Life in the pandemic XXIX Keswick in the transition…

Once again, for the second time in the pandemic, we have made our way to England’s beautiful Lake District, to the market town of Keswick. The scenery is undoubtedly spectacular, the weather tropical (this year at least), and the town itself charming. These would all be good reasons to spend a week’s holiday here. But that is not primarily why we’ve come. As regular readers (and you know who you are) of this blog will know, we are here for the Keswick Convention. For the last few years this has become part of our summer routine. I noted before that it might strike some as an odd way to spend a summer week in the 21^st Century. It is “old fashioned” in the sense that it has been running for over one hundred years, and some of the first attendees would be able to recognise what is going on. It would also strike some as old fashioned in that the subject matter has remained constant over that period. Yes, there have been changes in style, and some in format. But at its core, the key activity is the straightforward explanation of chunks of a very “old fashioned” book – the Bible. And there remains that same conviction – that the reason this is worth doing is that we are listening to God, whose Word this is (again, a very “old fashioned” notion).

There is of course one big difference this year. We are still in the midst of a global pandemic. Not that this is Keswick’s first pandemic, having survived the 1918 Spanish Flu. Last year, while we still came to Keswick (to walk and read), there were no meetings, although there was an online offering. But this year, once again, several thousand gather twice a day, for the morning “Bible Reading” and the evening “Celebration”. There are the now familiar markers of the pandemic – testing and masking. But transition, as well as virus, is in the air. On the first Monday of the first week, the legal restrictions introduced in England (mandatory mask wearing and restrictions on the numbers able to meet either indoors or outdoors) were removed. One of the most onerous restrictions on Christians meeting together was also removed. For fifteen months or more, we haven’t been able to sing together. So last night we sang for all we were worth. But this is transition, so we sang behind our masks. It was still worth it.

We’ve only reached the transition of course, and the pandemic is still with us. But it is perhaps time to reflect on what it might have taught us about ourselves. There have been, and will continue to be, dark days. Lives have been lost, families have been bereaved. Many others have been scarred by the experience of days or weeks (or in some cases months) of hospital treatment, gasping for breath. And not just scarred in their memories. We’ve yet to see the full impact of long Covid, a condition that will afflict hundreds of thousands in the UK alone. But we go on, because we have to. However, for the Christian this is (or should be) about much more than biology, medicine and politics. When the media talks about lessons to be learned, what is usually meant is how governments and health systems have coped with a pandemic; what was done well, what was done badly. An examination of these issues is clearly worthwhile And in the same vein all of us can perhaps reflect on how we responded, following guidelines or otherwise, wearing masks, getting vaccinated and the like. But this is thinking at  a particular level. And if it’s the only thinking that’s going on, we’re likely to draw only partial conclusions and learn partial lessons.

It has always seemed folly to me to draw direct lines between awful events, even big ones, and the judgment of God (discussed previously here). I don’t have the insight of an Amos or Jeremiah. But the pandemic is an event of global scale. It might, and probably will, be explained eventually by things like human skulduggery, incompetence, and individual and collective stupidity. But the ability of a virus that, while not benign is certainly not the most dangerous, to bring complete global dislocation must at a minimum say something about the basic fragility of modern life. Indeed, the pandemic has surely alerted us that to the fact that some of the most welcome aspects of modern life have amplified the dangers posed by the virus itself. International air travel, a boon to education, commerce and leisure in recent years, has facilitated rapid, global spread of the virus and its variants. The internet and social media, which have so improved communication and information transmission, have been used to transmit conspiracy theories and vaccine scepticism, depressing take-up in some quarters, with the attendant increased risk to health and life. Yes, science and technology have provided remarkably effective vaccines in a record short time, and this has saved lives. But the basic point stands – modern life is fragile, more fragile than we realised, and perhaps in some ways more fragile than in the past.

The virus is one evolving global tragedy, but it come at the time of of another - climate change. The UK Met office issued its first “extreme heat warning” this week. This follows record hot temperatures in North America, and freak summer floods in continental Europe. These events have either cost lives or are projected too. This is on the back of other disturbing evidence of the climate change scientists have been warning about for decades. The human cause of climate change is much less disputable than the proximate cause of the pandemic. Over decades rather than years, we face the severe consequences of what we have been doing to the planet. The scale of the action required to mitigate the effects of these action has begun to foment protests. But there is no sign of most of us really getting our heads round what is required to avoid what is coming. Much of this can be understood in (far from simple) naturalistic terms. Models can be built. Projections made. But are there deeper lessons?

For what its worth, here is my tentative thinking so far. The Bible closes with the book of Revelation, in which, among other things, a series of disasters is described. I had always thought of these as occurring over short periods of time, with a purpose that was quite obvious to those experiencing them. As a reader of Revelation I know that they serve to demonstrate to the whole of humanity that ignoring God, rebelling against Him, and living without reference to Him is self-defeating and ultimately only leads to unescapable judgment. Unfortunately, this isn’t the lesson that is learned from those suffering them. However, Revelation is highly symbolic and there is nothing in the text that demands that what is outlined occurs over short periods. So could infolding disasters like the pandemic and climate change, be two such calls to reassess where we stand in relation to the God who created the world that we are despoiling?

We appear to be in a transition out of the pandemic at least. The practical, political and medical lessons should all be learned. We’ll see if they are. But the clamour and rush for a return to “normality” should not drown out deeper lessons that could be, and perhaps need to be learned.