Chaos, the Virus and God

The thing about the virus is that it's pretty much beyond our control. Left to itself, it would run riot throughout the human race. Which is why we're doing everything we can to keep it within bounds, restrain it, put limits on its capacity to hurt and destroy us.

Most of us in the developed world have never before had this sense of a power beyond ourselves that threatens our very existence. My parents' generation did, living through the war. Survivors of the Blitz used to tell us as children what it was like to greet the morning with relief and gratitude at still being alive after a night of bombing. They learned to live from one day to the next, help one another through seemingly endless ordeals. It brought an awareness of the fragility, and therefore the sheer preciousness, of life.

In this pandemic however, the 'enemy' is far more elusive. We can't see it or detect its presence. It creeps upon us by stealth, lurking as an invisible threat that's all around us, maybe even within us, yet as an unknown, sinister presence to haunt our imaginations and stoke our fears. Not only that, but we can't even find strength and solace by facing this intangible foe by being physically together. There are no bunkers or air-raid shelters where we can hold one another through times of assault. In spite of our digital connectedness (which is a great benefit), we are more alone than we've ever had to be before, especially when we need one another so much.

I've been searching for metaphors and analogies that will do justice to what we are experiencing. To my mind, the image of warfare only takes us so far. But I found a different clue in a recent news item about the victims of the catastrophic floods on the Yorkshire River Don in February. Just as homes were beginning to dry out and repair works getting under way, the virus hit and lockdown was imposed. If you've ever been flooded, you'll feel for those poor householders trying to recover fromi a watery ordeal only to be overwhelmed by another kind of chaos that is putting a stop to so much everyday human activity.

Chaos is the idea I want to focus on. If you think about it, lockdown is how we always respond to chaos or the threat of it. Here in Tynedale, we became all too familiar with floodgates and sandbags in the floods of Storm Desmond in December 2015. As 'biblical rain' was bucketing down outside, I watched the water creep up the cellar stairs over a period of a couple of hours until it was two metres deep (yes, exactly that emblematic measure by which we now calibrate our social distancing). It was slow, it was silent, it was relentless - and it was sinister. How far would it rise? Would it invade the ground floor? That's when the image of chaos became a vivid reality. I was facing an invasion. The good order of my much-loved home was threatened by an enemy I could see (it's true), but could do nothing whatever to stop.

At once I was taken back to the Hebrew scriptures. The Psalms are full of references to keeping chaos at bay, mostly expressed in the language of the flood that was always threatening to overwhelm the dry land and civilised life. 'The floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their roaring.' To the Hebrews, for all its life-giving benefits, water was a force to respect and be afraid of. They never forgot the defining myth of the global flood that had all but destroyed life on earth. So they needed again and again to reassure themselves is that there was a power that was greater even than they were, strong enough to banish the waters to their proper place and reimpose order. 'More majestic than the waves of the sea, majestic on high is the Lord!' (Psalm 93.4).

This idea is fundamental in the first creation story in Genesis. 'In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep' (Genesis 1.1-2). In Hebrew, tohu wa vohu describes the chaotic ocean where, in semitic mythology, malevolent demons lurked, presences that needed to be overcome in a primordial battle with the god before the world could come into being. In Genesis, the separation of light from darkness, waters above from waters below, dry land from sea hint at this mythological battle with chaos. It was all part of the Creator's programme of introducing shape and structure into the cosmos so that it could become a place where life would flourish. When Jesus stills the storm in the gospel story by addressing the turbulent sea as if it were a malign conscious presence, 'Peace, be still!', he is recalling this ancient theme in an act of new creation (Mark 4.39). No wonder his terrified disciples were in awe of him.

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I'm wondering whether we are experiencing the virus in this way, as a kind of flood that must be kept within boundaries so that its power to damage is limited. Most of us are locked-down in our homes, safe places that we trust are havens from the flood of infection. But for many they are also experienced as prisons where freedoms are drastically curtailed. Our health and care workers are armed (when they are) by layers of personal protective equipment (PPE) observing hygiene protocols that are as exacting as any sanctuary ritual. All these are necessary acts of defence against the chaotic threat we are not yet able to cure or immunise against. The watery analogy is especially apt when you consider the etymology of the Latin word virus. It means a fluid that has potency to change things, usually in the bad sense of a poisonous liquid or venom. Those who have experienced the effects of the virus in themselves or others describe the saturation of the lungs as akin to drowning. Which is to be overwhelmed by water.

There's an important consequence to draw from this. Water is good, wholesome and utterly essential - in the right place. It gives us life, keeps us clean, provides us with energy. But when it overflows its appointed bounds, it becomes a threat, even a danger to life. The point is that water isn't evil in itself. It's only when it becomes an uncontrolled chaotic power that it has the capacity to destroy. Similarly, without viruses life on earth could not have evolved in the form we know it, nor would we exist as human beings. However damaging viral mutations like Covid19 are to us, they are no more intrinsically 'bad' than water (or fire or storms or volcanoes or earthquakes or any other natural phenomena). They simply are. 

So we should be careful about our language. In particular, we need to resist attributing personality to the virus by calling it 'evil' or even 'the enemy' as if it had some devious moral purpose in being out to get us. It doesn't. It just is what it is. In a universe of accident and risk, the only kind where life can evolve and humans come into being, stuff happens. It's unbearably cruel at times. But we're not to take it personally. Nature is already 'red in tooth and claw' as Tennyson said, as capricious against itself as it is against us. It may be a cold comfort to realise that the virus is indifferent to our destiny, and is only being true to its own nature in finding hosts in human beings. Indeed, what we experience as ‘chaos’ is in reality merely following its own rules which can be understood and described, such as the behaviour of the virus in human populations or of floodwater flowing in particular environments. But it's not 'meant' in any ultimate, metaphysical way. We all tend to ask, when afflicted by pain or disease, what we've done to deserve it. But as the Bible's wisdom literature makes clear, it's not only unanswerable, it doesn't even make sense as a question because it misconstrues reality. When they asked Jesus whose sin had resulted in the man being born blind, Jesus' response was to challenge the very assumptions of the question (John 9).

But there's one more aspect to the flood analogy. Just as the chaos of flooding is the result of water violating its proper boundaries, we can say precisely the same about this virus. The science points to Covid19 having 'transgressed', that is, crossed over from one species to another. In the bat (or whatever animal life it was resident in), the virus did no harm as far as we know. In jumping across to human beings, it transmuted into a presence whose effects we are seeing all too clearly. It not only causes dreadful chaos and destruction to the human body, it's also capable of replicating that same chaos in our collective social and economic life together, not to mention our spiritual, mental and emotional health. The body corporate is as much a victim as our physical bodies. Like flood water, it's an alien intruder that has violated its proper bounds. (I'm aware that even this graphic way of putting it may invoke memories of the Alien films and invest the virus with personality and moral agency which it doesn't have.)

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What's the answer to chaos?

In the Psalms, God's reign reintroduces order into the realm of chaos by subduing it, driving it back behnd its boundaries so as to contain it and recreate a safe place. Subduing the virus is what social distancing, quarantine, self-isolation and screening are all designed to do, 'flattening the curve' so as to contain within secure boundaries. At the same time, testing, tracing and monitoring help map the way this chaos is infiltrating the population and in time, please God, retreating to its proper place. A vaccine will probably not be the 'answer' to Covid19, but it will be a powerful tool to help curb its worst effects until it poses no further threat to us. (But it's imperative that we learn from this experience how to respond next time a pandemic strikes - which, the experts tell us, is not a matter of if but when.) 

We are not to look for a deus ex machina to rescue us from this or any other predicament that ambushes the human race. It's futile to pray that the virus will go away as a result of divine intervention. The chaos of this Coronavirus will not be subdued by divine fiat, only by natural processes such as the virus exhausting itself, or, more likely and certainly more swiftly, and at vastly less cost in human lives, as a result of concentrated human intervention. And theology wants to say that it's precisely through skilled human agency in ordering chaos that the hand of God is at work. I think this should be the clear focus of our prayers, alongside holding victims in our hearts and remembering those who care for them. And the very act of praying in this way begins to lay a template of good order over the chaos because it's fundamentally an act of love. It makes a real difference to the Zeitgeist, the sentient world of thought and feeling in which we experience our life together. It puts positivity and hope back into the system. We mustn't underestimate what this can do.

I think of St Benedict in the sixth century. He lived in the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman Empire, surrounded by the crumbling ruins of a great civilisation whose memory he held dear. It must have felt as though darkness was extinguishing every lamp of knowledge, culture, law and social life for which ancient Rome had been famed throughout the world. Just as the prophet had predicted of the holy city, it must have seemed as if the entire world was unravelling, reverting to that primitive chaos of Genesis, tohu wa vohu (Jeremiah 4.23).

How might the best of the empire be kept alive in these disintegrating times? Not the cruelty or love of display, not the lust for blood and sex, not the self-deceit and idolatry but all that was best in Roman civilisation as Benedict understood Christianity had transformed it: its nobility, its virtue, its public institutions, its art, its discipline, its sense of honour, its spirituality. His answer was to create monasteries, cells of men and women living under Rule, in which the light of civilised life, however precarious, could be cherished and safeguarded. He saw the good order of his communities, and especially the ordering of place and time through the threefold division of activity into prayer, study and work, as vital to a healthy common life. These local efforts at keeping chaos at bay may not have seemed much at the time. But it's hard to exaggerate their influence fifteen centuries later. It's not too much to say that the monastic vision and the movement it gave rise to kept European civilisation alive.

By kindling lights in dark places where people are overwhelmed and frightened, we 'bear witness' to the conviction that chaos does not have the last word. It's a mighty act of faith, of course. But it's the only antidote to despair that I know. We all have a part to play in affirming God’s good order in the face of the threat we face, indeed, helping to establish it in every aspect of our life together. It’s what I understand by the kingdom of God which, says the gospel, is already birthing within us.

‘The Road Not Taken’: a poem for our times

Radio 4’s Today programme has taken to poetry. Each day during the Coronavirus emergency, a presenter or reporter reads a poem of their choice and tells us why it’s become important to them. It’s a much-needed moment of respite from the relentless news of suffering that dominates the news just now. 

Today Justin Webb read Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’. Here it is, for any of you who don’t know it off by heart. (Note to self: memorise it for your personal knapsack of well-tried resources to bring out when you need them.)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

I was touched as I listened this morning. I knew the poem so well, but because my emotions were sensitised in this time of crisis and palpable fear, it seemed as if I was hearing it for the first time. In fact, I had discovered it when like the rest of the world, I read Scott Peck’s best seller The Road Less Travelled in the 1980s. Robert Frost I knew a little about, having read the biography of his friend Edward Thomas, the English poet who was killed in the Great War and whose story was told by his widow in two of the most moving books I’ve ever read, As It Was and World Without End. But the poem itself was a revelation. Not for the first time, I wondered today what it is that gives it such enduring appeal.

I tweeted my appreciation and voiced my question aloud. Justin Webb replied that it seemed Frost had written it to tease a friend, only to realise its power later (which happens sometimes - we speak beyond what we know or are conscious of, like Caiaphas in St John’s Gospel). That prompted another comment linking to an intriguing article about the poem by David Orr in the Paris Review, The Most Misread Poem in America. He castigates the view, typically American, that it’s ‘a paean to triumphant self-assertion’ and the power of individual agency in gaining mastery over our lives: ‘I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’ 

No doubt many people have read the poem in that way, though it’s a reading that’s never occurred to me. Maybe I have too much British self-doubt. For me, it’s a highly nuanced reflection on just how contingent our myriad life-choices are, how they hang on fragile threads of opportunity and chance. Every decision we make in life, big or small, could have gone another way. Every fork in the road presents us with a choice. Thousands and thousands of times. And because ‘way leads on to way’, the number of possible routes we could taken through life is almost infinite. Each time, we could have gone along a different track. But we happened to go this way, for whatever reason. Each time, or ‘ages and ages hence’, we had to recognise that it was what it was without regret and without self-justification. The cumulative effect has made us what we are today. That act of acceptance is what’s made ‘all the difference’. 

The poem reads as though it was casually dashed off on the back of an envelope, so artless is it, so unselfconscious. It may have started out that way: I don’t know. However, I have a hunch that in its final form it’s been worked up with great care. Frost’s internal dialogue with himself, the dilemma as to which path has the better claim (not much in it, really), whether he will ever return to this bifurcation (almost certainly not, and in any case he can’t step into the same river twice), what the consequences will be of making this decision rather than that (who can know, yet he has to choose one of them): this all makes acute psychological sense. It’s so well observed, rings true to the choices we have to make where the criteria are finely balanced, sometimes impossibly so, where either decision would make sense, be honourable and have integrity. 

As Kierkegaard famously said, ‘life must be lived forwards and understood backwards’. It’s only with hindsight that we can begin to see (if we ever can) the consequences of the choices we made, conjecture what our other lives might have been like if those decisions had been different. I think this becomes increasingly important as we grow older and are able to reflect on our life’s story and its possible meanings. As I’ve recently reached seventy, this is a key matter for me, not to indulge in regrets, still less self-defence, but to cultivate thankfulness for all that’s been life-giving and good.

It made me wonder whether this was an old man’s poem. The ‘yellow wood’ and fallen leaves suggest an autumnal take on life, the ‘ages and ages hence’ hinting at some kind of eternal perspective. I found out that in fact Robert Frost wrote it in 1916, almost exactly half way through his life. This image of a mid-life traveller brought to a halt in a wood because he doesn’t know which way to go immediately recalls the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy. There, the pilgrim’s journey comes to involve a panoramic perspective on hell, purgatory and heaven, and - for surely this is the spiritual point of the work - a reorientation of his life in the light of what he has been shown. It’s fanciful to think that Frost was recapitulating in twenty lines Dante’s epic voyage, and yet the themes seem to resonate, at least to me. 

Jenny and I have been watching the new drama Devs that’s recently been shown on BBC2. Alex Garland has created a smart, intelligent story about the flow of time in a quantum universe. I don’t pretend to understand it all. But a central theme is the age-old dilemma of determinism-through-causality versus the freedom of the will. Are events, including our own decisions and actions, predestined through processes of causation which, could they be mapped, understood and analysed, would turn out to lead to inevitable outcomes? Does this mean that in principle the future is as fixed as the past and can therefore be predicted? And what about the possibility of other universes diverging from our own in which different choices are acted out and different stories told? 

‘The Road Not Taken’ doesn’t engage with these questions. But it seems to point to the paradox that whatever the metaphysics, our subjective experience is that the choices we make are real and that they matter precisely because they could have gone another way. Its relativistic world view (either path has its own validity as a frame of reference; neither ultimately has the ‘better claim’) seems to echo Einsteinian relativity theory that was taking definitive shape at the time it was written, just as the uncertain choice that faces the traveller reflects the parallel development of quantum theory. It’s very much a poem of the twentieth century, a poem for all of us who can feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the world in which we live and have to trace a path safely through its tangled ‘undergrowth’. But it’s also a deeply life-affirming poem that celebrates our participation in the adventure of living, the reality that is ‘now’. 

So as I read the poem, I’m prompted to pay renewed attention to the ‘sacrament of the present moment’. It’s both the place I inhabit (‘Where can we live but days?’ asks Philip Larkin) and the locus of every decision I make, big or small, of little consequence or of momentous import. Faith affirms that however alone we may seem to be in the face of the choices we make, there is nevertheless a deep magic, a Presence, a Spirit, a Providence that moves in mysterious ways through the changes and chances of this fleeting world. That’s not a metaphysical statement but a faith-based one that rests on the conviction that God is always with us. It may be wishful thinking to read that assumption back into Frost’s poem. Yet its heart speaks to mine in a way that’s reassuring. It may not strictly qualify as ‘religious poetry’. But I experience it that way. 

This is important when we try to ‘ understand life backwards’.  When we construct the story of our lives, we should look for hints of golden thread we can discern that makes connections and traces meaning and value in them. To do this ‘heart-work’ may be especially significant at times like these when we are learning that the days where we live will run out sooner or later. I’d like to think that when that time comes, I shall (God willing) be able to say, ‘For all that has been, thanks! To all that shall be, yes!’ 

And that will make ‘all the difference’. 

Easter 2020: fear and hope in a landscape of death

Public was death, but Power, Might
But Life again, but Victory
Were hushed within the dead of night
The shuttered dark, the secrecy.
And all alone, alone, alone,
He rose again behind the stone

Alice Meynell’s poem is haunting me this Easter. ‘All alone, alone, alone’ is precisely how much of the human race finds itself during these weeks of Coronavirus lockdown. Despite all the ways in which we are digitally connected to one another as never before, this enforced isolation from physical human contact is still hard for many and for some, almost impossible to bear. We feel especially for those cut off in even more extreme ways because they are seriously ill, unconscious or facing death, and for those who love them. These are terrible times.

The poem underlines what’s said in all the Easter stories in the gospels, that no-one was there to witness Jesus being raised from the dead. All there was to show for it was an empty tomb from which the beloved body had gone. The resurrection narratives all begin there, not with joyful meetings with the risen Lord but with emptiness, bafflement and fear. They begin at the threshold of profound mystery, in a strange and disturbing place where nothing is quite as it seems.

The painting captures the paradox of Easter. It’s an extraordinary work of art from the same altarpiece I wrote about in Passiontide by Matthias Grünewald, the early sixteenth century German painter whose masterpiece this is. This resurrection panel is not as famous as the crucifixion but I find it just as remarkable. The colours for a start - this could have been painted by William Blake three centuries later. The way Jesus’ head seems to dissolve into the aureole of light surrounding it - that could be Turner. The beautiful curve of his diaphanous robes traced out by his rising up into the sky; the vibrancy of the risen Lord presiding majestically over a landscape of death with the wreckage of the rent tomb centre-stage: it all makes for a painting that’s as dramatic and compelling as anything in religious art. As an imaginative journey it takes us where no theologian would dare to tread.

I keep coming back to the aloneness of this risen Christ. Perhaps I wouldn’t have been tuned into it before we went into self-isolation. But I’m struck by how the painter pointedly does not include a heavenly panoply, a host of angels to celebrate the resurrection. Nor have the women yet arrived at the tomb. True, there are human figures in the painting, but the guards could not be more lifeless, strewn like broken toys across the foreground, When Lazarus stepped out of his tomb, his sisters and Jesus his friend were waiting to greet him. When it’s Jesus’ turn, there’s no-one. He is ‘alone, alone, alone’. Whatever has taken place on Easter night has happened out of sight, hidden from all human gaze.

The theological point is that the event of resurrection is unknowable. It can’t be witnessed or conceived, or even spoken about. It is a mystery, a work only God can do. ‘I trod the wine press alone’ says Isaiah, imagining a warrior returning after a great victory (Isaiah 63). He is bloodied but unbowed, triumphant, ‘announcing vindication, mighty to save’. Did Grünewald have this passage in mind when he tried to capture in paint the rending of the tomb and Christ the victor ascending in his gorgeous red robe, and his battle-scars, the marks of the nails, for ever branded on his hands and feet? ‘I looked, but there was no helper, so my own arm brought me victory.’

We’re struck by the purity of the risen Christ’s skin. In the crucifixion panel, Jesus’ body was terribly defaced by scars, boils and pustules; as I pointed out in the blog, this painting was commissioned for a convent whose vocation was to care for people with skin diseases. It was to reassure the sick that Jesus had suffered as they were suffering, identifying with them in their pain. But now, all this has been healed. Resurrection brings healing, transfiguration and beauty to our disfigured humanity. The sky may still be black and the landscape sombre, but the rainbow colours of Christ rising from death point to a transformation that is coming upon the world. Easter changes everything.

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I think this painting encapsulates where we find ourselves just now if we are Christians. Faith affirms that God raised Jesus from the dead. We profess it in the creeds and try to live by its promise. But like the altarpiece, our lived experience may take us into very bleak landscapes. The sterile ground may show no green shoots of spring, the dark vault of heaven may hold no hint of dawn. Our worlds may be strewn with wreckage and destruction. This radiant resurrected Christ gazes straight at us as if to say, hope against hope. A better future is promised. And we want to hope, desperately. We want to defy the despair we’re tempted to fall into. Even at the grave we want to sing ‘alleluia’. But the barren earth beneath us and the inky sky above seem to say: whatever this promise means, it is not for now. It is not yet.

Easter in lockdown may feel a bit like that. What hope does it bring to people who are lonely, frightened or very sick, or who have lost people they love? Or who are overwhelmed by worries about what the virus may mean for their homes, jobs and finances? Or who are burned out with the tasks of caring for others? Bring it close to home. Any of us could die in the next few weeks. Easter won’t make any difference in this strange and terrible year. Will it?

It would be easy for us to see Easter as the happy issue out of all our  afflictions, to allude to a prayer for the sick in the Book of Common Prayer. We want our tragedies to end in triumph, our tangled chaotic experiences to achieve resolution and come to rest. We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t crave a good ending to all this misery. Or at least, could glimpse some light at the end of this long dark tunnel. ‘Easter brings us hope’ will be the message of every online sermon preached today. But what does it mean? What difference does it make?

Let me say what I think it doesn’t mean. Easter makes no promise that things will get better, or that we’ll pull through this crisis because we’re resilient. It really doesn’t. You don’t tell someone who’s been terribly injured or is terminally ill or about to lose someone they love that ‘everything will be all right’. We don’t know if it will. It may not be. Worst fears may be realised. It’s a pastoral mistake in my view prematurely to quote Mother Julian’s ‘all shall be well’ as if it neutralised suffering here and now. Indeed, she wrote: ‘He said not, “Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou shalt not be dis-eased” but he said, “Thou shalt not be overcome”’.

When the desperately sick patients in the convent looked at Grünewald’s resurrection, I don’t think they necessarily believed that the risen Christ would cure their diseases and put everything right again.What did they look for then?

I think they found strength. That is to say, they were comforted by this luminous painting, given a strength that was not their own, resources with which to face suffering and death. Comfort isn’t a soft palliative word. It comes from confortare, to make strong, invigorate, en-courage. It’s about fortitude. Perhaps they recalled St Paul’s words about not being overwhelmed by trials beyond our capacity to endure, how God’s strength is revealed in human weakness. And surely they thought back to the words spoken by the empty tomb when the women were terrified, ‘do not be afraid’ (Matthew 28.5). And his final words in that Gospel, ‘I am with you to the end of the age’. The world’s age, yes, but my own too, whenever and however my life comes to its close.

I don’t underestimate the hope the painting’s message would have brought to the dying. The vision of God is at the heart of Christian faith and the resurrection opens a door on to our communion with ‘the love that moves the sun and the other stars’, to quote the marvellous last line of Dante’s Paradiso. The dying can feel very alone, especially when death comes because of this virus. As Jesus rises alone, up above the desolate landscape of death, his risen aloneness touches and transforms our loneliness. The rainbow colours of glory and the garland of stars promise that while there are tears in things, they do not have the final word.

That conviction could not be more comforting, more empowering. It imparts confidence, reassures me that my faith, fragile and faltering though it is, beset by ‘fightings and fears, within, without’, will hold whatever may come. Dietrich Bonhoeffer who was executed by the Nazis 75 years ago this month, said: ‘only the suffering God can help’.  When we read the resurrection painting in the light of the crucifixion, when we understand Easter in the light of Good Friday, we glimpse how suffering love is also the love that ultimately triumphs. We can be comforted, strengthened, by the truth that lies at the heart of all of life, amor vincit omnia, love overcomes all things. It feeds the hope that dares to imagine how things could be different for our world and for us all.

So my Easter prayer is that God may look with mercy on his suffering world and be close to every human child. That God will give us strength to persevere through this crisis, endure suffering, care well for one another. And that we hold on to our hope for the time we long for when ‘all shall be well, and shall be well, and manner of thing shall be well.’ And that the risen One who rose ‘alone, alone, alone’ will bring comfort to us all by reassuring us that because of Easter we are never alone.

A Birthday Appeal

It’s my birthday soon, my seventieth. It will fall just inside* the Easter season, so modest rejoicing will be permitted (but no partying), alongside the inevitable reflection on attaining this personal milestone. 

Cue introspection? Not now: this blog isn’t about me. I’m writing because this special birthday falls right in the middle of this terrible Coronavirus emergency as it’s hitting us here in the UK. We are holding so many people in our hearts during this crisis: the sick, the dying, the dead, the bereaved, all who are caring for others in these times, our leaders, those who maintain the fabric of our society. 

But we also know that this pandemic is global. Many communities are exposed to very great risks in places where healthcare is so much less developed than here in the UK. So to mark my three score years and ten, I’d like to ask you to join me in helping Oxfam respond to Covid19 across the world. 

Oxfam is deeply involved in helping to contain the spread of the virus worldwide, and in supporting victims and communities that have been badly hit by it. As many of you know, I volunteer each week in the Oxfam bookshop in Hexham here in North East England. I love this involvement for so many reasons, but the principal one is that it helps Oxfam make a difference to some of the neediest people in the world. So perhaps I can appeal particularly to people who support the charity by visiting Oxfam shops and who are missing them (as I am) during this lockdown? If I single out book-lovers especially, well, you’ll understand why as one of them myself.

We all share anxieties about how Covid19 is affecting everyone whether they are far away, closer to home or among our own families and friends. The impact is being felt across the world, especially where people are living through conflict, disaster and poverty. What could happen once the virus takes hold in less developed countries hardly bears thinking about. Bangladesh, for instance, about which I saw a report recently, where critical population densities in towns and cities make any prospect of social distancing, let alone isolation, impossible. In time there will be antiviral drugs and wholesale testing. But by then it will be far too late for many, many people.

Oxfam’s humanitarian staff and partners are working hard to help stop the spread of Covid19 by providing vital support like handwashing facilities, clean water, toilets and soap in many of the world’s most vulnerable communities.Work like this has helped contain deadly disease outbreaks in the past such as Ebola and cholera. It will help protect people against this virus too. 

Oxfam is also able to provide vital equipment in some places to healthcare facilities and hospitals that urgently need support. And it’s helping people who are losing income or at greater risk of domestic abuse because of restrictions on movement. Supporting the world's poorest communities is more important than ever right now.

You don’t need me to explain all this. One of the good things to come out of this emergency is that it’s heightening our awareness that we are one human family. Locally, we are learning how to look after one another better, love our sick, elderly or vulnerable neighbour in practical ways that make a difference. 

But my neighbour is every man, woman and child in every part of God’s world. At times of crisis when it’s tempting to look inwards, I need to make a conscious effort to think about people far away who are facing threats I can barely imagine. Each of them is my neighbour too. I know that in theory. But loving my neighbour isn’t a matter of theory but of developing a feeling for humanity that’s summed up in words like sympathy and compassion. They both have at their core the idea of suffering-with. In my last two blogs I explored what this might mean in this season of the year when we reflect on the Passion and cross of Jesus. For me, the thought that he continues to suffer in every suffering human child is at the heart of what Holy Week and Good Friday mean.

Which is why I’m asking if you’d be willing to join me in being part of this great effort if you can. I’ve made Oxfam’s Coronavirus appeal my birthday fundraiser on Facebook. You can give via my Facebook page. Please use this if possible. The post is public so you don’t have to be a member. But if you prefer, you can give directly to Oxfam though it won’t be included in the total raised by my personal appeal. You can find Oxfam’s Coronavirus giving page here.

Thank you. Stay safe and well. I hope and pray that this season of Holy Week and Easter brings health, peace and blessing. 

*To clarify, because some have speculated, my birthday falls on the Ides of April.

Ride on to Die!

Ride on, ride on in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die.

It is strange not to be singing those words in the Palm Sunday procession this year. Strange and dislocating when for my entire adult life the great ceremonies of Holy Week and Easter have been the pivot round which the year turns. It will no doubt feel more and more uncomfortable as the week goes on. Not to gather with others in the Upper Room and Gethsemane, at Golgotha and by the empty tomb. We understand why this is necessary. But it hurts, the locked door of the parish church across the road, its emptiness, its silent organ, its lonely altar. It hurts very much for it feels like a kind of abandonment, a death even. It's as if a great stone has been rolled across the entrance.

Which is why this Holy Week will require a great act of the imagination on the part of all of us for whom it matters. It always does call for imagination, of course. We are not literally actors in the drama of the Passion. When we tell its story, we are not rehearsing history but proclaiming this story as a life-changing narrative that is of ultimate significance for us. This is what the liturgy does through its words and images, its rituals and symbols. It's anamnesis, invoking the dynamic of memory that brings past, present and future into a single whole and says: this is the reality that has formed and shaped us, makes us what we are, that lies at the heart of what it means to be human.

I was due to give Holy Week addresses in a southern cathedral this week. The theme was to have been St John's passion narrative, and on Good Friday, the three last words from the cross in that gospel. For St John, Golgotha is a place of achievement, of glory. 'It is accomplished!' I had drafted the sermons before it became clear that there would be no public liturgy anywhere this year. Looking back on them now, they seem to come out of another world when things were normal and we felt safer, less afraid than we do now. Such first world illusions, when so much of the human race lives in fear and insecurity all the time. But this was life back then. And sermons written in one context won't travel when everything has changed.

In the last few days, Covid19 has begun to touch me personally. I don't mean foregoing so much I took for granted and practising social isolation: for us the sacrifices have not cost very much, not compared to others. No, I mean that someone I used to know (and like and admire - but that isn't the point) has died of the virus. I mean that family and close friends are now reporting deaths of people they knew. It has suddenly become a whole lot more real. And even that is a more distant kind of reality for me compared to what is being faced by people who have lost those they loved or who are seriously ill and afraid for their lives. And so many others who are taking great risks every day to care for them, or to maintain the fabric of our common life. These are cruel times. We wouldn't be human if our hearts weren't being broken more than perhaps we can ever remember.

So I find that for now, I'm living more in St Matthew than St John. In this Year of St Matthew, his is the passion story we would have read at the Palm Sunday service. It perfectly fits the experience of this Holy Week 2020. This is the gospel in which there is a great darkness 'across the whole earth' says the evangelist. And Jesus dies with the agonised words of the psalm on his lips, 'My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?' How many people 'across the whole earth' find themselves in just such a darkness uttering just such words right now? I tried to write about some of this in last week's blog when I reflected on a crucifixion altarpiece specifically painted for a convent where the sick and dying were cared for.

St Matthew is clear early on in his gospel that Jesus' death was inevitable, that he 'must go to
Jerusalem and undergo great suffering' (16.21). On Palm Sunday he enters the city as its humble anointed one. No-one gets the irony of the donkey bearing the messianic king. There are shouts of hosanna and victory palms. Who else guesses that he has come to die? Not even his disciples seem to have been paying attention. I wonder what this felt like to the Son of Man who when he arrived at the city he had wept over from afar, how illusory the acclamations and palm branches must have seemed when he looked beyond them to what must inevitably follow. 'Ride on to die.'

This is the first time I've consciously thought, I too must 'ride on to die'. We all must. Not with any messianic pretentions of course, but in the sense that what's true for Jesus is true for all of us. His mortality is ours and ours is his if he is truly 'bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh'. This is the solidarity I wrote about last time, God’s life with ours. We mortals move from one scene to the next in the drama of life that's 'but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more'. That's not to say that the play (let’s not name it out of respect for those in the acting profession) is right to sum it up as a 'tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. On the contrary. Every human life holds an infinity of meaning and value, if only we could see it and know it. But as to mortality, who is going to argue with Shakespeare, least of all when we face the threat of a disease that could bring the life of any of us to an unexpected end? We all ride on to die, if not soon, then one day.

********

This means me. I can't escape that fact. 'Most things may never happen: this one will' writes Philip Larkin as he lies awake at night and imagines what it will be like to die. Philip Larkin’s greatest and bleakest poem ‘Aubade’ won’t bring any comfort to us during this testing time or any other. ‘Not to be here / Not to be anywhere, / And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.’ Fear of death is real. It calls for courage, and yet ‘being brave / Lets no-one off the grave. / Death is no different whined at than understood.’ The poet accuses religion of being implicated in denial: ‘That vast moth-eaten musical brocade / Created to pretend we never die.’ Who is to say that he’s not at least partly right about that? It’s easy for preachers like me to present the resurrection as the ‘happy ending’ to the story of suffering and death rather than the great mystery about which we can only say that it is the heart of our faith, it keeps our hope alive, yet we cannot know this side of the grave what it really means. And meanwhile, the ‘work’ of dying is inescapable, whether we have faith or not.

What Larkin’s poem teaches me is that paradoxically, it’s calming and empowering, if not immediately then in time, to stop pretending, face the truth and live in the light of it. This is the theme of Kathryn Mannix’ outstanding book With the End in Mind: dying, death and wisdom in an age of denial. I read it before I’d ever heard of Coronavirus (but knowing that I would soon reach my allotted three score years and ten). She is a consultant in palliative care who has found in her work with the terminally ill, dying and bereaved that when we acknowledge our mortality and are able to speak about death, we not only prepare ourselves to die well, but also find that we live more fulfilled lives as a result. This is precisely the theme of the great classics of seventeenth century Anglican spirituality, Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. Perhaps one of the positives to come out of this crisis is that we are being urged to think realistically about dying, name it and talk about it with those who are closest to us. This means that if we were to succumb to the virus, we would die having said what we needed to say and made what practical arrangements were necessary. (To their credit, William Collins, publisher of Dr Mannix’ book, has made it available as a free e-book for the next few days. Follow the link.)

Of course Holy Week is about a lot more than our own mortality. These coming ‘days of awe’ celebrate nothing less than the redemption of the world through the cross and resurrection of Jesus. This Great Week transforms everything. This includes our own personal view of life, what we value, what we aspire to, how we are going to live. And how we hope to die. This year, as we observe Holy Week in isolation from one another and in anxiety about what the future may hold, it would be strange if we did not see in the lonely vulnerable Sufferer on his Via Dolorosa an image of us all, strange if we did not hear his cry ‘let this cup pass from me’ as ours, not only for ourselves but for these we love and for all who are suffering in these terrible  days. And yes, even his ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’

The days of Holy Week were terrible for Jesus too. Which is why, paradoxically, they can bring reassurance, comfort and hope. Where we are travelling in fear, desolation and sorrow he has been, and in an important sense, still walks and always will. Could it be that this year, because of the unique context we find ourselves in, we hear these familiar stories as if for the first time? Could they come alive for us in new ways in our aloneness, our fear, our loss? Could they help us to live better and trust that we shall die better when the time comes? In the last few days Sister Catherine Wybourne, the ‘Digital Nun’, has written a blog that I find profoundly moving. She has decided not to undergo a course of chemotherapy for her terminal cancer, which would now be ‘treatment of last resort’. She asks what it might mean to die at a time like this.

But what about dying itself? We all have our own views on that. The chances are that, in common with many others, if I die in the next few months, I shall die without the sacraments. I cannot easily express what that means to me, but if that should be my lot, I know that it is one I will share with many others, including many great saints. Can it really be so lonely to tread a path many have travelled before? I don’t know. What I do know is that whether I die alone or with someone watching at my bedside, with the sacraments or without, I shall be surrounded by the prayers of the great cloud of witnesses, living and dead, who make up the communion of saints. So, surely, it will not be so lonely after all.

Sister Catherine inspires me this Palm Sunday as I begin the Holy Week journey towards Easter. We can’t know what lies on the other side. It’s a case of ‘one step enough for me’. It always is. But as we take up the cross today we may perhaps find to our surprise that its yoke is easy and its burden light - or at least, a little lighter and a little easier than we had imagined. The Palm Sunday hymn sets the tone in which we must ride on ‘with the end in mind’ - both to die and to live:

Bow thy meek head to mortal pain,
Then take, O God, thy power, and reign!