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. 

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.

Bearing our Sickness: the Passion in 2020

This painting means a great deal to me. It lives in a marvellous museum in Colmar in the Alsace region of France. I first saw it there when I was a teenager, working on a farm near Strasbourg during what we would now call my gap year. I was grasped by this extraordinary and powerful work. Like Bach's St John Passion, it's been central to the way I've tried to understand and respond to the crucifixion throughout my adult life.

Let me first describe the painting. It belongs to a complex threefold altarpiece whose constituent parts were displayed to reflect the changing seasons of the liturgical year. It was created for an Antonine convent at Isenheim not far from Colmar (hence its name, the Isenheim Altarpiece). The 'Hospital Brothers of St Antony' lived under the Rule of St Augustine. Their particular vocation was to care for the sick. The altarpiece was commissioned in the early sixteenth century and was complete by 1516. This was on the eve of the German Reformation, so it belongs to the very last phase of medieval religious art with its distinctive spirituality focused on the passion and death of Christ. It is the masterpiece of German painter Matthias Grünewald (c1470-1528) of whom we know little, and of whose output only a handful of works survive.

The crucified Jesus dominates the painting, not only because he is placed at the centre but owing to his immense size - compare the figures on either side. He is not the martyr serenely offering up his life to his Father, but the agonised victim wracked with pain and suffering spiritual torment in a terrible darkness. There is no beauty or dignity to admire in this figure: this could be any common criminal, vagabond or slave. His skin is pitted with scars; we can read every muscle and sinew as the tension in his body drags down the ends of the cross-piece of this engine of death. It's as if God has entirely abandoned him at Golgotha. This is the passion according to Matthew or Mark: 'my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?'

And this seems to be the experience of the two women to his right. His mother Mary is attired in a grave-cloth white (where else is she depicted quite like this?), swooning at this appalling sight of her Son's death. At her feet Mary Magdalen kneels distraught at the foot of the cross, wringing her hands in a gesture that's as pitiful as anything in art. St John leans in to Mary, his hand pressing her towards him in a vain attempt to protect and comfort her. Opposite, John the Baptist stands apart, the interpreter out of time, pointing to the cross as an event foretold in the scriptures. The text reminds us of his words about Jesus, that 'he must increase while I must decrease', and of how he had spoken of him as 'the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world', shown in the painting as emptying his blood into a chalice that will, paradoxically, bring life to the world.

The Marys and the Beloved Disciple are shown again in the entombment below the crucifixion, where the agonies above finally reach some kind of resolution - it would be too much to call it rest. And on each side stand figures of saints: Sebastian, pierced by arrows, and Antony, the patron of the order that commissioned the painting. Both were appealed to in defence against sickness, not least the plague that was endemic across Europe during much of the middle ages. But there's a more specific reference in the image of Antony. The Antonines had been founded in 1093 by a man whose son had been cured through Antony's intercession of what was known as the 'burning sickness' or 'St Antony's fire'. Outbreaks of ergotism, a fungal poisoning caused by alkaloids in infected grains, regularly afflicted pre-modern societies. Its distinctive symptoms were severe and painful seizures and spasms, and a gangrenous rot that spread across the entire body. The suffering was excruciating, and usually fatal. It was to the care of its victims that the Isenheim convent was devoted. 

Experts who have studied the altarpiece have suggested that the artists consciously chose to depict the crucified Jesus as a victim of this terrible disease. His scarred, defaced skin not only bears the marks of persecution and human cruelty. It shows him covered with tumours and lesions from head to toe. No doubt Grünewald had seen for himself the effects of ergotism on its victims, perhaps in the convent morgue. This physical disfigurement of Christ adds to the profoundly disturbing effect the painting would have had - and was meant to have - on those who viewed it. It was a memento mori, a reminder of mortality. The message was: anyone could catch the disease and die from it. And even if they didn't, they would die of something. Even the Son of Man was not immune, for he was mortal, like us. 

Which of course is the whole point. In that bleak warning about mortality is embedded the possibility of a transforming vision. The startling insight that Jesus shares our humanity to the point of embracing our sickness is how the painter wants suffering victims to begin to find solace and hope. For he is Immanuel, God-with-us! This crucified Lord, says the painting, does not stand above suffering and pain in self-isolation from all that afflicts human beings. On the contrary. He makes our pain his own, immerses himself in our suffering, empties himself of his life because of it, demonstrates the depth of his love through his solidarity with the human race. 

How could Grünewald not have had in his mind the image of the suffering servant of the Lord in Isaiah 53? St Matthew quotes this famous passage (though not in the form we know it best from Handel's Messiah). 'He took our infirmities and bore our diseases' (Matthew 8.1). This turns out to be the likely meaning of the Hebrew. The Jewish scholar Robert Alter translates the passage as follows. 'Despised and shunned by people, a man of sorrows and visited by illness. And like one from whom the gaze is averted, despised, and we reckoned him naught. Indeed, he has borne our illness, and our sorrows he has carried. But we had reckoned him plagued, God-stricken and tormented' (Isaiah 53.3-4). 

You'll see why this painting has come alive for me in a new way since the Coronavirus pandemic began. I can't give you a precise explanation of what it means to say that the suffering servant 'bears our sickness'. But the key to it for me is the idea of solidarity. I think that during these past weeks we've all discovered how important solidarity is, and how heartening. Our feeling for those who have the virus severely, for those who have died of it or lost those they love have resulted in a profound sense of holding them together in our hearts and in whatever way we find ourselves praying.

I'm also thinking of our admiration of and respect for the courage and heroic commitment of those involved in health care and the emergency services. And of so many others who also face risks in front-line services that support us, from supermarkets to corner shops, in food supply chains, social services, education, public transport, refuse collection not to mention the three quarters of a million people who have enlisted as volunteers.... the list is endless. We are more aware of how interdependent we are in our common life and that can only be good. Lighting candles in our windows, coming out on the streets to applaud the NHS, a million little acts of care and kindness are examples of this. It's truly inspiring. 

And solidarity is what I experience by being drawn into the painting: my solidarity with all who suffer, theirs with me, and God's solidarity with all the human race. My response to the altarpiece is complicated, but it goes something like this. 'Behold the Lamb of God' it seems to say through John the Baptist as he points to the Christ on the cross. 'Look on this victim, this innocent sufferer who is undergoing what is afflicting so many people and threatens to overwhelm you, who was as lonely and desperate and afraid as you are. He drinks the cup of suffering to its dregs, embraces our sickness and our sorrow in solidarity with us, lightens burdens that are so huge, so dreadful that they would crush us completely if we had to bear them on our own. Look on him, and find strength. Cast your care upon him, for he cares for you. Find comfort, learn trust, have hope.' Perhaps this is all I need just now.

Today, Passiontide begins and our thoughts turn to the cross and all that it means. The gospel reading on this Sunday is the raising of Lazarus in John 11. Twice comes the pitiful lament from the dead man's sisters, 'Lord, if you had been here he would not have died!' On another panel of the altarpiece St Antony is shown again, this time with an agonised question, 'Where were you, good Jesus, why were you not there to heal my wounds?' The painting, and the passion narrative, answer that question. He was there. He is there. He will always be there with us and for us, this crucified God who bears the pain of the world on his heart. He is the Christ of Coronavirus. It's what incarnation means. This is the glory of the cross, full of grace and truth.

Self-Isolating: 'Going Lazaretto'

It looks like there's going to be a lot of time for woolgathering in the next few weeks.

Jenny and I are now in self-isolation here in Burswell House. How I hate that phrase with its self-serving connotations! We are in quarantine, or as I think I'm going to call it, going lazaretto. The 'lazaret' in early modern times was a place of quarantine for travellers at sea. Sometimes it would be a well detached building on or near the shore, sometimes an island close to a harbour or a ship permanently at anchor. Lepers would be looked after there, or mariners (and slaves) suffering from diseases like cholera or plague. (See the image at the end of this blog.)

The name comes from Lazarus, not the brother of Mary and Martha whom Jesus raised from the dead, but the poor man in the parable who lay begging at the rich man's gate (Luke 16.19-31). When he died, he was carried up into heaven by angels and found safety in Abraham's bosom while the rich man who had ignored the destitute beggar ended up in hell. So the lazaretto is a place of safety and refuge where the needy can be looked after. And in this pandemic, looking after one another is the first call on us all if we want to love our neighbour.

We made the decision to go lazaretto at the weekend, before the Prime Minister's speech yesterday. We are of that certain age (three score years and ten), and I am male with an 'underlying health condition'. Who knows if we are already carrying the virus? If so, we need to protect others from it. And to take sensible measures to protect ourselves, and so lighten the load on our already hugely over-burdened NHS. Yesterday, Jenny got talking to someone married to a virologist. That couple, aware of what was happening in China, has been in lazaretto since Christmas. Until now they have not been saying anything about it, reckoning that people would think them crazy. No-one will think that this morning.

It's a strange, unwelcome decision we've made. And a scary one. We have no idea what it will feel like after a week, a fortnight, three months of quarantine. I spent yesterday shutting down my life outside our home. I contacted the Oxfam bookshop and Hexham Abbey where I volunteer and explained. I apologised to the committees I attend that are due to meet in the next two weeks. I withdrew from a speaking engagement later this month, and (this was especially hard to do) from preaching Holy Week in a Cathedral in the south of England. We had already decided not to travel to continental Europe last week (and with the rapid shutting down of everyday life in France and Germany, it's possible we might not have got back to the UK for some while). We won't be socialising any more (such a lovely dinner party we went to last week, and we all behaved very circumspectly without the normal hugs and handshakes, but it was our last social event for some time). We won't be using public transport. We'll go to the shops only when we need to (and hope that panic buying hasn't emptied the shelves).

These choices are facing all of us now, and all the institutions we belong to. Whether to stay open, how to maintain a working staff, if and when to close, and in some cases indeed, how to remain viable in the face of real economic threat. Churches and cathedrals are having to decide how, if at all, to hold services for the foreseeable future, especially during Holy Week and Easter. If our personal quarantined life is going to be hard, I need to remember that for others it's going to be much, much tougher: those who were already ‘just about managing’ or not managing at all, those who don’t know if they’ll still have a job by the end of the week, those who are chronically sick and in fear of what infection by this virus could mean for them. These are extraordinarily difficult times for  leaders in public life and in our businesses, caring organisations and faith communities.

None of us who were born after the war have ever known anything like this. I can remember my parents being worried when I caught a cold during the Asian flu pandemic of 1957. I don't recall any special public health warnings being issued; if they were, I was too young to be paying attention. But if the famous 'wartime spirit' is any guide (and I'm aware how tiresome it can be to invoke it), then it's important to think positively, keep hope alive, not succumb to self-pity, paralysis, despondency or despair, however frightened we may be.

Forgive me for striking a domestic note in the face of such challenges. I can only say what this may mean for me. I think that when we find ourselves isolated, as we shall inevitably be, we need to pay attention to the shape of each day. Pattern and rhythm to structure time are essential if we are not to become listless or bored. St Benedict understood this when he wrote his Rule for Monks, allocating times each day for prayer, study and work alongside mealtimes and sleep. In particular, going into quarantine could be a real opportunity for us to rediscover this insight, think about the part prayer, spirituality, meditation or mindfulness - whatever we call it - plays in our lives, and allocate time to it for our soul's health. It's especially significant that we are having to think about this during Lent, a kind of 40-day quarantine, a time for spiritual renewal as we look forward to Easter. There's a lot of enforced 'giving up' we are all having to do this year. But think of the time it is releasing to discover new opportunities for personal and spiritual growth.

Fresh air and exercise is going to be important. We are lucky here in Northumberland to be surrounded by beautiful countryside that we can walk from our own front door. There's no reason not to go out and enjoy the springtime as the days grow longer; and no reason not to stop and talk to the people I meet, as long as we keep a safe distance from one another. We must not become too precious about our quarantine. As an introvert, I'm not afraid of my own company for hours on end, though I realise that for some, it is going to be a big hardship not to have frequent social contact with other people. But solitude is precisely not a matter of social distancing, only physical distancing. We have telephones and the internet, TV and radio. We are better connected today than we have ever been. It's important to remain socially linked by whatever means we can if we are not to be overtaken by loneliness. In this we must help one another.

For people not yet retired, there's a lot of emphasis on working from home if possible. So I'm asking myself what this could mean for me as a volunteer. I'm not clear yet how I could go on supporting the churches and organisations I'm involved in remotely, from my study desk, though I've asked whether there is any writing I could do, or social media activity or even, in the case of Oxfam, pricing rare and antiquarian books for the online bookshop. This emergency is requiring us all to be inventive. I want to go on contributing if I can. And seeing how I can lend support to Coronavirus initiatives being developed in my own village and locality.

I could go on, and probably shall in future blogs as lazaretto becomes a daily lived experience. Among the possibilities it may bring could be to nurture personal relationships: marriage (because in my case, quarantine is a shared experience), family, friends. Maybe there are people from my past whom I can make contact with during this time. I'll no doubt read books, watch films, listen to music, perhaps work at a foreign language or get down to some writing... We can all have projects that help give direction to time's arrow. What matters for our collective health and our personal wellbeing is to be open to the opportunities and seize the day. We did not want this virus, and its effects on all of us are going to be severe in ways we can't foresee yet. There was so much we took for granted a few weeks ago, including (for most of us) our own health and our hope to remain alive for a few more years yet. All that has now changed. It's 'the sacrament of the present moment' that matters now, being thankful for each day, living well in the light of its gift and possibility.

In all this I'm thinking aloud. The virus is making us exiles in our own land. The landmarks have shifted, nothing is quite staying in place any more. We are taking our first steps on a journey that is going to be long and testing. Like Christian and Hopeful in Pilgrim's Progress there will be more than one Slough of Despond to negotiate, and the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the Hill Difficulty. We shall pass by Doubting Castle and Vanity Fair. But Delectable Mountains too, I hope, and enticing glimpses of the Celestial City, whatever that vision means for us. The question is, will we carry on travelling as pilgrims? Try to find and name the kindness and goodness in things? Glimpse the presence of God even - especially! - in what is most painful and cruel and hard? Do what we can to help others who need what we could bring them? That’s my prayer.

Stay safe. Be of good cheer. You are not alone. Buon Lazaretto!

Abroad Thoughts from Home: on not travelling

It’s a dull, wet day here in Tynedale. Nothing unusual in that: the weather has been unspeakable for weeks. But today we should have been driving off the Newcastle-Amsterdam ferry and heading south into Germany and France.

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.

When Fear Goes Viral: Responding to Coronavirus

Coronavirus is so-called because the virus resembles a corona, a crown or garland. Or maybe a wreath, a word with haunting connotations of mortality. In the image it looks like a thing of beauty. But it would be wise not to get too close. 

As we all know by now, the Chinese city of Wuhan is the epicentre of this virus, its Ground Zero. Today, the ophthalmologist who tried to warn of the virus and its likely consequences has died of it. Dr Li Wenliang was reprimanded by the police in late December for “rumour-mongering” and raising alarm needlessly. He was a prophet not honoured in his own country. He acted courageously. But by the time he was listened to it was too late. Since then the Chinese authorities have taken drastic action. But the spread of the virus across the world now seems unstoppable.

What its effects may be is anyone’s guess. The World Health Organisation doesn’t know the precise reason the virus originally jumped from animal or bird species to humans, nor does it understand in detail how it is transmitted between humans. There is as yet no vaccine to prevent infections nor antibiotics to treat patients who develop bacterial pneumonia. Scientists worldwide are throwing all their efforts into addressing these known unknowns (and some unknown ones), but it takes time. 

Memories of the SARS outbreak (“Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome”) in 2003 have been rekindled - that was a coronavirus too. The question was, and still is, why does a virus that usually does nothing worse than inconvenience us by giving us a common cold dramatically turn malign and start killing people? A century ago the world was getting over the catastrophic Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918-19 that killed more people than the Great War had done. In 2003, worldwide panic over the outbreak of SARS proved short-lived. But it taught the world how new diseases could threaten to have devastating impacts in highly mobile, interconnected societies. And how nothing short of global collaboration would be needed to combat them.

The metaphor of warfare is never far away when disease knocks on the door. Thomas Abraham, in his book of 2005 Twenty-First Century Plague: the Story of SARS struck a chilling tone. “This was an attack by an unseen invader to which nations had to respond as they would to any other attack - by mobilising the resources to repel the invader. For many countries it became clear that the real threat to security would come not from invading armies but from unknown microbes.” 

Perhaps nothing instils atavistic dread as much as disease. The rider of the white horse of the Apocalypse (the first of the so-called Four Horsemen in Revelation 6) wears a corona or crown. While his identity - is he a symbol of good or evil? - is disputed by interpreters, popular culture imagines him as the bringer of sickness and plague, a cataclysmic expression of divine judgment on a corrupt world along with famine, war and bloodshed, images of universal terror and destruction. 

These are powerful metaphors that continue to haunt the imagination, even in an age that understands the processes by which diseases are transmitted. If we thought that modernity had done away with archaic ways of responding to infection or the threat of it, consider what has happened in Newcastle this week. The Chinese community there is reporting episodes of discrimination and hate crime because of the virus. One woman, a student, posted on social media that she had been spat on while walking back to her dormitory. Others have spoken of abusive comments and people covering their faces when walking past them in the street. One owner of a Chinese take-away, who has never been to China, said he had heard of people being beaten up and bullied, and is frightened of coughing in public in case he is thought to carry the virus. The knowledge that two of the three cases so far diagnosed in the UK are being treated in Newcastle is no doubt fuelling the panic. 

We’re right to be appalled. But we need to understand what’s going on when fear goes viral. Prejudice and hatred are fed by “othering” people who are perceived to be different. And when it’s examined, othering often turns out to be driven by fear. I say “often” but I have a hunch that it’s probably always the case at the unconscious level. The leper in the Bible is a familiar image of how the feared were banished to ghettos on the margins of society where rigorously enforced isolation, permanent quarantine, put them beyond reach of the community and the risk to it of contamination. Those words leper and ghetto still carry powerful resonances as figures of speech. And when the collective psyche projects on to (in this case) Chinese people because of our terror of infection, we are reaching back into very primitive states of mind indeed.

In one of the greatest twentieth century novels, Albert Camus charts the impact of an epidemic. The Plague (La Peste) is a profound exploration of how the contagion of fear spreads through a society and paralyses it; how panicky self-interest, the survival instinct dominates all else, how preachers try to make sense of the catastrophe that is happening. This epidemic set in a North African town was fictional, but it stood for an important truth. Writing in Vichy France during the 2nd World War, Camus meant it as a metaphor of enemy invasion and occupation, and how a terrorised society reacts. But we can see in it a metaphor of another occupying power that holds sway over humanity: the effect of fear on ordinary people's lives, the corruption of motives by self-concern, putting ourselves first, protecting ourselves from harm at all costs. In an important way, it is fear that spreads a spiritual plague, not because it’s unnatural or wrong to be afraid, but because of how we respond when it takes hold of us. Camus seems to be saying that while the sickness is a terrible thing, it’s not the worst kind of disease we can be afflicted by.

I say “us” deliberately. Like viruses, fear doesn’t discriminate. We are all at risk of being infected by both of them. There’s plenty of good advice telling us what to do in the face of this virus. A lot of it is common sense. Managing fear is more tricky because of its visceral character: how do you get a handle on what we’re most afraid of and why? Getting risk in perspective is one way of telling ourselves not to get things out of proportion. We are right to be afraid of a global pandemic, and if this particular virus is not going to cause it, the next one could: epidemiologists tell us it’s not a question of whether but of when. But we are right to be afraid of lots of other hazards too, that are the price of being alive in a universe of risk and that are almost all beyond our power to control. 

Perhaps modernity over-protects us in the first world from feeling the fragility of our existence too keenly. If so, the coronavirus can help make us more aware, not least of the fears most of the human race carry with them all the time. It can give us a better sense of our solidarity with those who suffer because we know that it could be us too. To think of ourselves as “citizens of the world” is to understand our primary identity as being human beings in all the “joy and woe” that, says William Blake, we were made for, “woven fine” in the tapestry of life. Is this how we learn to build solidarities of compassion and care, tenderness and love that transfigure fear by giving us the courage and dignity to look adversity squarely in the face and resolve that our inmost selves, our souls if you like, will not be brought down by it? 

The power of love is the greatest force for good the world knows. My faith tells me that my capacity to love, feeble though it often is, reflects the image of a God whose nature and whose name is Love. Which is why the words of so many biblical messengers across the centuries, “do not be afraid!”, carry such conviction. Dealing with fear is fundamentally a spiritual task. I don’t underestimate how difficult it can be. We don’t know what the coming months will bring. But whatever ordeals lie ahead for us and for people in other parts of the world, it’s immensely heartening to remind ourselves that we are not alone. 

Meanwhile, the people of China are in our thoughts and prayers, together with all whose lives have been directly affected  by the coronavirus. In Albert Schweitzer’s words, we belong to the community of all who bear the marks of pain. This is our privilege now, and always will be.