The Grinding of the Land

The SCP Zoom mass yesterday was challenging in ways these things always are - sudden changes in volume between one voice and another, a row of faces confronting you in a way they never would in life (I turned my video off, nobody wants to look at my face), clunks and knocks and audio wobbles and tinniness coming and going. I get absolutely nothing out of these experiences and still don't understand everyone else's enthusiasm for them. In fact they leave me agitated and unsettled, the exact opposite of being in touch with the divine. I think.

It was interesting, though, to hear about other clergy's plans for reopening their churches. The Cathedral will be aiming for a couple of weeks' time, Fr Donald at Elmham is going for this Sunday (as we are), and others are scattered in between. 

Who knows who will come. Everyone I speak to says they are anxious to get back into the church to worship, but I'm not convinced. 'Will we ever get back to normal?' people ask. I think we will, because the likelihood is that like every other disease of its kind COVID will become one of the things we deal with every year, eventually becoming milder until the next infection comes along. The permanent changes won't be those, they won't be the social-distancing and communion in one kind. Those will, eventually, be forgotten. Instead the changes will be - I suspect - the breaking of faith as people find they can get on well enough without church, without God, or that God has let them down; or find they can't walk to church as they did a few months ago and there is no one in a weakening and shrinking church community to give them a lift, even if precautions allowed them to.

The closest COVID has got to the congregation was a former member of the church who'd moved elsewhere, and the son of a pair of faithful worshippers. Yesterday the latter's mother told me that while he was in intensive care she 'held a little service' at home and randomly opening the Bible for a reading found John 11, the Raising of Lazarus. She took it as a message that Nigel would recover; and he didn't. She struggles to incorporate his death within a faith that's always rested on the idea that 'God has a plan': it's been the key that has unlocked unbelief, and Pat becomes another in the list I now have of Christians who have been propelled towards faithlessness by losing someone they love. I don't know whether this will be permanent in her case, or something that passes. How complex we human beings are: we all know that death comes to everyone, yet somehow we manage to think it will avoid us, and create ways of believing so. We succeed in looking across a world that orbits around arbitrary suffering, and imagining that we're not part of it. 'We have made a covenant with death,' Isaiah reminded me this morning, 'When the overwhelming scourge passes, it will not touch us'.

Perhaps some people will discover faith as a result of the last few months, but I expect more to lose it: the virus has swept over us like a glacier, and like a glacier will grind the land beneath it. And I don't think the coming time will be easy.