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.

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.

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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!

Images of Calm in Anxious Times

The tenth day of going Lazaretto (in self-isolation) and the first of lockdown. It’s a strange existence for all of us and a worrying one. I’ve been aware of the anxiety I’ve felt in the face of Covid19’s relentless advance. The fact that this threat is silent and invisible adds to the unease. When the Prime Minister spoke to the nation last night about what lockdown must mean, I wondered whether this is what it felt like on the morning of 3 September 1939 when another PM told Britain that she was now at war.

I guess my response was much the same as yours. I thought of the people - so many of them, young as well as old - whom the virus has touched and made sick, mortally so for some. I thought about the courageous men and women on the frontline of health care who are facing impossible life-and-death decisions about where to allocate resources and seem inadequately protected themselves. I thought about the countless people whose finances, livelihoods and homes have suddenly become immensely precarious. I thought about our own locality, our neighbours in this agreeably ordinary village community. I thought of our friends in other parts of the world and here in Britain. I thought of our family, our grandchildren who can barely comprehend what is happening to them, and whom we may not see for months. And yes, of course I thought of ourselves too, quarantined in our home, so lucky to be safe and well (so far), and provided for and with each other to support and love.

It’s hard not to be troubled by turbulent thoughts. The virus extends a force-field over all of us. We are caught up in a kind of psychic instability. Maybe I’m just a natural worrier. I find it easy to imagine, no, expect, the worst. ‘What if...’ this happens, or that, or a thousand other possibilities? Anxious times feed such Puddleglum reveries. Almost all of them are fantasies that take me nowhere except deeper into the slough of despond. Or they are imagined threats I can do nothing to mitigate, tomorrow’s bridges there’s no point in trying to cross today. And the longer we have in lockdown, the more time there is to fill with morbidity.

There’s a spiritual task here. It’s about quietening the spirit, cultivating equanimity, nurturing a more even temperament. As the well-known text Desiderata has it, that adorns many a living-room wall, ‘Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.... Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself....’ Which is not far away from the wisdom writers’ encouragement to live not out of fear but out of trust, echoed in Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Do not worry about your life’ (Matthew 6.25-33). Living trustfully is a key insight of the scriptures.

All my life I’ve found solace in music and art and they are great travelling companions through these febrile times. As is photography. When we first decided to go Lazaretto, I began to sift through my catalogue of photographs looking for images that might provide a focus for meditation. And then I thought: why not share some of them online? So I began to put some favourites on social media (Twitter and FaceBook), just one image each day using the hashtag #ImagesOfCalm. A bit corny, I know, but I couldn’t think of a better one. I’m delighted that a few others are now doing the same. I can promise that I have more than enough photographs to see us through at least twelve weeks of self-isolation.

You’d expect images of nature to feature. There’s something reassuring about landscapes, skies, water, trees, flowers, animals and birds. As you’re drawn inside an image of the natural world, you’re reminded that you belong to the created order, that the good earth is your home, and you’re helped to rediscover your place in the scheme of things. Walking in our peaceful Northumberland valley has been both calming and poignant this March. Daffodils and blackthorn blossom, new-born lambs and birdsong all remind us that with or without us, springtime is as fresh and abundant as ever.

Other images feature human creativity. Buildings, sculpture and paintings play a large part in my own imaginative life, so expect to see some of these in my choice of photographs. I believe there’s a special place for still life. This image (taken at Washington Old Hall) suggested itself for the simplicity of its forms and the
quietness of its colouring. The pewter candlestick and ewer are beautiful objects in themselves. But I liked the way they are lit against the curtain and the window, a light-and-shadow chiaroscuro that is so suggestive of these times we are experiencing. And faith can perhaps see in the ewer the implication of life-giving water, and in the candle, the light of grace and truth.

Some images may be more intriguing, perhaps disturbing. Take today’s photo on the left. I was in a cafe on a bleak day in the Port of Blyth and saw this table and chairs on the deck outside the window. It could not have conveyed a more forlorn scene, reinforced by low contrast in a dull even light. Few of my photos have unnerved me more than this one with its hint the surreal, even the dystopian. I wondered whether to post it this morning. Yet this empty table seemed to fit this first dislocated day of lockdown, representing our enforced abandonment of social life, laughter and the love of friends. Undeniably calm, it’s true, but it’s the ‘dead calm’ so well described by Tennyson in In Memoriam, his elegy for the friend he had lost: ‘And in my heart, if calm at all, / If any calm, a calm despair’.

Yet I also found a more promising ‘calm’ in what I saw. As I gazed at it, the furniture seemed to issue an invitation, or at least the possibility of one. For now, they were in a dormant state, tidily and symmetrically stowed on the decking to provide material for photographers like me. But, I thought, it would not be long before they would be peopled again. Like the wintry trees in another image I shared, it was only a matter of time before the scene would be brought back to life, animated by living, breathing people sitting at the table and enjoying the food and drink placed on it. An obvious allusion to the eucharist, of course, the celebration we are denied for now while our churches are closed for worship, but which remains at the heart of the spiritual life for all who follow Jesus.

Finally, I'm including more explicit images associated with faith. You'd expect that from a God-botherer like me, whose understanding of things has been shaped by Christianity all my adult life. On St Cuthbert's Day I posted a distant view of Durham Cathedral, his shrine, with a contemporary interpretation of an Irish high cross in the foreground. On Mothering Sunday I shared a perspective of Joseph Pyrz's Annunciation sculpture of Blessed Mary the Virgin in the Galilee Chapel of the Cathedral. I've long believed that photography can open up perspectives on faith and the spiritual life in ways that can surprise and enchant us. I don’t think I’d realised how potent a tool it can be until now.

So I'd like to think that these 'images of calm' could reassure and strengthen us when things are fragile and we are living through times of risk and danger. 'Go placidly...' I hope too that they may in turn put their questions to us, and encourage us to look again at the assumptions on which we base our lives and how we face a crisis. And maybe, just maybe, they could challenge us to try to live more authentically not least in reaching out to and helping those who need support and care so much.

Prayer in a Time of Coronavirus

I'm sitting in the study window as I write. The sun is shining outside, the air is calm and still. There are very few people walking past in the street. Daffodils are in full flower: this is a beautiful spring. I look across to the parish church of St Cuthbert. It will be open all day for prayer, reflection and stillness, but on this Mothering Sunday, the bells will not ring, the candles will not be lit and there will be no public act of worship.

These are such strange times to be living through. Here in Burswell House, we are in quarantine, lazaretto, as I wrote last time. Unless you are St Cuthbert who knew a lot about self-isolation, it takes some getting used to. We know it is for the safety of all of us, others, ourselves. But on Sunday especially, it is hard to realise that the eucharist will not be the focal point of our day, hard not to look forward to seeing our friends and neighbours in church, one of the village's key gathering-places, hard not to have face-to-face contact and share our stories of the past week.

So like many of you I'm sure, we listened especially carefully to today's act of worship on BBC Radio 4. It came from Lambeth Palace and was led by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It could not have been done better. There was great sensitivity in the choice of readings, music and prayers to reflect the seriousness of these times. Familiar words seemed to take on fresh and urgent meanings. In the opening hymn, for instance, ‘Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy’. I’ve sung it hundreds of times, yet never felt more powerfully the sense of the day’s curve and of our life’s curve traced out in the last line of each stanza, from ‘the break of the day’ through ‘the noon of the day’ to ‘the eve of the day’ and ‘the end of the day’. It was inspired, too, to choose as the gospel reading the word from the cross in St John where Jesus entrusts his mother and the beloved disciple to each other’s care: Mothering Sunday perfectly linked to human suffering in the passion of Jesus.*

Tonight at 7pm, in common with people across the country, we shall light a candle in the study window. Indeed, we’ve decided to light it each evening at that time for a few minutes for as long as this Coronavirus is with us. In the Middle Ages they spoke of plague stalking the streets. Well, maybe the virus will see these candles burning in our windows and think better of crossing our thresholds. I’m speaking in primitive metaphor, of course. But there’s something undeniably powerful in kindling lights in a solidarity of prayer and hope. Our solidarity with others, God’s solidarity with us. I dare say we shall be the stronger in mind and spirit for taking part in this simple yet profound act, better equipped to face whatever ordeals the coming weeks and months may bring.

When we are forced to be socially distanced or ‘self-isolated’, it matters that we do not think of ourselves as alone, cut off from the mainstream of our society, the human family, those who love us. There’s a required solitude just now, of course whether we experience it as individual people, couples or families. But as Cuthbert and the desert fathers teach us, solitude is not isolation. The hermit life was and is a profoundly connected way of being human in which relationships and community matter all the more, not less. Our lighted candles, vulnerable and precarious though their flames will be, nevertheless represent the conviction that we are together in anxiety and suffering, together in our wish to hold victims in our hearts and care for them, together in our hope, our expectation indeed, that under God we shall be kept safe through this time of trial.

That’s an allusion to the final petition of the Lord’s Prayer, of course, ‘Save us in the time of trial and rescue us from the evil one’ as I think it should be translated.** Peirasmos, which we usually render as ‘temptation’, has much more the sense of a great ordeal such as would destroy the faith and hope of anyone. It’s what Jesus experiences in the desert as we recall in this season of Lent, this quarantine of savage times and places that he must undergo in his wilderness of self-isolation. In the anxieties that this pandemic is generating, I think we are probably experiencing a collective peirasmos such as we haven’t known for decades, maybe never in our lifetimes. It’s as cruel as that.

I doubt those who first prayed the words of the Our Father thought they were thereby protected from physical danger or harm. What’s the Lord’s Prayer fundamentally about? Surely it’s the coming of God’s kingdom, his just and gentle rule that brings everything into its right relationship with the Creator, that reconciles all that is broken and destructive and hurtful, that is the source of grace and truth, joy, peace and good in human life. It’s our inward transformation I shall be thinking of when we light our candle tonight. And of the words Jesus says to Peter before the ordeal of his passion, ‘I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail’*** - personally and collectively. We need to pray for one another and for our world that in the face of this threat, our faith may not fail and our hope be kept alive - even if it’s as fragile as a tiny candle flame burning in a great darkness.

This ordeal is hard for all of us and may be devastating for some. Who knows if we shall catch the virus ourselves despite taking every precaution, perhaps be severely affected by it, maybe even die or be bereaved because of it? It’s foolish not to ask ourselves those questions and make preparations in case our fears are realised. Our forebears took mortality for granted: read the seventeenth century Bishop Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying as one of the most famous and spiritually wise examples of how to face death with equanimity. We find it harder than his generation to imagine that we won’t live for ever. But when we love life and are filled with gratitude at the beauty of things and the wonder of our own existence, it’s not surprising that the thought of not seeing another springtime seems unbearable at times.

So our candle can be the prayer that during these turbulent times, we don’t lose heart but that our faith holds, sustained by the belief that God is not far from any of us and that he is especially close to those who are suffering or lonely or afraid. We need to pray, ‘save us in the time of trial and deliver us from the evil one’. And perhaps see in the candles in our windows a promise of the Paschal Candle  that will be lit in our churches on Easter Day in celebration of Christ risen from the dead. In our darkened streets, tonight’s candles will speak not only of our solidarity in suffering, but of a hope that transcends fear and pain and loss and even death itself. ‘We are more than conquerors through him who loved us’ says St Paul.****

I think of those words, and my spirits lighten. I am not as fearful as I was. I feel strangely calmed, and stronger once again.

*John 19.25-27       **Matthew 6.13       ***Luke 22.32      ****Romans 8.37

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.