Life Together

We all know by now what the plan is. We are trying to flatten the curve. By extending the period during which Covid-19 is epidemic such that at any one time a smaller number of people is sick, we decrease the pressure on the NHS and other medical services and lower the death rate. We know that the Coronavirus is disproportionately dangerous for those who are older and who have underlying health problems. This will save our old people and our sick. Why are we not just leaving the weak to die? TomHolland has recently  pointed out that our assumptions about what is good and right which we make in western society are profoundly Christian ones. Getting it all over and done with quickly, with those of us who are younger and fitter simply having a heavy cold or a dose of flu and being left with a stronger economy and fewer dependants looks like a good offer for the survivors. That it fills most of us with horror and that we are prepared to push up with the terrible disruption which is now beginning to characterise our lives is a sign that we share profoundly Christian assumptions about how we should treat the weak, the vulnerable and our neighbours.

It is also teaching us something more profound about our Christian community. Self isolation is a profound sacrifice. We are made to be with others. The Dean of Saint Paul's has written

As isolation is being encouraged in our society for reasons of physical health, so together with people of faith and no faith, we will be encouraging different ways of coming together for our mental and spiritual health.” 

Involved as I am with a great deal of multi faith work in the context of the London Resilience Forum for which I lead the Faith Sector, it has struck me how relatively easy it has been for other faiths to take the idea that the places of worship should be closed and that people should pray alone. Tom Holland has also pointed out that the concept of “religion” and of “religious practice” as a distinct sphere of life is a profoundly Christian one. For most non-Christians there is simply a way of being a human being.

But since the gatherings described in the Acts in Jerusalem and by the river in Phillipi and then in the house of Lydia Christians have come together to worship and understood that to be in a congregation is a fundamental part of how we are to live out our faith. We meet together to hear the scriptures and to intercede, but above all to celebrate the sacraments. In these days of communicable illness we have returned to doing so in ways which are not new, but were developed in less hygienic world precisely to enable contact when it is dangerous.

TS Eliot’s play, The Rock was written to raise money to build churches. In the second of the play’s choruses he asked,

What life have you if you have not life together?

There is not life that is not in community,

and no community not lived in praise of God.

Even the Anchorite who meditates alone,

for whom the days and nights repeat the praise of God

Prays with the Church the Body of Christ Incarnate.

So we have moved to find new ways of praying together in a time when we are asked not to congregate. We have used ancient tools such as acts of spiritual communion and the Office made to Unite our souls with others who are praying in the same way or at the same time. We have used modern means of communication to live stream services. We have not simply gone to our private rooms and continued our individual devotions, for even as it has been more difficult to pray together we have realised afresh that to worship alone is not what it is too live as a Christian.

S Cyprian Clarence Gate where Eliot worshipped

Isolation, self imposed for the good of others or forced on the unwilling, is indeed not good for our physical or mental well being. Made in the image of God who is One and Three we find that only in offering ourselves to others do we grow into the individual that we have been made to be.

Eliot's Rock decried the atomisation of society at the opening of the 20th century just after the last global pandemic:

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads

and no man knows or cares who is his neighbour

unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance.

But all dash to and fro in motor cars

familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

Nor does the family even move about together

but every son would have his motorcycle

and daughters ride away on casual pillions.

It might seem that the closure of churches and the ending of public worship is the triumph of the move to individualism and separation. But we have found it revolting even if we have not revolted against the call to engage in it. The very love of neighbour which makes us want to come together enjoins us right now to be apart. Paradoxically the experience of isolation is drawing us back together again. We see an upsurge of concern for others, a vast desire to volunteer, a concern for the vulnerable and the poor and an association of each with another in the face of this new disease. So let us pray now that the very force which pushes us apart may begin at last to undo the separation which has so characterized our last century. Maybe there is some good that comes out of this evil. Eliot again in the First Chorus from The Rock:

The desert is not remote in southern tropics,

the desert is not only around the corner

the desert is squeezed in the tube train next to you

the desert is in the heart of your brother.

The good man is the builder,

if he build what is good.

I will show you the things that are now being done,

and some of the things that were long ago done,

that you may take heart.

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