God, the Virus and ‘Tragic Optimism’

Where is God in all this? That's the question I've tried to wrestle with since  the Coronavirus became a fact of all our lives.  For vast numbers of people in this country and across the world these are terrible times. Where is God in the suffering and dying, the loss and the loneliness, the hopelessness and despair that so many are experiencing in this pandemic? When the world finally emerges from this ordeal, what kind of story will faith tell about it? What difference will it make to the way we believe?

I opened up some of these questions in an earlier blog, Chaos, the Virus and God. I was looking for a metaphor that would help make sense of the threat and disorder that the Coronavirus has posed for the world. I came up with the idea of flood, a pervasive image in the Hebrew scriptures of the primordial fear of being overwhelmed by chaotic forces beyond human control.

All four of the elements believed by the ancients to constitute the physical universe - earth, air, fire and water - are necessary to sustain life. Yet when they break out of their bounds they wreak havoc. I want to write about one famous example in history when all four were let loose at the same time. Because this particular event happened not in some remote country on the other side of the world but to a proud and prosperous European city, it had a dramatic effect on the way people thought about natural disaster. I'm referring to the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755.

It struck at around 09.40 on the morning of All Saints' Day, Saturday 1 November. It was remembered as a calm clear autumn day. On a major festival in this devoutly catholic city, churches were thronged with worshippers, processions and carnival-goers squeezed along the narrow streets. The earthquake probably measured about 8.5-9.0 on the Magnitude Scale, catastrophic by any standards. Its epicentre lay about 120 miles offshore in the Atlantic. Within minutes damage to the city was extensive. This was followed by a fire storm that engulfed the centre, fuelled by thousands of church candles lit for the feast and a fierce wind generated by the flames.

Then came the most destructive event of all, three tsunamis that rushed in from the ocean and up the Tagus estuary causing devastation on a huge scale. No-one knows how many were killed in this disaster. Modern estimates reckon around 25000 in Lisbon, maybe 10000 more in the surrounding areas of Portugal, Spain and North Africa. The Lisbon figure would amount to around ten percent of the city's entire population. Death on this cataclysmic scale had not been known in living memory though the Great Plague that had ravaged London in 1665 had killed even more. But it was not only the magnitude but also the character of this calamity that would never be forgotten: how earth, air, fire and water had come together in a deadly embrace to the destruction of so much human life. And that it had happened in the heart of civilised Europe.

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What did it mean? - this was the question that preoccupied philosophers and preachers for years afterwards. The overwhelming conclusion among religious people, both Catholic and Protestant, was that the city had been punished for its sinfulness. John Wesley wrote a tract Serious Thoughts Occasioned by the Late Earthquake at Lisbon in which he refuted 'natural causes', described nature as 'God's method of acting in the world' and warned that if the message of Lisbon was not heeded, God might deflect Halley's Comet, due in 1758, so that it would hit the earth and 'burn it to a coal'.

You have to wonder how even good theologians could read events with such naivete. You would think they had never read the Book of Job which comprehensively dismissed the idea that suffering reflected a cosmos ordered according to the laws of reward and punishment. What was needed was what the theology of the time could not supply, a new way of thinking, a seismic shift (as it were) away from the discredited paradigms of retributive justice and direct divine intervention to understanding how even violent natural phenomena simply followed the physical principles intrinsic to the way the universe works.

The key thinker in the aftermath of the disaster was Voltaire. He had imbibed the doctrine of the German philosopher Leibniz that ours was the best of all possible worlds. But his sunny (because highly privileged) outlook on life was turned upside down by the Lisbon Earthquake. In his comic novel Candide published four years later in 1759, he has two men, the ever optimistic Pangloss and his pupil Candide undertake a grand tour to see the world. They arrive at Lisbon just as the earthquake hits. They live through its mayhem only to fall prey to the Inquisition: as if natural disaster had not done enough, they were now to be subjected to extreme human cruelty. The bloodied, terrified Candide turns to his tutor and asks plaintively, ‘if this is the best of all possible worlds, what must the others be like?’

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The death toll due to the Coronavirus in this country is comparable to the Lisbon Earthquake. It is a catastrophe of the first magnitude, but unlike 1755, this one affects the entire world. This makes it unique among natural disasters in our lifetimes. It would be strange if we did not ask what significance lies in what is happening to the human race. In an article in The Guardian American responses to the virus are examined, and the majority are found to be looking for meanings of some kind, whether or not they are derived from organised religion or particular traditions of faith.

The quest for meaning in the cosmos seems so elusive because it appears to function according to principles that are indifferent to human beings. Our experience at times of trouble is not that the cosmos is necessarily hostile, simply that it doesn't care. That's the conclusion drawn by the world-weary author of Ecclesiastes where what goes round comes round, nothing is permanent, all is ‘vanity’, as light and insubstantial as air. As the wisdom writings of the Hebrew Bible show, faith has to find a way of negotiating the capriciousness of things, living with risk, accident and disaster, turning to the best ends we can whatever happens to us whether it is good or bad. Far from Alexander Pope’s notorious ‘whatever is, is right’, it's more a case of ‘whatever is, just is’.

In such a universe, could it still be ‘Love that moves the sun and the other stars’, as Dante puts it in the last line of the Divine Comedy? One response of contemporary faith is to reflect on the convergence of mind and matter, exploring whether consciousness of the divine could be the goal of the cosmos as it moves towards realising what the Jesuit palaeontologist-theologian Teilhard de Chardin called its Omega Point. Process theology asks whether evolutionary theory, relativity, quantum physics and the cyborg expansion of the human psyche could all be relevant here.

This would still be a universe where things still go wrong, disasters happen and life is damaged. But faith is able to affirm that in an ultimate sense, 'all shall be well' by envisaging how pain, suffering and death are woven into this cosmic ‘process’ that is always moving towards finality. This kind of faith wants to explore how God is present, not above or outside the cosmos but within it, embedded even in its changes and chances. And this ‘withinness’ is mirrored by a personal spirituality that emphasises the journey inwards, towards the centre that we symbolise as the human heart where, as the mystics of all religious traditions teach, God is found. It would mean that the Creator was humble enough to be immersed in the fabric of the cosmos, in the natural processes of the created order and in our own human life and relationships. That would be true kenosis, self-emptying, the ultimate act of love. Just as the Incarnation was. (Or do I mean is?)

Whatever we believe, it seems to me that faith in these times has to be more tentative than before, humbler in the face of a universe we know to be more profoundly mysterious than our forebears of the eighteenth century could have guessed. In particular, contemporary faith must show the utmost sensitivity to pain. With our awareness of suffering, whether due to natural events or human agency, the existence of a deity who is both benign yet ‘in control’ is more and more difficult to articulate convincingly. To many people who are sympathetic to religious faith, traditional statements of theism seem not so much impossible as incredible. They want to know what kind of power we are claiming for God when we address him as the ‘Almighty’, what we mean when we speak about ‘God’s will’ while human hearts break under the burden of pain and sorrow. Theodicy is the study of these questions. We cannot help but ask them, if not during a crisis, then later on. But however we respond, it must surely be provisionally. If we follow the Book of Job, we’re bound to conclude that in the end, the problem of suffering is unanswerable. Meanwhile we have to go on living, and very possibly suffering, and if we can, like Job, trusting and praising God.

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What I learn from the Lisbon Earthquake is that at a time of catastrophe the last thing we should do is find refuge in explanations that sound easy or obvious. If they don’t do justice to the complexity of the real world, they are certain to be wrong. The short-lived comforts of Panglossian optimism will always be unmasked in the end. To try to reassure a terminally ill patient or someone who has just been bereaved or lost home and livelihood by saying ‘don’t worry: it will be all right in the end’ can be an act of real cruelty, not least because it sounds like a denial of what they are experiencing at the time. Indeed, explanations of any kind aren’t likely to be what’s needed in a time of crisis.

After their ordeals in eighteenth century Lisbon, Pangloss and Candide survive. Voltaire’s novel takes its leave of them placidly tilling the soil. Pangloss is still exhorting Candide to look on the bright side. To which Candide replies enigmatically, ‘’Tis well said...but we must cultivate our own gardens’. That is not perhaps very different from the outlook of another work published in the same year, Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. It too asks what we can do in the face of human suffering. Johnson concludes that we must each labour for our own happiness ‘by promoting within his own circle, however narrow, the happiness of others’. Which is to follow the Golden Rule, care about the welfare of others and love our neighbour as ourselves.

This needn’t mean that ‘optimism’ should be written off. But it does need nuancing carefully. Following his desperate experiences in the Nazi death camps, Victor Frankl coined the phrase tragic optimism. In his book Man’s Search for Meaning, he turns the fundamental human question round from ‘What do I expect of life’ to ‘What does life expect of me?’ ‘Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.’ To be able to say ‘yes’ to life in spite of tragedy is to make the best of every situation, to live purposefully even at times of pain, despair and death. Optimism means believing that the best will happen. And so it will, not in the inevitable course of external events, but in the best selves those very events help us to become.

We have all seen countless examples of tragic optimism in this crisis. We find it wherever there is kenosis, self-emptying love happening in practice. In the courage and devotion of men and women in frontline caring roles in our hospitals, residential homes, surgeries and schools. In the dogged perseverance of those engaged in biomedical research that may one day transform our management of viral disease. In the work of ordinary people who, as it says in Ecclesiasticus, 'maintain the fabric of the world' by enabling society to go on functioning. And in the myriad little acts of kindness that are happening all around us as friends and neighbours recognise need and try to meet it. The virus has brought untold suffering to so many, but it has also released untold goodness and love that bring help, lift spirits and lighten heavy hearts. There is something miraculous in that, and very comforting.

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There is something deeply Christ-like in this washing of one another’s feet as we might see these beautiful acts of service. For self-emptying, kenosis, is precisely what takes place in the upper room on Maundy Thursday, and in the cross of Jesus on Good Friday. In the darkness of Golgotha, he opens his arms wide to embrace the human race, not in a coercive act of naked power but in the crucified power of love to give itself without limit, persuade, accept, entice, draw us to itself. It’s what makes love what it is, offers us the lens by which to read the world, convinces us that even the smallest act of service done in the name of love confers meaning and has the potential to transform our vision of life.

Which makes me think Candide was right. To cultivate our own gardens in the face of catastrophe is not an act of selfishness or shoulder-shrugging indifference. It is to defy death and say yes to life, yes to hope and yes to the future. This is tragic optimism at work. Frankl tells of someone in the Warsaw Ghetto who had placed a pot of brilliant red geraniums on their window sill above the street. What could be more eloquent than a blaze of colour in a dark and desperate place? Maybe painted rainbows and candles lit in our front room windows can do something similar in our time and raise the hopes of those who pass by.

Clergy and Locked Churches: the Bells Not Tolled

When I was a parish priest, my curate and I would meet twice each day to say morning and evening prayer in the church. We would toll the service bell first and wait a minute or two in case anyone joined us. Two or three usually did in the evenings. In the mornings we’d be on our own.

Overlooking the churchyard was a residential home for elderly people. A number of them had rooms that looked out on the medieval church in its beautiful setting. One day, I had to be away. It was my colleague’s rest day. So the church remained locked and the bell silent. Next morning as I walked into town I bumped into a couple of women who lived in the home. I hadn’t met them before. They stopped me, looking solicitous.

‘Are you all right, Vicar?’ they inquired. ‘We were worried about you.’
‘I’m fine, thank you. But why do you ask?’
‘Oh, it’s just that you weren’t at your prayers yesterday. We always notice you walking across to church from the vicarage and listen out for the bell. We thought there must be something wrong when we didn’t see you.’

It was nearly forty years ago, but I’ve never forgotten that encounter. I was a young incumbent and had a lot to learn. Without realising it, in five minutes those good women taught me one of the most important lessons of my life. It was that when you are a priest of the Church of England, you are there for the whole parish, not simply your congregants. You are a public representative of God, the Christian faith and the national church. And when you go into church to say your prayers, you take the parish with you in mind and heart as you lay before the Almighty the life of the community you live in and serve in God’s name. You may be alone in the building. But you’re always engaging in an act of public prayer. Because you do this on behalf of the parish, it’s an act of common prayer. And you are noticed!

This witness is part of what we’ve learned to call public faith. It’s built into the Church of England’s understanding of itself as a national church whose parish system ensures that there is ‘a Christian presence in every community’ with a duty of care to all who live there whatever their faith affiliation. The incumbent belongs to the visible sacral, social and legal symbol-system that connects the church building and the geographical parish to the persona of the ‘parson’. And this is what gives the witness of priest-in-church-and-parish its public character in worship, pastoral care and outreach.

Which brings me to the lockdown of our churches during the Coronavirus emergency. I haven’t blogged about this before because I did not want to make the life of our bishops and clergy more difficult than it already is at this demanding time. I realise it’s contentious, and ill-tempered spats on social media don’t help. But reading Bishop Peter Selby’s article ‘Is Anglicanism Going Private?’ in this week’s Tablet (£) has reinforced my original belief that the decision to prohibit (or strongly dissuade - which is it?) the parish clergy from going into their locked churches to say their prayers is fundamentally misguided. I’m sorry to say that I think it risks compromising the Church’s public witness during this crisis.

For this reason I have signed a letter in today’s Times (£ - but go to the end of this blog). It suggests that this policy ‘is a failure of the Church’s responsibility to the nation, stifling our prophetic witness and defence of the poor’. As we know, the clergy are regarded by the Government as ‘key workers’ who are explicitly permitted to enter their buildings during the course of their duties. So there is no question of challenging the law. Our concerns are more theological and pastoral. As Bishop Selby says, ‘our churches are not just optional when useful and available but are signs of hope and healing for our communities and our nation’ (my italics). Our letter speaks about church buildings ‘whose architecture, symbolism and history represents the consecration of our public life’. So we are urging the bishops at their gathering this week to change their current policy, and ask that ‘the processes and thinking which led to these decisions’ should be openly debated through the Church’s synodical structures.

Let me make four points about this. The first is that I do not doubt that the bishops acted for the best of reasons. They are concerned about public safety like everyone else. They want clergy to demonstrate responsibility in complying with the lockdown regulations and to show solidarity with the public. They are right to insist that priests should not be thought of as taking advantage of their position in ways not open (literally) to lay people.

Secondly, nothing in our letter or this blog is meant to disparage the wonderful work being done by parish clergy across the land during this crisis. I want to pay tribute to my own parish priest here. Whether it’s the streaming of services, producing resources for prayer and reflection, maintaining pastoral contact with parishioners or catalysing and contributing to local voluntary efforts in support of the vulnerable and needy, the imagination and inventiveness of our clergy has been hugely impressive. They deserve our warmest thanks.

Thirdly, there is no quarrel with the decision to suspend services of worship and close church buildings even for personal prayer. This is a clear matter of public safety, and is consistent with how all public gathering spaces have been regulated in this crisis. I did not support the plea made during Holy Week to open up our church buildings for members of the public to engage in private devotion on Easter Day. The risks would have been too high.

The final clarification is that for me, the emphasis is less on streaming acts of worship from church buildings as opposed to vicarage kitchens or dining rooms, than the more basic question of what our church buildings are for. I have to say that in this respect I think the Catholic Church’s decision to maintain the daily offering of mass in local churches, streamed or not, is exemplary. It’s true that we refer to streaming in the letter. But it’s the principle of clergy praying in their churches that has prompted it and is uppermost in my mind in writing this blog.

It comes down to this. I believe that even during this emergency, parish priests should do all in their power to keep their churches in use, even when the doors are locked. I mean that clergy should continue to ‘inhabit’ them by maintaining the sacred activity for which they were built, which is the offering of prayer. Whether it’s the eucharist, the daily office or simple acts of reflection through scripture and silence, it’s keeping the soul of the building alive that matters. To walk away from our church buildings, even temporarily, is in Peter Selby’s words a worrying sign that we may have reached ‘a decisive point in the retreat of the Church of England from the public sphere to the private realm’.

Our churches are the most visible tool of mission that we have. At times of threat, people instinctively turn towards them for solace and strength. They are places to lay burdens of worry, sorrow and despair, calm the spirit and find peace and hope. It’s a cruel feature of this emergency that this cannot take place in any corporate way. But it can still happen by engaging the imagination and the spirit. The church building is always there: inspiring, steady, reliable, a potent symbol of God’s presence among us, and of a community of faith and care for whom it is the primary focus of life together. But its witness needs a human presence if it’s to be effective. It needs the heartbeat of its rhythm of prayer to help sustain its community in hope. Like the high priests of old who bore the people on their hearts as they went alone into the holy place, the incumbent praying in church on behalf of his or her people is a beautiful and eloquent symbol of something deep within the human psyche.

Representative priesthood, public witness and the symbolic function of sacred space are rich ideas but they are not unduly mysterious. The spiritual potential in knowing that the priest is at prayer in church shouldn’t be underestimated. Far from the incumbent invoking the privilege of holy orders in order to do something disallowed to lay people, the representative character of prayer turns it into a profound act of service to the parish.

‘Those who live around’, the meaning of the word paroikia, may or may not be aware that their priest is doing this for them, and in an important sense, with them. But whether they are aware or not isn’t the point. What matters is that the incumbent sees himself or herself, not as a private individual but as a representative person who goes into church to serve. Liturgy is literally an act of service. And whatever expression it takes, formal, informal, traditional, contemporary, virtual or face to face, in the sacred space or outside it, all Church of England worship ultimately derives its validity from the church building and the geographical parish, the twin visible foci of the incumbent’s ministry as Anglicanism understands it.

Which is why the bishops’ decision is not so much distressing as baffling. It’s a lazy binary to perpetuate the cliché about how ‘the church isn’t buildings but people’. The truth is that it’s both. Ask parishioners! Sacred buildings work so well as numinous symbols because they gather up and bring into transcendent perspective the whole life of human communities whose tragedies and triumphs, fears and longings, hopes and aspirations are embodied and cherished within them. Holistic mission always means grasping the ‘both-ands’ of the material and spiritual dimensions of an incarnational way of ministering. To lock our church doors against the very people set aside to represent this servant ministry and put it into practical effect makes no sense.

How institutions behave in crises is always a big test not only of their resilience but their virtue. History will judge whether the reputation of the Church of England has suffered as a result of its response to this emergency. Its verdict may not be kind if Peter Selby is right that we are sliding ever further in the direction of a privatised, congregation-centered existence. As our letter says, we must look again at the assumptions behind this policy. And as a matter of good theology and practice, we must allow our priests inside our churches and let their prayers breathe the prayer of the living Spirit back into our beloved holy places once again.

Here is the full text of the letter (with the full - and growing - list of signatories).

What We Can Do For The Dead

‘One has lost so many friends, and that one feels, of course. But the deaths of tens of thousands happening every day is the most insignificant of sensations.... One death means more than a thousand. When men are dying like flies, that is what they are dying like.’

This is Marcel Proust in Alan Bennett’s play A Private Function. He is speaking about war. But he could have been speaking about a pandemic. How right he is. We can scarcely get our minds round the scale of the mortality due to Covid19. Twenty thousand and more in our own country, hundreds of thousands worldwide. We could not have imagined six months ago how suddenly catastrophe can come upon us.

We try to make sense of the numbers through the arithmetic of morbidity - the statistics, the charts, the graphs. We study the probabilities, the trends, make comparisons with other countries, calibrate our exposure to risk. It’s clarifying and necessary. But what cold data can never do is convey any sense of the human tragedy that is happening around us. It’s crude to say that the amassing of metrics treats the dead as if they had died like flies. (It’s not even true, given the respectful way the figures have mostly been presented at the Government’s daily media briefings.) But on our bad days, the global calculus of death can feel like that, unremittingly desperate.

For more and more of us, the virus is no longer a drama happening ‘out there’, safely beyond our immediate experience. It is now touching us directly. We’re not spectators any longer. Maybe we’ve succumbed to infection, felt its impact for ourselves. We may have become seriously ill, hospitalised, been on a ventilator fighting for life. It may have affected our mental health, perhaps precipitated an episode of depression or suicidal thoughts. Or meant that a cancer test or ‘routine’ operation (which of course no operation ever is entirely) has had to be postponed, and that too will have life-changing effects.

And by the day, many more of us are bereaved. Someone close to us, a family member or friend, has died. Or someone we were less intimate with but still knew - a neighbour or work colleague perhaps. Or someone further removed, a friend of a friend, a distant relative, a friend from the past we have long lost touch with, or someone we’ve got to know on social media. It doesn’t matter how far removed they are. The point is that the person who’s died is not a mere statistic, lost among the nameless myriads who have also died ‘like flies’. This was someone real, a human being with a face, a name and a story. And we had a place somewhere in their concentric circles of belonging. However close to us or distant, they had become part of us and we of them.

‘One death means more than a thousand.’ This seems to me to be a clue to how we could try to respond to death happening before our eyes on such a scale. We need to individualise death, personalise it. We need to focus on the individual human beings behind the daily stats, the men, women and children who like us are not islands but are ‘part of the main’, each of whose deaths, as John Donne famously said, ‘diminishes me’. I’m suggesting that it matters because this is work we need to do for the dead.

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How do we do this? By starting with the people we know, or know of, who have died. My first cousin’s husband. My sister’s schoolfriend’s partner. The local councillor I knew and worked with years ago. The father of a friend on Facebook. The young nurse who was a friend of someone I got talking to in the village. A colleague’s parish priest. I can take the trouble consciously to ‘remember‘ them, name them, weep for them, cherish them in my mind and heart for a little while. Not necessarily just the once on first hearing the news that they had died but maybe from time to time, especially on the day of their funeral if we know when it’s taking place. With only handfuls of mourners allowed at a graveside or crematorium during lockdown, there’s immense strength to be drawn from the knowledge that others too are ‘present’ through an act of mindful embrace.

To me as a person of faith, it’s the most natural thing in the world to pray for the dead. It’s as natural to intercede for the departed in the presence of Light and Love as it is to pray for the living. There’s no great mystery about this as far as I can see. Whatever we believe about an afterlife, our love for people and our duty of care towards them doesn’t suddenly stop when they die. Holding, honouring and cherishing in our hearts those whom we love but no longer see is certainly to keep memory alive. In times like these, nothing could be more important than to know that when we die we are not forgotten, that those who love us will go on loving us to their own lives’ end. It keeps the verbs of loving and caring in the present tense. As for God, it says of Jesus in the gospel that he loves ‘to the end’. It’s all I need to know, because it transcends the boundaries of time and space.

But if it’s true, and experience tells me that it’s likely to be, that ‘one death means more than a thousand’, then we need to recognise this in relation to all Covid19 victims including those we don’t know personally. My daily paper, like most others, has published articles featuring groups of people who have died as a result of the virus. It has highlighted those who served in the NHS. It has honoured people who kept essential services going as frontline workers. It has recognised men, women and children who died in hospitals and, in the past week, in care homes. And so many others. The elderly. The young. The homeless. People of minority ethnicity. The LGBT community. Those from other counties who came to Britain to make a better life for themselves and their families. The all-but-forgotten who died alone in the world and had no one to attend their funerals and grieve for them.

They make painful reading, these potted biographies, the photographs, the heartfelt tributes from family, friends and colleagues, the volume of naked grief that pours off the page. ‘I just can’t get over that I didn’t get to say goodbye or be with her after 52 years of marriage. It’s so cruel’ I read yesterday. This was Tony from Birmingham, speaking about his beloved wife Suzanne. ‘She was wonderful.’ I stopped to take in that one word, such a simple yet eloquent tribute to a love that had grown over a lifetime. ‘She did everything’ he said, explaining how she was active in the community and had chaired the local Flower Club. I tried to imagine her life and his together, the beauty and yes, the wonder that an intimate relationship can flourish across half a century and more.

The media are doing us a great service by this simple, respectful way of personalising death. They are helping us to honour people as individuals, not simply aggregate them namelessly into the swollen mass of the thousands of dead, as if they had died ‘like flies’. This is what I mean when I talk about the work we can and should do for the dead. We may or may not have a religious faith, but that doesn’t matter. Amid the welter of Coronavirus news we can take the trouble to read about a few of those who have died, and be alongside them in some simple act of the imagination, whether it’s recollection, mental embrace, lighting a candle, offering a silent prayer or simply speaking their name. It’s the least we can do to pay our respects to the departed in this way, take it upon ourselves to undertake a little ‘heart work’ for them.

The few minutes it takes to read a dozen tributes seems little enough. Yet to do it mindfully, trying to be present to people we do not know, could be a powerful act of human solidarity and reverence for life in the face of sickness and death. It’s a way of bearing witness, at least to ourselves, to the truth that we are one human family and are in this together. Lighting a candle, metaphorically or actually, feels like a sign of hope. What could be more important?

Requiescant in pace. 

I’d just published this blog when my wife drew my attention to this article in The Guardian,’How reading obituaries can humanise a crisis’. It’s well worth reading.