Category: We Can’t Go Back…

by Savitri Hensman, community worker, author of “Sexuality, Struggle and Saintliness” and LGBTI+ equality activist

As the coronavirus pandemic has spread, there has been widespread sorrow, fear and frustration. But there have also been many instances of love and kindness which have touched people’s hearts.

A recent item on the BBC news website contained two accounts from the COVID wards of Bradford Royal Infirmary.

The first was about a patient “marrying” his fiancée hours before he died. A nurse on the night shift had called in a chaplain after talking to the dying man’s partner, who was at his bedside, in full personal protective equipment. Though a legally recognised wedding was not possible, a moving ceremony as close to this as possible was held, with cake afterwards. “You just want to do your bit to treat people with dignity, to help them know that they are loved and cared for. I’m very grateful to have the opportunity to help them celebrate their love,” the chaplain explained.

Meanwhile the ward manager was facing her own challenges. She had placed her little boy in the care of her mother, who was in a high-risk category. And, to protect them both, she moved out, taking on extra shifts to care for her often desperately ill patients. “His birthday was the hardest day – not being able to touch him. I saw him from the end of the garden,” she said. But her son “understands that mummy has to work to help the poorly people” and that she “could be carrying germs that might harm him and that he needs to stay with grandma to keep safe and well.”

Loving Intimacy and Family Life

Real-life stories of this kind touch a chord with many people because, I think, they tap into experiences (or at least aspirations) which are almost universal. Probably most have been, or would like to be, bound together in loving intimacy with someone special – being known and treasured in body, mind and spirit. Likewise, many know what it is like to grow through family life, with its shared joys, sorrows and opportunities for generosity and tenderness. Of course, close relationships can go wrong: the pandemic has sadly led to a spike in domestic violence and child abuse. Yet at best, intimacy and love can benefit those who experience it directly and spill over into care for others.

In the Bible and Christian spirituality, love can take many forms: from fellowship within a faith community to comradeship in the quest for justice, or from compassion and help for a neighbour in need to close friendship and committed life-partnership. COVID-19 has prompted many of us to appreciate not only the dedication of key workers and volunteers but also the importance of the personal ties which make us more vulnerable yet help to keep us going, practically and emotionally.

People vary and there are a few who are not called to be part of a couple or experience ‘family’ life (in the broadest of terms). Others experience partnership breakdown or loss, or unfortunately never get to meet another single person who is right for them. But, tragically, church leaders in the UK and elsewhere still often put energy into hindering, rather than nurturing, committed relationships if these involve physically intimate same-sex love.

A century or so ago, it was widely believed that such partnerships would always be shallow or damaging and that the Bible clearly ruled them out. It has become evident over the years that neither is true.  Indeed, numerous theologians continue to make the case for acceptance, with which many churchgoers agree. Yet senior clergy or church elders have often avoided admitting this, so as not to upset people they think are important in their worshipping community.

Sometimes they have suggested friendship as an alternative. However, the lockdown has highlighted just how nurturing touch can be, along with the intimacy of sharing space and the joys and disciplines of life together. It is true that self-sacrifice may well at times be needed, as in the case of the ward manager and her young son, but this is always to protect those in need rather than appeasing the powerful. Jesus repeatedly demonstrated this himself in the Gospels.

Sadly, for many lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex people, building close friendships is that much harder.  This is especially true if they have been taught from an early age to believe that their  identity is at core shameful, and that their tenderest feelings and creativity fundamentally wrong. Hiding or continually apologising for one’s God-given self can get in the way of connecting with others and using one’s gifts to nurture them.

Many churches are indeed affirming at a local level. However, after the pandemic, Christian leaders may undermine the chances of sharing “good news” if they continue to give the impression that the Church is prejudiced against certain groups.

All Creation Interconnected

At the same time, the spread of COVID-19 has highlighted how the whole of humankind is interconnected and that we are part of a wider creation. For instance, it has become harder for society to ignore care home residents, disabled people in community settings and homeless people. At the same time, key workers – who are often low-paid or from ethnic minorities – have for once been seen as more than mere sources of labour, to be used and discarded.

Interdependence across the globe and reliance on the earth have become apparent. Trees, flowers and even household pets have all sustained people through their bleakest moments.

Recent events have highlighted the destructiveness of divisions and how environmental damage and war can make bad situations worse. If humanity is to survive and thrive, it is time to challenge the way the world is ordered – where wealth is hoarded or wasted while people starve and whilst power-games among leaders inflict suffering and death on millions.

Many Christian thinkers have addressed these issues, as have other scholars and activists who care about justice.  But, again, our leaders have often played down such matters to avoid offending those with the most riches, power or status.

Relationships matter, from the most intimate and personal to the connections among all of humankind. If the churches fully recognise this, they will then be able to care and witness more effectively in the post-coronavirus world.

by the Rt Revd Paul Bayes, Bishop of Liverpool and Chair of the Ozanne Foundation

A few weeks ago I broke a tooth. It was a big molar that had done great work for me for well over fifty years, and I broke it by biting a potato crisp. I didn’t bite hard, and there wasn’t a stone in the crisp. According to the dentist, the edge of the crisp had simply impacted on a thin crack, a fault-line in the tooth, as any crisp could have done for decades. All the fault-line needed was a piece of food in the wrong place at the wrong time – and I now have a broken tooth, and of course no immediate prospect of a filling.

The Coronavirus has more in common with a mouthful of broken glass than with a Salt and Vinegar crinkle. And it is impacting on all our personal and institutional lives at once. But the principle is the same; ways of being and living that have done us well for decades and centuries are suddenly under impact, and if there are fault-lines some of them will break, with no immediate prospect of a filling.

That’s where we are across the world; biting down on the hard thing, and finding what breaks. In a similar image the writer to Hebrews speaks of things that can be shaken “that is, created things” – and things that cannot be shaken (Hebrews 12:26ff). What is God saying to us about this as we are shaken today, as the fault-lines are tested in our lives as a society and as a Church? What from the past is indeed essential to us? What treasured ways of living will prove in the end to be utterly peripheral? And the constant, overarching question: how do we build a future that nourishes the human family as a whole?

All this was doubtless in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s mind when he meditated on the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and from his meditation produced his Easter sermon, in which he said this:

“Yet in the resurrection of Jesus, God lights a fire which calls us to justice, to live in humble generosity, to transform our societies. After so much suffering, so much heroism from key workers and the NHS, so much effort, once this epidemic is conquered here and round the world, we cannot be content to go back to what was before as if all is normal. There needs to be a resurrection of our common life, something that links to the old, but is different and more beautiful.”

In this unfolding Via Media series a range of people will be offering their sense of what that resurrection of our common life should be. For now as I reflect on my own response, two things come to the fore. The first is a basket of possibilities, and the second is the sense, which I need constantly to remember, that these are early days.

The basket of possibilities in my mind reminds me that I am a child of my time, a time which is passing. Nonetheless I know what I long to see. In values and feelings I long to see inequality broken, inclusion honoured and promoted, faith respected, diversity affirmed, love and joy celebrated and defended wherever it is truly found. In practical politics I long to see Universal Credit paused and repaired, a Universal Basic Income explored and properly trialled, austerity finally halted and rejected, the future of the planet finally treasured and preserved. In the Church I long to see doctrinal harshness reduced, love celebrated, quiet service honoured, worship and prayer restored, people fed, the lonely loved, the dying supported.

I continue to long for these things among so many more, and I commit myself to work to see them come. I will advocate for them and I hope for the courage and grace to oppose all that stands in their way.

Alongside this I must remember that in the new world, the world of the Coronavirus, these are early days. I rejoice that the testing of fault-lines has meant that some parts of my basket of possibilities may finally be affirmed and implemented, and I lament that other parts will struggle to prevail, especially in the face of corporate anxiety, institutional inequality, the desire to go back to a safe and unchanging past, the rush to give people certainties which may not help them in the end, when so much that seemed strong has already been shattered by the impact of the virus.

These are early days, and no one knows the answers to questions that the virus compels us to ask; questions the modern world has not had to ask before. Will I then have the patience and humility, whatever my basket of possibilities may contain, to refrain from closing down conversations too soon?

If we are to bring good out of the impact of evil, then we need a discipline; to sit patiently with uncertainty even though uncertainty makes us anxious. The poet John Keats famously explored this discipline in a letter, written of course in the language of his time:

“ …at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously — I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason…”

I hope we will be capable of that, and that we will not hurt one another in our haste. These are frightening days, but they are also early days. “We cannot be content to go back to what was before as if all is normal”; no indeed. Instead we must explore a new future for the world, and for the Church within the world, each one advocating for what matters most, but each one also listening hard before arriving at conclusions. That at any rate is my own commitment, as I seek to put the Archbishop’s words into action, and to work with others to discover a future that will surprise us all.