Moving through the pandemic

The pandemic has proceeded through several phases and cycles. This is bewildering to the everyday pastor, trying to adapt to rapidly-changing medical prognoses and governmental pronouncements. However, much of the religious whining about our new lockdown is merely special pleading, with arguments similar to businesses who want exemptions, because their particular premises haven’t sparked outbreaks. Government though has to take account of where they may occur. But pastors’ dismay is exemplified in the oft-repeated joke, that they never got trained at seminary about how to deal with a pandemic. 

We need a healthy dose of religious pessimism, to sustain us in the stalemate, rather like Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1950s “Christian Realism”. It was the careful husbanding of our own church’s resources, for example, by our treasurer, like Joseph, which gave us a solid financial foundation to weather the storm. Nicholas Christakis’s new book, Apollo’s Arrow, outlining the consequences of Covid, also suggests a possible timeline for the near future. He proposes that the “immediate pandemic period” will last until 2022. Then, in an “intermediate pandemic period”, a vaccine may become widely available, or we achieve herd immunity, and learn to live with the virus. But only in 2024, will we reach the “post-pandemic period”, and a “partial” return to some kind of “normal”.

Our planning therefore, politically and ecclesially, must be longterm. It is likely, for instance, that we will not see large numbers returning to services. Many will stay away permanently. How will we equip believers to maintain their spiritual life, in this hyper-individualistic situation, where we are permanently dispersed and disconnected? Some are employing lockdown comparisons with monasticism, with recommendations to ‘stay inside their cell’. Most of us, however, do not have this vocation, and are ill-equipped to cope with the ensuant acedia. The rise in mental illness during the first lockdown, and likely during the second (with many medical advisers thinking there may be more lockdowns), was due to this. Being alone need not lead to loneliness, if there is sufficient spiritual support.

Even when we temporarily reconvened as a gathered church, the passivity of our physical services was a problem. For Free Churches especially, with no heritage of liturgy, and forbidden to sing, this can cause a spiritual vacuum. Perhaps a recovery of responsive liturgy may be required for a collective expression of petition and praise. At a minimum, the Lord’s Prayer should be reinstituted: among charismatics particularly, this has fallen into disuse, in favour of supposedly spontaneous free worship, without form or structure (though it has its own). This has led to a disconnect from our dominical tradition, and ecumenical separation from other churches on the one practice we might hold in common.

Sometimes it is good simply to maintain traditions: I remember, on holiday, visiting a monastery outside Florence, where they had retained Gregorian chant through the centuries, and were only now experiencing revival of interest among locals. For stability, we all need to rediscover our movement’s founding charism, and follow what it instructs us.