those things? Nary a word, she related. The Church of England's use of technology is clearly more important than all of that. What do we have to say to the world at large, beyond our own tiny, miniscule interests - the practices of a small Church in one historical moment?

In fact there was a bibliography attached to the webinar which does include some weighty theology examining the way God works, or doesn't work, through calamity and disaster, but it doesn't seem to have poked its way into the discussions themselves. I find myself thinking more about the nature of apocalyptic, the revelatory motion of truth which draws creation forward to whatever consummation God has planned for it, and I will say more about this some time. It's a word nobody seems to want much to deal with.