Coronavirus - A vicars diary 2

It's all incredibly quiet. Like someone has pressed 'hibernate' on the world. Out at 5pm yesterday cycling around Yeovil, there were more bikes than cars on the roads.

Everything else is making it up as we go along. Last weeks big challenge was pulling together a contacts list at both churches. This weeks is reacting to the almost daily changes in guidance. First we could do weddings with 5 people max as well as funerals and baptisms. Then the weddings and baptisms went but funerals were still ok, now there's a complete shutdown. I'm not even supposed to go into my own churches to pray, let alone to stream live worship. However the government guidance is more relaxed than that issued by the Archbishops. But since the government website was updated only today - and it doesn't tell you what was updated - I don't know if the relaxation is a new thing since we were instructed to lock the doors.

So from looking at how to deliver live streamed worship, with music, from our church building, it will probably be yours truly at home, with a nice picture covering the normal chaos of my study and doubling as a passable background. We're probably going to save Communion for Easter Day, and prime people over the next 2 weeks to get supplies in. In the meantime we're working on a 'worship at home' pack which can be emailed out, and posted to those without email, with all the Sunday liturgies, resources for daily prayer, contact details, and palm crosses for those who are getting the deliveries.

The volunteer response picture is changing by the day. All sorts of groups have sprung up around Yeovil, so the NHS initiative is encouraging, it's important to have a co-ordinated effort rather than a patchwork of groups which will never reach every corner of society, and may end up duplicating. Having said that, we're assembling a list of offers of help, and have had 4 households in touch so far, including a 99 year old. A member of our church with a health condition was told today she'd next be allowed out on 25th June, so she's been stockpiling wool in order to knit her way through the next quarter.

We've managed to produce a daily diet of podcasts, thoughts for the day, a couple of 'virtual assemblies' and a very moving and peaceful Compline service put together by our associate Vicar. This Sunday will be live streamed from here, but we've scheduled the sermon (pre-recorded by one of our trainee preachers and incorporated into a video) to pop up on the Youtube channel during the service, so people can pause the livestream and switch to the sermon if they want to.

Speaking to a couple tomorrow who are due to get married in July. I have no idea what to say, no idea how to plan for it. It's hard to have to postpone a wedding, but it's even harder if people die, I think we're suddenly finding lots of things that we can do without if we suddenly put our minds to it.

The word floating round my head at the moment is 'Sabbath'. The account of the exile of God's people in 2 Chronicles speaks of the land 'enjoying a sabbath rest' for all the years it had hosted the Israelites without them faithfully worshipping God. It ended up lying fallow for decades. There's something about this moment that feels like the planet is breathing a deep, silent sigh of relief. The planes are on the ground, the cars and cruise liners are parked, the ferocious consumerism (food aside) has suddenly stopped, we are back to basics: food, home, health, communication. I have often wondered if God builds 'failsafe' mechanisms into the world, so that if we over-reach ourselves they kick in to stop things getting too far out of balance.

Prior to the modern age, the question was never 'how can God allow this suffering' it was 'how can we ever deserve God's mercy'. Rather than assuming we were in the right and God was in the wrong, it was the other way round. The response to tragedy was to question ourselves first, rather than outsource blame to God. The unreflected life is not worth living, is this enough of a wake up call to get us asking the right questions? Coronavirus is not the end of the world, but if it's the end of a way of life that would have led to the end of the world, then we might look back on 2020 as a turning point.

The first self-isolating family

Re-reading the Noah story, for a 'virtual assembly' in a few days time, it turns out that Noah and his family were cooped up together for just over a year. At least they had the animals to distract them. So if you're feeling a bit stir crazy already, just be glad the rain's stopped.

Coronavirus - A vicars diary 1

This evening should have been the PCC - Parochial Church Council - but that became one of several cancelled meetings this week. It goes in the shredder along with the Lent course, pastoral visits to the elderly, school parents evening, a Spring Fair, and sadly a wedding on Saturday which was brought forward to escape the shutdown, but still has too many key people for the Church of England restrictions, and so has been postponed.

Last night I had a call from a funeral director, who, thinking we were closed for everything, wanted to borrow some chairs for doing funerals on his premises. The funeral protocols are a bit vaguer than those for weddings, we can still do them, but with a minimal number of mourners, and discouraging the over-70s and those with underlying health conditions from attending. With the closure of Yeovil Crematorium from next week, I've also been peppering my Diocese with emails asking for permission to act as a substitute venue, not just for church funerals but for others too. We'll see...

The last 2 days have been manic. On the one hand, setting up the scaffolding for church life without the two things which often define us the most - the building, and the Sunday morning meeting. We have 2 churches, so we've been creating a contacts list for both, and a strategy for keeping in touch with everyone, whether they are part of a small group, on email, on Facebook, on a smartphone (and thus able to join a Whatsapp group), or just have a landline. There's a slightly different way of getting in touch with each 'layer' of the congregation. We already have a few people signed up who weren't members of the church, but want to keep in touch with what we're doing.

What are we doing? Daily prayer podcasts and video messages, trying to nail the tech for live streaming a Sunday service from Youtube, with liturgy posted on the church website for people to follow at home. An email/Whatsapp/Facebook communication template which gets key information out to about 90% of both congregations. Ringing round everyone who's not on email to make sure they know that Sundays (and everything else) are cancelled, but that they can join in online or at home. Next weeks job is creating a prayer resource for people to use at home - daily prayers, a Sunday liturgy we'll use each week, key contacts and websites, and a few other bits and bobs.

Our main parish church will be staying open, St James Yeovil, for personal prayer, and for donations to the local food bank, which is going to need every tin of beans they can lay their hands on. We're putting out some creative prayer stations, so that the church becomes more of a prayer space than a corporate worship space. Someone is down there every day saying morning prayer, the rest of us join in at 9am via the CofE Daily Prayer app.

The Community Centre at our other church, St. Peters, has become a vital community hub. Most of the groups have closed down, but we're trying to work out if there is a way of keeping it open as a community resource - it hosts a small library, and can be a collection point for various things (the latest is a large batch of wool from a house clearance, which our army of local knitters will be raiding on Monday morning). With all the free time that people are going to have, it may be viable to set up a fresh food bank, with unsold produce from the local Co-op, which we've been offered but never had the team of volunteers able to make it happen.

Meanwhile in the community, we've managed to cover nearly half the streets in a 2000 home neighbourhood with these things

Having a strong community Facebook group has been a massive help, through one post on that, we've been able to circulate a list of streets and co-ordinate deliveries. We've left a pile in the church, and in the local co-op, for people to help themselves. I'm hoping we run out and need to reprint for both.

I have my ups and downs with social media - I quit Twitter about this time last year because it just seemed to be full of angry people being angry with each other, and I always came off more agitated than before I logged on. But it has been such an asset this week, being able to use email, Facebook, youtube, Zoom (video conferencing - going to try Morning Prayer with a group of 10 people on Monday, if that works we might roll it out to the whole congregation), Whatsapp, Anchor podcasts, they've all been excellent for getting the tools and the infrastructure for keeping in touch with most of the congregation. For those not on social media, we're setting up 'phone pastors' who will have 6 people they ring every week, to keep them in touch. 

I normally get 30-40 emails a day, today it was 100, and Facebook in Yeovil has been white hot with groups, initiatives, offers of help, key communications, plus the odd idiot who's required me to put my group moderator hat on. 

I work from home normally, I'm fairly happy with my own company, I regularly do quiet days and occasionally do retreats -the best was 8 days in silence. So I'm ok with social distancing, and once I've got used to having hardly any face to face meetings, it probably won't be too much of a trial. But for those who are reliant on being/getting out and about, who have to home school their children for 3+ months, who rely on the visitors they get, etc. etc. this is going to be very hard. 

At the same time, this could be an incredibly fruitful time. I know someone who has borrowed a cello so they can self-teach during what would have been the summer term. Already lots of creative ideas are appearing on social media. Without all the time and energy which goes into Sunday church, we're going to discover a new, less busy, and maybe more authentic way of being the church. We're going to find out what shape we become without a building and a Sunday meeting to shape and define us. We're going to have chances to bless and love other people that don't present themselves in normal times. I'm praying we rise to the challenge, that we grow, that it's the acts of kindness and not the selfish and life-threatening stockpiling that define us. 

And finally... it's going to be a long tunnel. If the restrictions are too effective, we'll come out of them in June/July with only a fraction of the population having been infected, leaving everyone else vulnerable of a second flare up. So how long do the restrictions stay in place? As long as Covid-19 is out of control somewhere in the world, there's a chance of it getting everywhere again. If we do flatten the curve, the only safe time to go back to normal is when we have a vaccine, which is by all accounts 12+ months away. If the efforts are not a success, the restrictions may lift sooner due to the 'herd immunity', but at a catstrophic cost in the meantime. Where, and how, will it end? The main factor is our behaviour. It's up to us.

CS Lewis on Coronavirus

well, almost - well done to The Gospel Coalition for digging this one out. Swap 'atomic bomb' for coronavirus. For most of history, most people have lived with the possibility of imminent death, through war, plague, famine, illness etc., and they have got on with life. I think there is a lot of wisdom here.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

Political Parties as Weather Systems

Whilst delirious from coronavirus*, I suddenly got to wondering. You know those team building sessions where you're asked to imagine yourself as a fruit, or your organisation as a species of fish? Me neither. But in these weather - saturated times, what meteorological form do our political parties take?

Conservative Party - A large, prolonged and blustery shower
Labour Party - A turbulent front, breaking up around the Middle East.
Labour Party Brexit Policy - Fog
Liberal Democrats - Hail (small, hits you hard for a while then melts away)
Scottish National Party - A biting Northerly wind.
Democratic Unionist Party - Heavy weather

*or standing up too quickly on an empty stomach

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