Of all my poems, this might be the one that’s closest to my heart. I wrote it in the aftermath of Christmas 2018, and was chuffed to have it appear in the Winter 2019 edition of Preach magazine.
And then the pandemic. And the stuff of it all got a bit real. And no, I don’t mean any of the following: that “God has done this,” or that I wished for it, or that there is somehow a “purpose” to the acute global increase of hardship and suffering and death resulting from Covid-19. As the title of Tom Wright’s wise and gentle Time Magazine article sums up, “Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To”.
No. Not a punishment, not a loving intervention, not a trial to test our mettle nor an opportunity to shine. To me, the current crisis is, well, it’s a fact. Of the sort to be humbly and intently lamented. And dealt with as best we can.
But it’s a fact that exposes other facts – ones that have been around a lot longer, that we scarcely lament and do little to “deal with” because, well, they’re just how things are. They are normal.
The pandemic exposes our individualism. We struggle to get our heads around a threat that, for the majority (though not for everyone), is more collective than it is personal. And so we’re either busy scaring one another into terrified retreat with stories of tragic edge cases and warnings about our own personal vulnerable loved ones, or we’re protesting the “nonsense” of allowing one’s personal freedom to be curtailed by such a small (personal) risk. Neither inclination makes for strategies that serve the needs of whole communities.
It exposes massive structural injustice. In both Britain and the US, people of colour are being hospitalised and are dying at disproportionately high rates, largely as a result of existing housing and employment inequalities that mean they are more likely to be in environments exposed to the virus, and of health and healthcare inequalities that contribute to worse outcomes. There is even evidence of racist discrimination affecting working conditions in frontline jobs, with people of colour employed by the NHS dying at a higher rate than their white colleagues. [1]
It exposes stark inequality. Celebrities and business magnates rile the tweeting public with grand(“-ish!”) charitable gestures and (“spotlight-seeking!”) motivational speeches filmed poolside at country house N+1. Meanwhile, suburban well-to-dos flaunt sunny garden selfies, heedless of the many crammed in run-down flats with housemates that they didn’t choose. Meanwhile austerity, food poverty, the gig economy, “unskilled” (low wage) key work, and on top of all of it homeschooling; meanwhile homelessness and destitute asylum seeking.
It exposes pre-existing global crises – famine, conflict, displacement, environmental collapse – contexts in which one more contagious disease must feel like a bitter drop in an already raging ocean. And with movement curtailed and resources being redirected into efforts against the pandemic, it also reduces the usual channels of aid and action in response to these ongoing challenges.
It exposes the realities of life for those already isolated or excluded or unserved in our communities, for any of a wide variety of reasons – because of inaccessible facilities, or stigma around mental illness, or ageism; because of homophobic or transphobic abuse and discrimination; because of domestic violence and manipulation, or modern day slavery; because of drug or alcohol addiction; because of injustice in the asylum system. And many of those marginalised are left even more so by the suspension of the usual support services.
It exposes the hubris of assuming we have everything in hand. There is so much we don’t know, so much we can’t control. And yet we treat the natural world like something we are outside and above of, something to be reduced to its component parts and exploited. And when reality doesn’t yield to our command, we rush to control the narrative instead – hence politicians who tell us what we want to hear, with little care for truth (or even basic common sense); hence conspiracy theorists and the rise of the far right and the torrent of fake news, offering bitter and fragile people channels for their hatred and the reassuring sense of being “in the loop”.
None of this is new. It’s all embedded in the normal we are aching to “get back” to. “For you always have the poor with you,” said Jesus (Matt 26:11) – reproaching us, I believe, for preferring charitable gestures over readiness for different ways of being. Earlier, I said I didn’t think that the pandemic is an opportunity. There is no special time to choose better; the opportunity is always now. But it’s hard at the best of times. In fact, it’s harder at the best of times, when those with influence are comfortable (with more to lose), and those without are hidden. So maybe there is something about this "now" that makes us readier than usual. Better choices won’t just happen, though, they must be made.
I have a terrified yearning for God to bring about this sort of change in us – in me. Hence This House. But what God doesn’t do, so I believe, is force us. The foundational disruption that we need entails a cooperation that I fear I am not ready to give. But, for the church’s part at least, it seems to me there are some basic minimal steps we can take, if we are at all serious in our optimistic talk of Covid “bright sides”.
First, I suggest we should be praying for way bigger than a quick return to “normal”. Yes, we want the suffering to end and lives to be saved and livelihoods salvaged. Of course. But the pandemic isn’t the only thing causing suffering and death and loss. And if we believe that God can intervene to stop a disease (which for some of us has been little more than an inconvenience so far), where is our faith for God to break the power of individualism, to bring to justice and repentance those abusing positions of influence, to end white supremacy and the rise of the far right, to help us structure economic frameworks that provide for everyone without coercion and without destroying the environment…?
Secondly, the Bible has a lot to say that we aren’t getting round to hearing. Yes, people are in need of comfort and reassurance, and I’m grateful that the Bible speaks into that need. But to only pick the parts that do this is effectively to tell it what it is allowed to say, and to limit its potential for transformative disruption. We like that Jesus rested, and invested in relationships, and prayed; we talk less about him dying violently, self-givingly and telling his disciples likewise to lay down their lives. We turn frequently to Jeremiah’s relatively fleeting messages of future hope for the exiles in Babylon, but seldom get around to the rest of the book, which is full of warnings against false hope, and criticisms of a ruling class in stubborn denial of grim reality, surrounded by ‘court prophets’ promising “‘peace peace’ [...] when there is no peace” (Jer 6:14). These selections are made, I am sure, without any strategic intent to distort, but they still amount to a curated story of scripture which is perfectly tuned to the contemporary (individualistic, relatively privileged) audience we are trying to ‘reach’. And, on top of the general not-OK-ness of ‘using’ the Bible to suit our purposes, the sad irony is that many people are yearning for alternatives to the values we have harmfully internalised, and these might be more readily encountered through grappling with the difficult, jarring, uncomfortable bits we routinely omit than in the smoothed version resulting from those omissions.
And thirdly, there’s some amazing, truly amazing contributions from churches in the effort to serve and support vulnerable people in our communities at this time especially. But please let’s be transparent about – and wary of – the power and “good publicity” this gives us, which is our reward from an unjust status quo (that we risk propping up if we’re not careful). I’m in awe of and grateful to and fully up for celebrating the human compassion and activism on display in initiatives like Foodbanks, but we should never stop lamenting that they’re necessary, nor seeking to dismantle the injustice that perpetuates the need. And, before we slip into triumphal self-congratulation for our part, I feel as though we need to take a bigger, harder look at what we have been up to in the world and make some space for grief. Personally, I’m not done reeling from the revelations of Jean Vanier’s abuse of women over several decades. The story, one more in a seemingly endless line of similar, became public at the end of February, so that I entered lockdown more sad and tired with church than ever. And I think it’s right that this stuff – along with other harms (cruelty to LGBT+ neighbours and siblings, failures of inclusion and accessibility, dehumanising attitudes to women, neocolonial mission practices, entanglement with far right agendas…) – should make us truly, deeply sorrowful. Where else does repentance begin? Attempts to deny or cover-up or ameliorate wrongs done by church, or to make them “not our problem” (because “they’re not REAL Christians like we are”), or to outweigh the “bad” with visible “good works” will leave us locked down against change, complicit with the toxic normal.
So, there you go. Pray bigger, read the tricky bits, and feel the bad. That’s as far as I’ve got in eight weeks, and I don’t know if I trust myself to not go “back”.
[1; (24/06/20)] I wrote this just a few days before the killing of George Floyd, and the global wave of grief, anti-racist protest and awareness-raising that it helped to trigger. The timing does not seem to be coincidental; rather, the racial health inequalities exposed by the pandemic, along with the increased availability of many people due to the closure of schools and workplaces, are understood to have contributed to the massive scale of the movement. My prayer is that the momentum will persist beyond lockdown, leading to structural change (and change in me) that goes beyond performative lip-service, and that as church together we will continue to pay attention, to lament and to actively repent.
[Edited to add (20/05/20): I've realised that this post has enough implicit Brueggemann-ness in it that I should probably give him a mention. Indeed, his ideas around grief and hope have become so much a part of my thinking since I read Prophetic Imagination two years ago (see, e.g., 'Coat Thieves Operate in this Area' and 'Sunday Mourning') that I forget they started off as someone else's. And while I'm here, perhaps I should also point out that I've been reading Walter Wink lately and, for all my reservations, I can definitely see his influence in the bits around prayer and responding to circumstance. And for that matter, I should basically never write a thing without crediting my fabulous sister, whose wise conversation is normally where it all starts (though that's not to say I ever do justice to it).]
[Thumbnail image cc by Sasha Freemind via Unsplash.]
THIS HOUSE
Oh come, oh come Emmanuel, and hurl
Our order into holy disarray:
Upend the tables where we wheel and deal,
And scatter our accrued prosperity.
Awake us, dancer on the dancing deep,
From placid slumber; rock the boat; disturb
The peace that we content ourselves to keep,
And make us see the chaos we transfer.
Confound our clarity, cut short our too long
Prayers, take back the narrative and heckle
Sermons preached to itching ears. Throw down
Each stone in every separating wall.
Do what you’re here to do … but, come what may,
Rebuild the ruins of us, please – and stay.
Carolyn Whitnall, 2019.
And then the pandemic. And the stuff of it all got a bit real. And no, I don’t mean any of the following: that “God has done this,” or that I wished for it, or that there is somehow a “purpose” to the acute global increase of hardship and suffering and death resulting from Covid-19. As the title of Tom Wright’s wise and gentle Time Magazine article sums up, “Christianity Offers No Answers About the Coronavirus. It's Not Supposed To”.
No. Not a punishment, not a loving intervention, not a trial to test our mettle nor an opportunity to shine. To me, the current crisis is, well, it’s a fact. Of the sort to be humbly and intently lamented. And dealt with as best we can.
But it’s a fact that exposes other facts – ones that have been around a lot longer, that we scarcely lament and do little to “deal with” because, well, they’re just how things are. They are normal.
The pandemic exposes our individualism. We struggle to get our heads around a threat that, for the majority (though not for everyone), is more collective than it is personal. And so we’re either busy scaring one another into terrified retreat with stories of tragic edge cases and warnings about our own personal vulnerable loved ones, or we’re protesting the “nonsense” of allowing one’s personal freedom to be curtailed by such a small (personal) risk. Neither inclination makes for strategies that serve the needs of whole communities.
It exposes massive structural injustice. In both Britain and the US, people of colour are being hospitalised and are dying at disproportionately high rates, largely as a result of existing housing and employment inequalities that mean they are more likely to be in environments exposed to the virus, and of health and healthcare inequalities that contribute to worse outcomes. There is even evidence of racist discrimination affecting working conditions in frontline jobs, with people of colour employed by the NHS dying at a higher rate than their white colleagues. [1]
It exposes stark inequality. Celebrities and business magnates rile the tweeting public with grand(“-ish!”) charitable gestures and (“spotlight-seeking!”) motivational speeches filmed poolside at country house N+1. Meanwhile, suburban well-to-dos flaunt sunny garden selfies, heedless of the many crammed in run-down flats with housemates that they didn’t choose. Meanwhile austerity, food poverty, the gig economy, “unskilled” (low wage) key work, and on top of all of it homeschooling; meanwhile homelessness and destitute asylum seeking.
It exposes pre-existing global crises – famine, conflict, displacement, environmental collapse – contexts in which one more contagious disease must feel like a bitter drop in an already raging ocean. And with movement curtailed and resources being redirected into efforts against the pandemic, it also reduces the usual channels of aid and action in response to these ongoing challenges.
It exposes the realities of life for those already isolated or excluded or unserved in our communities, for any of a wide variety of reasons – because of inaccessible facilities, or stigma around mental illness, or ageism; because of homophobic or transphobic abuse and discrimination; because of domestic violence and manipulation, or modern day slavery; because of drug or alcohol addiction; because of injustice in the asylum system. And many of those marginalised are left even more so by the suspension of the usual support services.
It exposes the hubris of assuming we have everything in hand. There is so much we don’t know, so much we can’t control. And yet we treat the natural world like something we are outside and above of, something to be reduced to its component parts and exploited. And when reality doesn’t yield to our command, we rush to control the narrative instead – hence politicians who tell us what we want to hear, with little care for truth (or even basic common sense); hence conspiracy theorists and the rise of the far right and the torrent of fake news, offering bitter and fragile people channels for their hatred and the reassuring sense of being “in the loop”.
None of this is new. It’s all embedded in the normal we are aching to “get back” to. “For you always have the poor with you,” said Jesus (Matt 26:11) – reproaching us, I believe, for preferring charitable gestures over readiness for different ways of being. Earlier, I said I didn’t think that the pandemic is an opportunity. There is no special time to choose better; the opportunity is always now. But it’s hard at the best of times. In fact, it’s harder at the best of times, when those with influence are comfortable (with more to lose), and those without are hidden. So maybe there is something about this "now" that makes us readier than usual. Better choices won’t just happen, though, they must be made.
I have a terrified yearning for God to bring about this sort of change in us – in me. Hence This House. But what God doesn’t do, so I believe, is force us. The foundational disruption that we need entails a cooperation that I fear I am not ready to give. But, for the church’s part at least, it seems to me there are some basic minimal steps we can take, if we are at all serious in our optimistic talk of Covid “bright sides”.
First, I suggest we should be praying for way bigger than a quick return to “normal”. Yes, we want the suffering to end and lives to be saved and livelihoods salvaged. Of course. But the pandemic isn’t the only thing causing suffering and death and loss. And if we believe that God can intervene to stop a disease (which for some of us has been little more than an inconvenience so far), where is our faith for God to break the power of individualism, to bring to justice and repentance those abusing positions of influence, to end white supremacy and the rise of the far right, to help us structure economic frameworks that provide for everyone without coercion and without destroying the environment…?
Secondly, the Bible has a lot to say that we aren’t getting round to hearing. Yes, people are in need of comfort and reassurance, and I’m grateful that the Bible speaks into that need. But to only pick the parts that do this is effectively to tell it what it is allowed to say, and to limit its potential for transformative disruption. We like that Jesus rested, and invested in relationships, and prayed; we talk less about him dying violently, self-givingly and telling his disciples likewise to lay down their lives. We turn frequently to Jeremiah’s relatively fleeting messages of future hope for the exiles in Babylon, but seldom get around to the rest of the book, which is full of warnings against false hope, and criticisms of a ruling class in stubborn denial of grim reality, surrounded by ‘court prophets’ promising “‘peace peace’ [...] when there is no peace” (Jer 6:14). These selections are made, I am sure, without any strategic intent to distort, but they still amount to a curated story of scripture which is perfectly tuned to the contemporary (individualistic, relatively privileged) audience we are trying to ‘reach’. And, on top of the general not-OK-ness of ‘using’ the Bible to suit our purposes, the sad irony is that many people are yearning for alternatives to the values we have harmfully internalised, and these might be more readily encountered through grappling with the difficult, jarring, uncomfortable bits we routinely omit than in the smoothed version resulting from those omissions.
And thirdly, there’s some amazing, truly amazing contributions from churches in the effort to serve and support vulnerable people in our communities at this time especially. But please let’s be transparent about – and wary of – the power and “good publicity” this gives us, which is our reward from an unjust status quo (that we risk propping up if we’re not careful). I’m in awe of and grateful to and fully up for celebrating the human compassion and activism on display in initiatives like Foodbanks, but we should never stop lamenting that they’re necessary, nor seeking to dismantle the injustice that perpetuates the need. And, before we slip into triumphal self-congratulation for our part, I feel as though we need to take a bigger, harder look at what we have been up to in the world and make some space for grief. Personally, I’m not done reeling from the revelations of Jean Vanier’s abuse of women over several decades. The story, one more in a seemingly endless line of similar, became public at the end of February, so that I entered lockdown more sad and tired with church than ever. And I think it’s right that this stuff – along with other harms (cruelty to LGBT+ neighbours and siblings, failures of inclusion and accessibility, dehumanising attitudes to women, neocolonial mission practices, entanglement with far right agendas…) – should make us truly, deeply sorrowful. Where else does repentance begin? Attempts to deny or cover-up or ameliorate wrongs done by church, or to make them “not our problem” (because “they’re not REAL Christians like we are”), or to outweigh the “bad” with visible “good works” will leave us locked down against change, complicit with the toxic normal.
So, there you go. Pray bigger, read the tricky bits, and feel the bad. That’s as far as I’ve got in eight weeks, and I don’t know if I trust myself to not go “back”.
[1; (24/06/20)] I wrote this just a few days before the killing of George Floyd, and the global wave of grief, anti-racist protest and awareness-raising that it helped to trigger. The timing does not seem to be coincidental; rather, the racial health inequalities exposed by the pandemic, along with the increased availability of many people due to the closure of schools and workplaces, are understood to have contributed to the massive scale of the movement. My prayer is that the momentum will persist beyond lockdown, leading to structural change (and change in me) that goes beyond performative lip-service, and that as church together we will continue to pay attention, to lament and to actively repent.
[Edited to add (20/05/20): I've realised that this post has enough implicit Brueggemann-ness in it that I should probably give him a mention. Indeed, his ideas around grief and hope have become so much a part of my thinking since I read Prophetic Imagination two years ago (see, e.g., 'Coat Thieves Operate in this Area' and 'Sunday Mourning') that I forget they started off as someone else's. And while I'm here, perhaps I should also point out that I've been reading Walter Wink lately and, for all my reservations, I can definitely see his influence in the bits around prayer and responding to circumstance. And for that matter, I should basically never write a thing without crediting my fabulous sister, whose wise conversation is normally where it all starts (though that's not to say I ever do justice to it).]
[Thumbnail image cc by Sasha Freemind via Unsplash.]
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