Thick Red Line

My last brush with covid - as far as I can tell - was two years ago, and I consider I've done rather well to avoid it until now. I went to bed thinking that something was amiss, what with a headache and a tickly throat, and on rising to a headache this morning decided to check: the result was unmistakable, though now the symptoms seem to have morphed into those of a standard cold I'm very used to. Plus an upset stomach - though that's so common an experience it may not be to do with the pesky coronavirus at all. Possibly the arena of infection was the Goth night at Chislehurst Caves I spent a couple of hours at on Saturday night, but I fear, with only a day from that until the emergence of first symptoms, I was probably more infector than infectee; maybe my visit to a café in Banstead on Thursday was to blame, or Toddler Group on Friday morning. It's been so long since my last infection that I had to check what the NHS advises one does and I see it's now acceptable to get back to normal life 5 days after a positive result and see vulnerable people - such as my mum, who I hope to visit along with Lady Arlen and her daughter at the end of the month - after 10. I absolutely must meet tomorrow with a couple who need a wedding licence (we will do so outdoors and masked), and have a funeral of a beloved church member on Friday, which should be OK as the person I will interact most closely with is already dead.

It leads me to recollect that hallucinatory period that began when Mr Johnson appeared on our TV screens to say 'You must all stay at home', of which the children now at Church Club at the Infants School (which I will miss on Wednesday) will remember nothing. We treat covid remarkably casually now. My mum had it and made it through; so did Ms Kittywitch, who has several organs that aren't the ones she was born with and next to no immune system at all. It's fatally easy to forget how dreadful it seemed early in 2020, to forget that its fatality rate was 1% or so in the first wave, meaning that in this country not far short of 3/4 of a million people would have had to die before that resonant state, 'herd immunity', was achieved; to forget how we expected that sub-Saharan Africa was going to be devastated by the disease, when in fact it turned out to be relatively lenient with that part of the world. It sounds outrageous given the scale of death and suffering, but we got off reasonably lightly compared to how it might have been.

Back at (nearly) the beginning, I asked asked whether it was all worth it, the restrictions we placed on ourselves and the consequent economic and social damage, and I concluded that we would never reach a clear answer. The current covid enquiry isn't looking at all into the question of whether the Swedish solution or the Chinese or whatever would have been better than what we did in the UK, or rather the variants of what we did, as our constituent regional governments bickered and manoeuvred for advantage. I wondered whether the current advice on 'avoiding meeting people' for 5 days rather than complete isolation for 10 as it was in 2022 more reflects medical reality in terms of better epidemiology and dissemination of vaccines, or a different assessment of the balance between medical safety and socioeconomic harm. Now and again a news report appears in the lower reaches of the BBC homepage discussing some new finding about 'long-covid' or the like, but their obscurity reflects how we have moved on and don't want to think about it anymore. It's foolish, but I suppose, at the time, it's what I wanted as much as anyone.

Back Inside

On Wednesday I and Margaret from the congregation went in through the airlock-like door of Widelake care home, and followed a member of staff to the 'pub' where we celebrated Holy Communion for a group of residents. This unremarkable event was the first of its kind to happen since March 2020 when covid was first gripping us. I'd had discussions on and off with Amy who runs Widelake about starting up services again, but for a long while we would have had to stand behind a perspex screen and have no contact with residents, which makes a communion service a bit of a non-starter and there's little point in doing much else. But now all is, more or less, back to normal. My face mask was all very well but seemed a little bit tokenistic.

One change is that we no longer have the services of Alec who used to play the piano so I had rigged up some music and a couple of hymns on my iPod. It turned out that the speakers weren't up to the job, leaving the music so quiet that even on 'All Things B&B' and 'We Plough the Fields' we were a bar out of time after a single verse. More kit required. I could barely remember what to put in the bag as it was, and spent a good chunk of Tuesday morning frantically photocopying hymns after the folder with the old hymn sheets was nowhere to be found.

Sort Of How It Is Supposed To Work

Unlike last year when it all went a bit wrong, we had a full Mothering Sunday posy-making team and the posies were pleasantly presentable. Today the Roman Catholic congregation also distributed posies, which I can’t remember them doing in the past. It was almost back to normal as the children from the Infants School came to sing for us and brought their families with them, so we had about 120 people in the church for the main service. It was great and everyone enjoyed themselves. But where were our usual congregation members? Without the visitors I calculated we would have been few indeed, possibly fewer than 30. Yesterday I’d seen emails from members of the refreshments team appealing for help as all the people usually available were away or struck down by covid, and so before we began this morning I checked to see whether anyone was available to do it – no hands went up, so we saved on the biscuits. I haven’t heard of anyone newly afflicted by covid for a few days, so I wonder whether the peak is passing us, but it’s still having a noticeable impact.

La Peste

It felt strange at 7am yesterday morning to go down the hill to the post box and then past it for the first time in twelve days. Even in the midst of my isolation I had ventured out to post letters under cover of darkness, slightly on edge in case Sir Chris Whitty or someone were to leap out from a bush and point an accusing finger at me. There was never anyone else around, though, to denounce or to potentially infect. Anyway, on Sunday I left the post box far behind me and went down to the church. At least I remembered where it was. 

There were fewer people at the 10am mass than for ages: in fact, barely half the numbers we had only a month ago when everyone coincidentally turned up at once. Then, and since, I have had a string of reports and emails announcing this or that person has covid or is steering clear of friends and relatives in case they do. One of them is Sylv our Pastoral Assistant, and her being out takes out a range of others as well, not just those she gives lifts to church but also those who were in the home group she took part in last week. So far, though, only one member of the church has had to go to hospital, and he has (praise God) just been released, sorry, discharged. I mention all this just to put my own sickness into the context of a very significant upsurge in cases, and one which is cutting a swathe through the older members of the community. Thankfully, though, none of them are all that ill, generally reporting nothing more serious than a heavy cold and mostly less than that. The great benefit is that really quite large numbers of people will have had covid before Easter and there will be no reason for them not to come. Or not that one, anyway.

Straight to the Door

More days in covid incarceration beckon, and I have engaged in yet another personal first by ordering a grocery delivery online. Just like my past experiences of joining the kind of modernity everyone else has long since embraced, this feels like something of a defeat and I wish I understood quite why. Dr Abacus says his family find online shopping far more convenient and I suppose it is. In this instance, there may be some reprehensible pride lurking at the bottom of my reaction, as I would rather go and do my own shopping than have someone else do it for me - a minimal sort of independence, which I might be better off shaking free of. But I have no choice at the moment, and I was able to buy some lentil soup which seems to have disappeared off the shelves a long while ago. I can probably be reassured that I won't be making a habit of this because it was a tough job finding enough things to make the minimum shop: a packet of razor blades, which I don't really need yet, got me halfway to the magic £40 in one go. And that felt like cheating. 

Seduced by Signs

There is precious little to say about a third day secluded indoors, unless I was to discuss the weird dreams of a disrupted night's sleep, culminating in one in which I finish the midweek mass and then watch Frs Duncan and Kevin (from Lamford days) talk to each other while I am strangled by my facemask. Since getting up on Wednesday and feeling iffy, I've moved on to grotty, and I wonder whether it would have been worse had I not had my three vaccinations, or whether they have made no difference at all. In fact my symptoms are not very different from those of the cold I had a couple of weeks ago, or of any other moderately annoying cold I've ever had. It's been inconvenient enough already, and of course what I would like to happen is for my next covid test on Sunday evening to be clear, followed by another on Monday, or I am going to have to rearange yet more events I am supposed to be taking part in. Given the stage things seem to be at presently - an irritating dry cough appearing - I am not very confident of that. Like listening neurotically to the news to work out whether we're all going to be alive in a week, anxiously analysing every passing sensation to see if it presages your condition getting better is pointless - but I suspect we all do it!

The Messy Church team are determined to press on with the gathering tomorrow. Obviously I can't lead the worship bit but all they really need is something to occupy everyone in church while the hall is set up for tea. Jack is going to do it. I only hope what he has in mind doesn't involve reciting 'Albert and the Lion' like usual. 

That I Feared Has Come Upon Me, or, Lent Gets More Loathsome

In the middle of the night I woke up feeling nauseous. It went off in a couple of minutes, and I returned to sleep. Then on getting up I discovered I had a bit of a headache, which isn’t the most unusual experience in the world. I would normally have taken a covid test, and did so, and as I rather dreaded, the second little red line appeared. At least it proved I’ve probably been doing it right all those times it didn’t.

Church Club at school had to be cancelled toute de suite and the parents informed, and I set about trying to think who might fill in for the services and two baptisms this weekend – retired hospital chaplain Duncan offered to do the lot, for which he will win the Rector’s Gold Star and Bar did such a thing exist. I have a slight tremor of fear lest Duncan succumb as well (he was with us at Morning Prayer yesterday), and there isn’t much sign of a Plan C in evidence, but he will test himself too. Then there is Trevor, who I took for a haircut yesterday: he may soon have something actually to complain about in place of his usual imaginary ailments.

It wasn’t just Church Club that had to be cancelled: the Singing Club at school wasn’t running because of a covid case, and when Sandra who is the Church Club supremo got to prison where she was supposed to be taking part in a parenting course, that had been stopped as well. There is, as they say, a lot of it about. Dr Abacus has persuaded me to sign up for the molnupiravir trial to do my bit for society. I will have a bit of time on my hands until Monday at the very least.

Still, it means I shall be all right for Easter! He says, rashly.

Have This One On Me

"I expect an answer next time we speak!" Dale told me over Zoom this week. Former member of the Swanvale Halt flock, Dale comes from an American Lutheran background and I have been talking to him regularly since the first lockdown. This time we were discussing the resumption of communion being administered to the laity in both kinds, which we suspended nearly two years ago. Nobody doubts it would be preferable to return to giving the wine to the congregation; many of my (even) more Anglo-Catholic colleagues did so long ago. Others have adopted the use of the president intincting the Host before adminstering it, but I've never been able to see how you safely do that without ending up pressing a mushy disc into the communicant's hand. But how we are to go about it? Dale, you see, would be delighted if I plumped for individual communion cups. 

Evangelical Anglican commentators such as Ian Paul, when he has caught breath between agitating for bishops to give up mitres and Anglican churches to stop putting out crib scenes at Christmas, saw the pandemic as a God-given opportunity to promote the use of individual communion cups. But then he went on from there to suggest that it would better to decamp communion services permanently to domestic settings, so perhaps we should leave him to one side. Anyway, the bishops came out with a statement against this particular form of administering the Sacrament in July 2020, which according to some parties was based on a very inadequate legal opinion on the matter dating from 2011; but in October last year they discussed it again, and agreed that there was nothing to be gained by putting the matter to Synod (something generally best avoided in any circumstance) and that they had no intention of telling individual churches what to do. I don't know of any churches in Guildford diocese that have taken this option, but some evangelical churches elsewhere have.

We rightly associate individual communion cups with Nonconformist churches. Until the late 1800s Dissenters were content with common cups like everyone else, but from the 1890s an increasing awareness of the mechanisms of infection led to a movement among Dissenting churches in the northeastern United States to use separate communion vessels for each communicant, and the habit spread as quickly as the sicknesses everyone was afraid of. Asked about the matter in the early 1900s, Archbishop Randall Davidson decided using individual communion cups, were any church to do so, would indeed be legal, and the 1908 Lambeth Conference stated that bishops could authorise their use, though there was no medical case for abandoning the common cup wholesale (if it was all that risky clergy would be endlessly ill from consuming the dregs of the chalice at the end of communion, whereas they are not obviously sicker than anyone else and it would be presumptuous to ascribe this to divine intervention). 

Still, the standard Catholic objections to using separate cups do ring a bit hollow. We administer the bread in separate wafers happily enough, and any argument in favour of sharing a cup would equally apply to sharing a loaf. Any remains left in the cups could be reverently dealt with by collecting them, rinsing them, and then pouring the water with its diluted wine to earth in the same way we do when laundering purificators. No, the core of the problem is elsewhere.

I'm surprised that nobody ever talks much about the psychology of receiving the sacrament.  During lockdown, Marion our then-curate got into a rough debate in the group of Franciscan Tertiaries she belonged to (imagine that!) about the validity of 'remote consecration', in which clergy who refused to consecrate bread and wine over Zoom were accused of 'denying the sacrament' to the laypeople. This is not the mindset of passive, thankful reception, but of the exercise of rights. We come to the altar, into the real presence of the Lord, as recipients of grace. Think about the difference between coming to an altar, kneeling, and having a chalice put to your lips, and on the other hand approaching, standing, taking a small cup, and knocking it back either off to one side, or, worse, back in your seat. This is not the same as having a Host put into your hand which you then eat; it is like coming forward, breaking off a portion of a loaf of bread yourself, and taking it away. It is, psychologically, administering the Sacrament to yourself, rather than having it administered to you; it is claiming your grace from Jesus, rather than accepting it as his gift. This, I suspect, is why Protestants rather warm to it, because it promotes the sense of freedom, choice and independence which is at the heart of the Protestant mindset, one which - I feel constrained to argue - history suggests leads eventually to effective unbelief. I shouldn't think they themselves know that's what's happening, and would resist the case if it was made. 

I can see a Catholic way of using individual communion cups: they would have to be given to the communicant, ideally kneeling if they are able to do so; the Blood consumed there and then, and returned to the minister. Hard to manage, though. Any harder than a chalice? I'm not sure.

Follow the Science

Back in the depths of the pandemic over a year ago, we talked a lot about the social lessons we had learned, or at least hoped we might learn. I have also, I think, picked up some new thoughts about how science works and how it interacts with the media, which may not be new to anyone but me, of course.

Firstly there is what I would call the distinction between experimental science and experiential science. The first is what happens in laboratories: it’s about measurements, the physical properties of substances, double-blind trials, repetition of results, proving or disproving theses. It is controlled and discrete. It’s this kind of science which has produced our vaccines. On the other hand, experiential science happens outside the lab: it brings data and observation to bear on the ‘real world’ and seeks to answer questions about it. It is a far, far more hazardous venture than experimentation. In truth, it isn’t amenable to the ’scientific method’ at all, because you can’t isolate, say, an entire society and screen off various factors which might be affecting it to assess the truth of your hypothesis: you end up with a mass of data and really very limited means to analyse them in a way that would rule out other analyses. Human behaviour is too complex. It’s this second type of science which characterises the epidemiological decisions governments across the world have had to make, and its relatively indeterminate nature obviously makes it much more subject to bias. This leads onto the second observation, how different scientists and groups of scientists, once they move outside the laboratory, are driven by their own preferences and personalities to read the data they confront in different ways; perhaps not as much as the rest of us, but to some degree. My favourite covid commentator is possibly Sir John Bell, the Canadian Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, favourite partly because he is the living spit of 1940s band leader Spike Jones so whenever he comes on the wireless I half expect to hear him playing farty noises on a trumpet and firing a gun. ‘You know me’, Professor Bell told an interviewer on Today once, ‘I’m a glass-half-full kinda guy’, and so he is. At least he admits it, and thus you can apply an optimism discount to his pronouncements. Then there is (for instance) Dr Carl Henegham who I heard opining the other day that there isn’t anything really wrong at the moment, and that everything we hear about the Omicron variant is exaggerated. Everybody seems to have forgotten about the study his Oxford Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine published in May 2020 alleging that covid had been in the UK far longer than anyone thought, that therefore everyone had had it already and it was massively less lethal than supposed, and that the pandemic was essentially over. An academic friend of mine commented that ‘Carl Henegham tests my belief in tenure’. Again, does anyone now remember the days when the World Health Organisation was advising us not to wear masks? The reasoning seemed to be that masks encouraged ‘a false sense of security’, and this is a piece with the WHO’s apparent concern less with medical facts than with how it thinks people behave, and ought to behave. Whereas it changed its mind about masks, it’s consistently argued against travel restrictions: now, it seems to me that, while restrictions on international travel obviously aren’t any kind of long-term solution to a pandemic, they logically must do something in the short term to impede a pathogen’s spread, in exactly the same way that getting people to stand two yards apart does something. The WHO’s concern appears to be that travel bans break down international solidarity, which I can’t help thinking is a) not necessarily true, and b) isn’t its business. 

Finally, the media. I am a great defender, in general, of the BBC, but a lot of its coverage, even via the sedate medium of radio, has been disgraceful. Barely a day passes without some headline along the lines of ‘Professor A says Y is possible’ or ‘Dr B warns of risk of Z’ when neither Professor A nor Dr B are speaking on behalf of anything like a consensus. Well, you can always find someone to say nearly anything, and the fact that someone says it is hardly of itself worthy of a screaming news item, especially when you can just as easily source an opposite opinion. Very few things aren't possible, and hardly anything isn't a risk.

A friend complained some time ago that the reporting of the different brands of vaccine was a capitalistic development, making heroes out of the companies that manufactured the medicines, whereas once we had no idea where our drugs came from. I argued that this was in fact a good thing: it cast light on the process of pharmaceutical research and procurement which had previously been mysterious and obscure. People would know more in the future. I think that probably applies to ‘the science’ as well.

Hac in Anni Ianua

A topsy-turvy New Year for me as I am off on New Year's Eve and at work on New Year's Day: I had a funeral yesterday on what would normally be my day off. That was unusual, too: a graveside ceremony for someone relatively well-known in the community (though not to me directly), assisted by the Council who provided a PA system and music, and with sloe gin to toast the departed. Seeing people line up outside the cemetery (a rather nice spot, our little local godsacre) was very moving and seemed much more pleasing than being at the Crem., or even, dare I say, in church. Today I have largely spent ordering books and managing to avoid employing the Evil Empire of Amazon to do so, and downloading music ranging from the orchestral accompaniment to the Golden Parade of the Pharoahs back in July, to early-1980s feminist punk, to 1940s Chinese jazz. This has a name, shidaiqu, so don't say you don't learn anything here, unless you knew it before.

I get slightly peeved when people I know speak as though calendar years have personalities, and it's both a mystery and a shock when one turns out unusually horrible, but I also get peeved when other people I know get very superior about not doing that. It's a natural if loose way of thinking. The annual ticking-over of one digit to another gives us a way of framing our outlook and perhaps amending our behaviour, though whatever life may presently be throwing at us pays no attention to it, of course. 

People ask me whether I think the pandemic will ever be over and I say, Yes I do, because human beings have been through this experience umpteen times and it has always followed, overall, the same trajectory. Pandemics never end with diseases eradicated: we've only ever managed that twice, with smallpox and one sort of polio. Instead successive waves of infection sweep across continents, or the world, and they get milder as resistance builds up among their survivors. What's different this time is twofold: first, we have far more information than ever before, and can analyse what's happening with the virus in a way we never could in the past, and secondly we are tackling this disease not predominately with natural infection, but with vaccines. We are not just shrugging our shoulders and letting lots of people die. That's a degree of progress.

I think it will all be all right, and it may all be all right sooner than we fear. Not everything will be. Democracy and freedom seem to me very fragile indeed - more fragile than they always are - and of course we're still heading, more likely than not, for the collapse of our civilisation and everything we love and value before the end of the century. You might have noticed this is the warmest New Year on record. That may well not be all right at all. But this will be. In a couple of hours time I will drink a small toast to it!

Last Hurrah

'Very bold!' cried Edward from the congregation who was sat on the station platform having coffee with Rick the verger and Rena, another regular at the church. He was referring to the fact that I was catching the train to go and see S.D. for the first time in a long time, and possibly the last for a bit, too. Earlier that morning I'd been to the Park-and-Ride near Guildford to have my booster vaccination - which probably shouldn't be called that now, but simply an additional vaccination. I'd been booked in for the third inoculation at the end of the month, but my mother wanted me to get it sooner. I'd looked for a walk-in centre, but wasn't overly bothered until Professor Abacus, who should know, emailed me to say I should get it done as soon as I possibly could. Really. I was going to go to Kingston, until Sandra and Clarice in the church office pointed me to the Park-and-Ride which isn't listed publicly as a walk-in centre, but is. I called: no bookings until after Christmas, I was told at first, but then the nice lady spotted a cancellation early the following day, so I went along and waltzed past the poor souls queuing for their walk-in jab, waiting for just a little while before I was speared and free to go.

By the New Year the whole population will have been infected, says the BBC, or various scientific sages through it. We are not shutting up shop at the church unless we are told to by the Lawful Authorities, but I am anticipating lots of people falling by the wayside and many souls deciding they will prioritise, if they must, family gatherings rather than worship. In fact some have already told me this is what they will do. My chief problem is what happens if I fall victim myself: anything else I can absorb, short of playing the organ (and I can lead carols a capella if need be). If I do, Christmas at Swanvale Halt will be reduced to one mass on Christmas Day and the funeral I am booked to do on the 30th, and I have asked for help with those. I suppose I really need a Plan C as well as B.

S.D. asked me a couple of probing questions but proffered no advice. He was most put out by attending Mass for the Immaculate Conception at St Mary's Bourne Street the other day, and finding that His Grace of Chichester, presiding, chose only to use one mitre rather than the mitra simplex and the mitra preciosa to which such an occasion entitled him. 'He now looks like Pius XII in the last stages of his life', he offered.

The Lord's Rivals

The last time I discussed covid-scepticism I mentioned Florence who refuses to take the vaccines on ethical grounds - that is, their development using foetal cell material, like many modern medicines. I recently got into a discussion about it, rather to my trepidation, as she’d stated a quoted mortality rate for covid-19 of 1.37% made it ‘mild’, which I suppose it is compared to many other sicknesses, but of course 1.37% of a lot, is a lot, as any statistician knows. We disagree about the moral status of early-stage foetuses, but some of the other challenges Florence makes seem worth thinking about.

Should we not learn to rely on God rather than the idol of medicine, Florence asks. I don’t think anything in the Bible suggests that Christians ought in every situation to expect the miraculous intervention of God rather than ordinary secular healing. In Jesus’s time sickness was viewed as a sign of God’s displeasure on specific individuals and the Lord gave that very short shrift (John 3.1-3). His healing ministry was a way of revealing God’s will, and restoring individuals to the fellowship of Israel. Though Christians were also likely to slip into seeing illness and disability as a divine visitation, the Scriptures themselves don’t: in his short discussion of healing, St James (5.14-16) neither claims that, nor that Christians should not avail themselves of secular medicine as well as prayer. Miraculous healings still take place, but a) we now think about sickness differently and b) in order to reveal God’s will they necessarily have to be extraordinary events rather than things we expect to happen all the time. I don’t see any reason to believe that God wants us not to use ordinary, normal human methods of fighting covid.

Florence is a serious soul and also raised the fact that the word the New Testament uses for medicine, pharmakeia, also means ‘sorcery’, and ultimately derives from pharmakon, ‘poison’. Isn’t this a suspicious view of medical science, she suggests, and therefore presumably one Christians should also exercise. I hadn’t thought about the way the Scriptures deal with medicine: it’s easy enough to claim that it is merely a matter of ignorance (obviously at the time nobody (including the physicians themselves) would have understood the process of healing so the use of drugs was close to magic and therefore suspect); also, the texts use another word, iatros, for ‘doctor’ when talking about ordinary physicians and St Luke the evangelist himself. But we have to be more positive than that and assume that the Biblical language has something to tell us – that there might be a valuable point to that apparent connection between doctors and sorcerers. Perhaps there’s a link between both magic and medicine in our human desire for quick fixes to our problems that don’t require us to change anything about ourselves. There are all sorts of lessons to learn from the current pandemic involving our society and behaviour and early on almost everyone I spoke to talked about that, but now we’re just exhausted and yearn for it to be over: we really want the vaccines to be a get-out-of-jail-free-card. In terms of the pandemic's origins, for instance, we may never know whether the virus emerged from a laboratory accident or a crossover from animals being kept in bad conditions; but, whichever it was, human actions have played a major part. A purely medical solution that leaves out any spiritual reflection or room for repentance plays to the very understandable desire (which I feel as much as anyone) to ‘get back to normal’. Could that be the insight that lies underneath the Biblical language?

Radical Traditionalism

'You know I don't go in for liturgy,' Emily wrote in an email, 'so I don't know why it's Compline that gets to me'. Emily turned up with her mum (all the way from South Wales in her case!) at our first Zoom Compline on Sunday evening. As I may have mentioned I have fought shy of simply shoving our ordinary worship online once the progress of the pandemic allowed us to meet in person again, partly because our kit isn't very good, partly because a standard Parish Eucharist isn't really a very involving business if you're watching it on a screen, and partly because I don't want it to get into people's heads that online worship is any replacement for the real thing, the real thing being Christians actually being in the same place where they stand a chance of forming relationships that lead them on in their spiritual lives. But I still felt I wanted to do something that allowed those at a far distance to access our worshipping life. Compline, the Night Office, once a month seemed an ideal thing to try.

And so I sat in the Lady Chapel with a candelabra lit having put the link and an order of service on the website. There were seven of us in the end, which I thought was fine. I greeted everyone and then muted them: my experience is that online worship where you can hear everyone else is horrendous as attempts to speak in unison inevitably mean the pace gets slower and slower until you can't see how you're actually managing to move forward at all. There was a space for people to chip in with their own prayers, but nobody did (perhaps they will eventually). We sang Te Lucis Ante Terminum, the antiphon and Nunc Dimittis - at least, I did, I don't know what everyone else did - and at the end I snuffed the candles: 'very evocative!' Emily reported. 

Apart from practicalities such as trying to read and simultaneously keep an eye on the Participants list for stragglers, and having the camera elsewhere than my computer screen, there was one unanticipated issue. As Compline is the conclusion of the liturgical day, worshippers are supposed to leave in virtual silence; but in our online lives since March 2020 we have begun accustomed to waving goodbye to each other as we leave a meeting, to the extent that not to do so feels strangely uncomfortable and rude. Worshippers physically in the Lady Chapel wouldn't have felt the need to wave to each other, but that is now an engrained part of our social etiquette, and so should probably be retained!

Hearts to Heaven and Voices Raise

Provided the numbers don't drop below six, I told Neil who organises the choir, we can give it another go. Sadly that was becoming a tall order even before the pandemic, and I really don't want to repeat choir processions which only have two or three people in them: six seems a not unreasonable minimum, especially if they're going to spread out a bit among the stalls, bearing in mind we're still supposed to be sensible. 

This evening the choir reconvened for the first time since March 2020. Or was it February? Did we suspend it even before the lockdown? I can't remember. In the event we had precisely six singers, and they made a rather pleasing noise, knowing 'Ave Verum Corpus' pretty well. I found myself borne up by the vocal waves and that was good to experience again. Surprising how much sound a modest group of voices can produce. 

Anti Vaxx

Three non-mainstream views from people I know: not because I agree with them, of course, but because they interest me. 

.......

Neither Julia nor her partner Stan have been vaccinated. They’ve both had bad reactions to vaccinations in the past, and prefer to rely on other measures. Julia says Stan is generally very healthy and never gets colds or bugs, while although she has a range of health difficulties this makes her less worried about covid than you might imagine: it’s just another thing to take into account when she goes out, in the way she always has. She had hand-sanitiser in her bag long before it became the fashion. Reason holds her back from being a full-fat covid-sceptic: ‘people are saying the same thing across the world, so I suppose it must be true.’ This is very sound reasoning. Nevertheless she feels governments are exaggerating the threat in order to take control of more of our lives.

.......

Florence is an evangelical Christian, and life experiences have given her a firm opposition to abortion and the scientific use of foetal material. This is the root of her objection to the covid vaccines. It leads her to seek out media stories which emphasise their ineffectiveness, and the self-interest of the bodies that produce them and the governments that promote them. It’s not that she’s a covid-denier: she’s had the disease, and been ill with it, and faith pulled her through, she insists. It’s that, for her, the damage of the sickness is outweighed by the immorality of the measures taken to combat it. Because she can’t understand how any Christian could take a different view, she sees the response to the pandemic as an aspect of an ongoing, long-term secular attack on Christian values. Friends who comment on her posts on social media use more extreme language than Florence does: one said that while there might be a case for vaccinating the old, vaccinating young or otherwise healthy people, or children, was ‘demonic’.

.......

I’ve mentioned Jasper before. He has a rational reason for not wanting to be vaccinated, having had relevant health problems in the past, but even were that not the case his deep ideological stance conditions his attitude to the pandemic as a whole. His basic belief (which I took a long time to work out) is that human beings have within themselves everything they need to solve their problems naturally, and that therefore anyone who promotes scientific or technocratic solutions does so out of self-interest or malign intentions. He sees the medical response to covid as part of a widespread assault on human nature that began decades ago, leading to humans being enslaved by technology and those who control it. Like Florence, he was ill with covid, so he doesn’t think it’s a hoax, but as far as he’s concerned he saw the disease off with meditation and willpower. He not only rages against the powerful individuals he sees as responsible for what’s happening, but is also contemptuous of the majority of people who are meekly falling in line with their agenda, mocks mask-wearing, insists the vaccines are causing the deaths of thousands of people, and describes medical professionals as liars and stooges, and worse. He publicises, very uncritically, anything that seems to endorse this viewpoint. Like Florence’s friends, it’s Jasper’s who say the more extreme things: commenting on his social media posts, they use words like ‘genocide’ to describe the vaccination programme, and predict that the officials of the World Health Organisation will be ‘tried for crimes against humanity’, hanged, or end up in front of ‘a firing squad’.

.......

All three begin from their own experience, but Florence and Jasper place over theirs an ideological framework which leads them to interpret what has happened to them, and their own instinctive feelings, as just one aspect of something much larger. This larger context is a society-wide conflict in which they are on the side of right, and, precisely because it positions them as part of a minority who understand what is truly going on, powerfully validates who they feel they are. It’s also polarising: it forces them to see everyone else as an ally or an enemy. Violent language both reinforces that sense of polarisation and pushes it farther. I wonder, in the case of the people who comment on Florence’s and Jasper’s posts, how far? I have a university friend who works for the WHO, and would like him to remain safe, thank you.

Revelation at Guildford

Today's SCP eucharist and lunch at the Cathedral made a number of things clear to me. Probably the first was how unobservant I can be. It struck me that the altar furniture in the Lady Chapel where we gathered was really quite surprisingly unattractive, and I couldn't remember ever seeing it before. Yet here the cross and candlesticks are, in this photo, rendered slightly less unappealing by the height of the candles, which today were mere stumps. Perhaps they'd been regilded which caused them to make themselves more apparent to my eye.

As we repaired to the café I further realised how problematic covid protocols now are. We ended up huddled around one table because nobody felt it was their responsibility to start a new one or insist that anyone else did. As soon as my soup was finished I pushed my chair back a little in a pathetic and half-hearted attempt to make a gesture in the direction of physical distancing. Of course now that Dr Spector's ZOE covid symptom tracker has announced that the disease's signs are more or less indistinguishable from a cold's I think I might have it all the time. There is scarcely a day when I don't have a headache, a tickle in the throat, or feel tired. When does one not feel tired!

Everyone else seemed fully clued-up about the resignation of the Bishop of Winchester and his mysterious CV and dubious validity, something which had entirely passed me by. We strove to find something positive to say about the Archbishop of Canterbury's forthcoming evangelistic visit to the diocese, and some of my colleagues worried that any failure to produce the expected waves of converts would be blamed on our unhelpful attitude. Surely there aren't enough of us? Even if we all had dolls of Justin Welby to stick needles in? and most of us, we discovered, had missed the Voodoo module in our training. 

My final discovery was that I am even sloppier than I thought, getting home to find that my phone was nowhere in my bag, or my car. It was apparently on the floor beneath the chair where I'd been sitting, having failed to be properly lodged in the bag. Will I learn from the experience? I only wish I might. 

Fear and Its Proponents

Reading a headline along the lines of ‘vaccine-sceptic US Cardinal out of intensive care after covid diagnosis’ it came as no very great surprise to discover that the Cardinal in question is longstanding antagonist of the Bishop of Rome, Raymond Burke of Wisconsin, poster-boy of Roman Catholic conservatives the world over. Cardinal Burke is known for controversial statements on a variety of topics, but it depresses one slightly to find him in exactly the position you would predict on this issue too, even though its relationship with Christian faith is indirect to say the least. In some places online you will see him quoted as spreading the rumour that the covid vaccines contain injectable microchips, but to give even him some credit, this is not the case; his statements opposing compulsory vaccinations (something I sympathise with, on the grounds that the skin marks the inviolable boundary of the state’s mandate over sane people) go back before the pandemic, and in the interview in question he seems to be drawing a parallel between that and forms of governmental techno-monitoring of individuals’ behaviour, rather than connecting them directly.

But the Cardinal’s overall attitude to covid is, as I say, clear and predictable. It’s summarised in a homily he preached on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Wisconsin last December. This is his argument. The US has treacherously been made economically dependent on Marxist materialism in the form of China; the pandemic is being used to destroy Christian faith and practice; the Church is full of moral and theological laxity and incapable of mounting a defence. All Christians can do is flee to Our Lady who weeps along with them.

I am very sure Our Lady weeps on occasion, and in this baleful picture there are, not surprisingly, some colours that while lurid are not too far off reality. The influence of China is indeed troublesome; the Church certainly hasn’t covered itself with glory during the pandemic, though if the Cardinal thinks the Roman dispensation has been wanting in this respect he should peer this side of the Tiber. But it’s the middle bit of his case which catches the ear:

Then, there is the mysterious Wuhan virus about whose nature and prevention the mass media daily give us conflicting information. What is clear, however, is that it has been used by certain forces, inimical to families and to the freedom of states, to advance their evil agenda. These forces tell us that we are now the subjects of the so-called “Great Reset”, the “New Normal”, which is dictated to us by their manipulation of citizens and nations through ignorance and fear. Now, we are supposed to find in a disease and its prevention the way to understand and direct our lives, rather than in God and in His plan for our salvation. The response of many Bishops and priests, and of many faithful has manifested a woeful lack of sound catechesis. So many in the Church seem to have no understanding of how Christ continues His saving work in times of plague and of other disasters…. At a time when we most need to be close to one another in Christian love, worldly forces would isolate us and have us believe that we are alone and dependent upon secular forces which would make us slaves to their godless and murderous agenda.

Is the virus mysterious? Is information about its nature and prevention conflicting? I mean, my feeling is that, while we may not and will probably never know where it came from, we understand pretty much everything we need to about it. Nobody knows where the Spanish Flu of 1919 originated, or pretty much any other pandemic infection. Like most covid-sceptics talking outside their own echo-chambers the Cardinal never ties any of his argument down to definitive statement: he insinuates, hints and suggests – ‘certain forces’ are to blame, the shadowy elites who are, apparently, not only content with enriching themselves (which is the left-wing reading of the ‘Great Reset’), but also destroying the Christian faith and replacing God as well. I can’t think of anything emanating from the World Health Organisation, the World Economic Forum, the UN, or any other organisation of global influence which could justify such an idea, but what do I know.

Great Reset language, and the reaction to it, interests me. A global crisis which halts so much of human society seems to me almost inevitably to bring into question many of the normal aspects of social organisation: it’s natural that individuals and organisations should have their usual habits shaken up and query whether they actually want to resume them. You see that everywhere, including churches. It strikes me as a natural, obvious, and entirely healthy thing. The use of this language by rich and influential individuals operating on the global stage is surely just a reflection of the same psychological instinct; what they mean by it and how far they are prepared to do anything about it is another matter. From Prince Charles to Karl Schwab they seem to me to be vaguely progressive and well-meaning souls who have no real conception that anything about their own lives or positions might have to be sacrificed to bring about the changes that they say they want, and that is also standard, for the rich and for all of us, most of the time. That's why the change they promote might well enrich and empower such people still more, even if they don't actively plan it that way. 

Cardinal Burke also shares this with the secular covid-sceptics I have come across: that while he blames the elites for controlling the ignorant masses through fear, it is his own discourse which is fear-filled. Its lack of specifics and detail is exactly what energises fear: its story of undefined, dark, evil forces who control our lives, manipulating and terrorising us, out to destroy everything we value and that makes our lives worthwhile. In complete contrast, the mainstream narrative of the pandemic has concentrated on casting light and hope. Here is a new virus; this is serious in this way, and in this way; but look, this is what we can do about it; and thanks to scientific effort, there’s the prospect of putting it behind us, isn’t that good? I have no doubt the Devil makes use of any situation. It is hard to see, however, the use he can make out of lots of people not dying of a disease, and any sort of Christianity that concludes widespread horrible death is a salutary thing needs to look at itself hard.

Future Prospect

I sat opposite our newer churchwarden, Grant, talking about a church property whose management has worried me for a long while. Grant very much sees his year as churchwarden – his first, I hope! – as concentrating on the church’s finances and properties and making sure we make the best of what we have as we emerge from the pandemic. He, and others who have talked about this to me, are right, and I am aware that there is a series of questions I’ve pushed to one side over the course of years that relate not just to this but to other organisations we are linked with, and which we either give money to or receive it from. They have niggled, but I have devoted my energy and mental bandwidth to other things. Now those questions must be brought out again and tackled.

Nothing comes to life except first it dies, the Apostle Paul reminds us, and over the last fifteen months like so many other churches (and organisations generally), while it has not died, Swanvale Halt church has been ground down close to it. In March and April 2020 we existed in no more substantial form than me saying the mass on my own in a bedroom and an invisible web of prayer across the parish. Now we face the task of rebuilding, reconstructing activities and relationships which have dwindled or been impossible. Decisions between priorities are forced on us by our remaining resources both financial and human: my plan for resuming worship supposes having a crucifer as well as a server, and eventually a full serving team, but we now have only three people who can act as crucifer at all. What’s best and more encouraging: for more people to remain in the congregation, or for them to see more souls participating in the liturgy? We will need a determined concentration on what does the mission of the church most good rather than what we are used to doing, and some things are already falling by the wayside as the people who used to run them decide that they no longer can. For us, as for so much else in society, the pandemic has accelerated developments which were already underway.

Yet there is a great deal to be encouraged by. Our curate may have left, but it looks as though over the course of a few months the church will have acquired two retired priests, a lay reader, and an occasional preacher, as well as a variety of souls whose experiences and abilities promise to be very useful. We will have a revamped and explicitly evangelistic non-eucharistic service to add to the mix, and I will be a better pastor to the organisers within the church and the souls on the edge. So I tell myself: and one has to cultivate hope!

Thanksgiving Day

My joke has always been that Hornington is a bit like Trumpton and it felt particularly Trumpton-like on Monday as I took part in a thanksgiving service for NHS and social care workers, myself and Jack the Salvation Army bugler moving backward and forward in and out of the Market House in the town centre like the figures on the Trumpton Town Hall clock. Telling the time, never too quickly, never too slowly.

I found it quite hard to put together the prayers. The NHS is a human institution and much as we in the UK load on it the ideals of charity and self-sacrifice we tell ourselves we believe in, it's nothing more than that. My family and friends of mine have suffered from mistakes it has made, structural shortcomings that have nothing essentially to do with resources, and, though I shudder at the resentment Jasper expresses at the NHS and all its works, you don't have to be a hardline anti-vaxxer to find some of its pro-vaccine propaganda a bit awkward and weird and wonder at how much it cost. 

There was recommended CofE liturgical material available for the day, but meek endorsement of whatever middle-of-the-road majority opinion is at the time is standard CofE practice so I didn't feel completely comfortable with it. I ended up focusing very much on the people who work in the NHS (and other care settings) with a single line referring to the 'vision and tenacity' involved in its founding. At least I felt I avoided the idolatry of structures and mainstream beliefs. Next stop the monarchy.

Opening Up

'Not before 18^th July 2115’ is the O/C of the Air Cadets’ estimate of when the Corps will issue guidance to local squadrons responding to the Government’s announcements on Monday releasing coronavirus restrictions, ‘and even then it will amount to “local commanders are finally responsible for any decisions”’. I expect the Church of England to come out with something earlier than that, and imagine Bishop Sarah Mullaly of London who is the lead of the Covid Recovery Group will have something to do with it; but to judge by previous experience the bottom line with us will also be ‘it’s down to you’. We will of course have to interpret and mould whatever guidance we get around our local circumstances, but a steer, a rationale, would be helpful, and I don’t know whether we will get that, because it will require making some sort of implied public judgement about the wisdom of the national approach and the Church doesn’t seem to want to wade into those waters.

Not that the Government is telling us what it really thinks, how many deaths or cases of post-covid syndromes it regards as ‘worth it’ in that impossible but inescapable calculation of risk and benefit. Driven by a historical perspective – covid-19 isn’t the Black Death, it isn’t even SARS, MERS or Ebola – I’ve always looked on the pandemic with what I like to think of as a ‘robust’ attitude though I concede others might have different words for it. We have got off, so far, really relatively lightly from this. We have vaccines which have been developed miraculously quickly and which batter infection down significantly at every degree of severity. While we can argue which of the measures the Government is casting aside we might prefer to retain (as I write I’ve only just heard that lateral flow tests will no longer be freely available from the end of the month, which is not exactly helpful), it is hard to see, in broad terms, how things are going to be much better than they are now. And this is what, I suspect, we may not want to face. Looking at my own reactions, I see a conflict between what I know rationally and what I feel emotionally.

Rationally, once we (we, being humanity in general) let covid escape and circulate, that was it: eradication became impossible. The misjudgements made by virtually every western government made it inevitable that it would eventually become an endemic disease. SARS, MERS and Ebola are all far, far more deadly, but they’re also easier to control: in the case of MERS (case fatality rate 35%) you basically have to steer clear of camels and you should be OK, and even the terrifying Ebola can be stamped on pretty effectively with determined hygiene measures. In contrast, a disease that can only be controlled by stopping ordinary human contact, but at least a third of whose victims won’t even know they’re infected, can’t be contained indefinitely, unless you test your whole population, constantly, forever. Eventually, even the countries which have been far more effective than us at preventing infection, New Zealand, South Korea and the like, will face the question of what to do in the long term when vaccines don’t provide anything like full protection. We (we being the British) can’t get to where they are, and the likelihood is that they will end up closer to where we are. So, rationally speaking, this is probably as good as it gets.

But even I don’t want that. What I want is a world in which I don’t think about covid any more, about the possibility of being infected or infecting others. This is my emotional, as opposed to my rational, state. I think it’s the desire I have been secretly harbouring behind the longing to ‘get back to normal’: ‘normal’ doesn’t really mean the absence of restrictions, it means the absence of anxiety. And while I expect that will probably come, it will only come after several years, perhaps, of living with it, of our expectations being reordered around this new reality. We will have to grow towards normality, not legislate for it: the relaxation of rules doesn’t mean the relaxation of the heart. Although a government can help it or hinder it, it can’t make it happen.