The plan was to drive up the Rhine to a village near Strasbourg. I was due to give addresses there at a weekend conference for church people from the Anglican Diocese in Europe. On the way we had planned to stay in Düsseldorf. This was where my Jewish mother was born and brought up until, at the age of fourteen, she was sent to Britain to escape the Nazi persecution. We'd arranged to meet the head teacher of her old school and some of his current students. He has taken a great interest in Jewish children who had attended it before the war, making contact with survivors (my mother was one of the few) and helping today’s young people understand the terrible history of Germany under the Third Reich.
After the conference, we were going to linger for a few days in Alsace, one of our favourite regions of France. That too is an area with long memories for me. In my gap year (we didn’t call it that in the 1960s), I worked for a few months on a pig farm at Pfaffenhoffen, a village north of Strasbourg. I grew to love Alsace and its culture, positioned as it is at a crossroads of Europe by the Rhine where French and German identity, language and culture meet. And at the end of our tour, we had booked to stay a night at Edam in the Netherlands (where the cheese comes from) where my grandparents were kept safe underground for two years by two evangelical Christian sisters who saw it as their vocation to shelter Jews during the Nazi occupation.
But we’re not on the autobahn where we should have been today. It’s the virus of course. Last Friday I was talking on the phone to my GP about the medication I’m on. It’s relevant to this story that a few years ago I had a silent heart attack which was only discovered during an MRI scan later on. I was already on medication for atrial fibrillation and hypertension. ‘Too much information’ you cry! Point taken. That’s all you need to know.
‘By the way’, I asked my doctor, ‘what about travelling abroad with Covid19 spreading across the continent?’ He spelled out the risks: not travel per se, but being in close proximity to people you don’t know in ships and hotels and conference centres. It’s not only the risk they pose to you, but yours to them. Any of us could be carrying the virus without knowing it. Only 20% of those who catch it will develop severe symptoms. Of those, a few percent will die. You could be one of the unlucky ones, he went on. You are nearly 70. You have an ‘underlying health condition’. You are male. You tick all three ‘higher risk’ boxes.
‘Ok’, I replied, ‘I know you’re not telling me whether to travel or not, but giving me the information I need in order to make a sensible decision. But perhaps you can answer this: what would you do in my situation?’ He paused, then said: ‘In your position, I would not travel. Maybe you’d be fine. You probably would. But I don’t think any of us should travel just now unless it’s essential. I’m surprised that the FCO website is as relaxed as it is about overseas travel. And if you found yourself quarantined while you were away, you’d say to yourselves that this ordeal was avoidable. Far better, if it comes to it, to be quarantined in your own home’. Or words to that effect.
I’ve often found that to ask someone, ‘what would you do in my situation?’ can open the door to a really helpful conversation. The other person – priest, financial advisor, counsellor, GP, spouse or friend - isn’t doing my work for me. In adulthood, other people can’t and shouldn’t make decisions for us. Not if we are in our right mind, and competent to be led by the evidence, weigh it up and come to a view about what we should do. But to ask ‘what would you do?’ does allow my conversation partner to be candid. I’ve often said to others who’ve sought my advice: ‘I can’t make this decision for you. But given what you’ve told me, I can suggest how I’d respond if I were in your shoes’. My GP was willing to do that. I needed to hear what he had to say. But the decision not to travel was ours, and ours alone.
Today, when we should have been on the road, it’s inevitable that I ask myself whether we did the right thing. It all comes down to risk. Did we do the risk analysis well? Was our appetite for risk unduly cautious? On the other hand, had we crossed the North Sea after all, might we now be asking if this was a reckless adventure we shouldn’t have embarked on? I’ve since learned that the Land or province of Nordrein-Westfalen which includes Düsseldorf is where most of Germany’s cases of the virus have been reported.
As I wrote in my last blog there is a virus that is more contagious than Covid19. It’s the fear and anxiety that it’s generating. One professional I’ve heard speak about it, a senior epidemiologist, says that Covid19 poses the gravest global threat through disease since the Spanish flu of 1918 that killed so many millions. This coronavirus is not as deadly as, say, Ebola, but crucially, it is far more infectious. The combination of high probability of contagion with serious impacts on more vulnerable sections of the population raises the risk level significantly. Enough to make it essential that we change our behaviours to mitigate the risk.
Our travel dilemma is a case-study of how we are all being faced with new and difficult choices thanks to the virus. They involve changes of thought, habit and behaviour. Handwashing and hygiene, not kissing or shaking hands – these are straightforward enough. Trickier are choices that involve our daily work, our education, our family and social lives, our holiday plans. Wherever people gather - schools, sports and leisure venues, pubs, restaurants, businesses, shops, theatres, cinemas, churches, airports and railway stations – all are having to negotiate territory that is unfamiliar and unwelcome. They have to make choices about how to manage in these coming weeks and months, aware that there are big economic and social consequences at stake. We have to decide what kind of engagement with them will be low-risk and safe, and where we need to be more cautious. It’s a kind of exile, a strange land where ordinary rules of engagement are suspended. (‘Exile’ was to have been the theme of my Bible studies at the church conference – how much material there suddenly is to reflect on!)
As for me, I’m hugely disappointed not to be travelling today. Yet relieved, too, that we don’t have to. Our children certainly feel that way. It’s a conflicted place to be. Only hindsight will reassure us about our decision, or not, as the case may be. We tried to act for the best. But life is lived not in the crystal-clarity of black-and-white but in ambiguity, among a million shades of grey. Faith becomes a real factor when you have to weigh up risks. As does courage, whatever path we opt to tread. ‘Face the fear and do it anyway’: the fear of doing something or of not doing it. These are early days in the story of the virus. There will be many more decisions we shall need to face in the future, and some of them will be painful and hard.
That’s where prayer, wisdom and God-given discernment come into things. There’s spiritual work to do at times like these. The virus sends us back to the foundations of our faith and what it is that gives us our dignity as men and women. And where we believe God is found at the core of seems to be dangerous and frightening. 'Do not worry about tomorrow' says Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. I try not to, though temperamentally I find it's one of the hardest challenges of the gospel. Cultivating wisdom, learning to take the long view, finding hope where I can, and above all, living contentedly, thankful for the goodness of God - these I've found to be the most important strategies for mitigating risk at an inward level, facing it with equanimity and becoming, God willing, a better human being as a result.
In the same situation when I expected to be somewhere else (the UK actually) for an event arranged 6 months ago.
ReplyDeleteThe decision was difficult and energy-draining, but a lingering resentment is now giving way to a sense of freedom.
The decision, like yours, was not primarily driven by fear but by the awareness that one could unwittingly infect others. I wonder whether we are all being called to reconsider some of our assumptions about travel. It is difficult to envisage many forms of long-distance travel which do not have an adverse effect of others, including those living in the future (an issue, incidentally, that all of us living in the Diocese in Europe need to bear in mind). Anyway, enjoy the day in lovely Northumberland, with all the opportunities it will bring.