A message from the Dean - 1 May 2020
Dear Friends,
First, a warm 'thank you' to all of you who have responded to my weekly letters. It has been good to hear from you and I've appreciated your comments. I have also found the discipline of collecting my thoughts once a week very useful.
During the course of the lockdown all meetings have gone virtual and I am now heartily fed up with looking at myself on Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Although we can all be grateful for the way technology keeps us connected and working, the artificiality of the medium begins to grate. Being present to one another accounts for sixty-five per cent of communication, so it's no wonder we find it easier than ever just now to 'mis-communicate' and not pick up on everything that is trying to be expressed. All the more reason to hope lockdown will only last until safety permits us a little more social interaction, whether or not we have to wear masks when we emerge. I can see a new commercial opportunity for the Cathedral embroiders and sewers - a new production line of facemasks in liturgical colours, stamped with the St. Chad Cross and the Cathedral logo, bearing our motto 'In servi Deo et laetare' - serve God and be joyful. (Did you spot the mistake in last week's letter - a typo cast 'laetare' as 'lactare'? Our motto has nothing to do with milk production I assure you.) As we come out of this crisis, we will need to be enterprising and imaginative.
Five weeks into lockdown there is a perceptible restlessness, reported in the media and observable in the number of people on the streets and parks. There is also a new mood in the country. Captain Tom (now Hon. Colonel Tom), the nation's favourite centenarian, has captured the public's imagination with his walk for the NHS and the £30m his effort has raised. After three and a half years of divisive Brexit argument that has brought out the worst in us, we seem to have rediscovered our sense of community and obligation to one another.
In a week's time we will be remembering the peace that came to Europe in May 1945. It was the end of almost six exhausting years of total war. (Incidentally, the UK didn't clear its war debts until the late 1990s - so if we fear the debts racked up by the Covid-19 crisis, please keep a sense of proportion). I have really vivid recollections of the stories my parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents told us of VE day. Winston Churchill ordered the breweries to increase production so that everyone could celebrate. There were street parties and dancing in public squares. One of my former parishioners showed me a photograph of her on VE day: a young woman wearing a sailor's hat and sitting on top of one of the lions in Trafalgar Square! The nation went on a state-sanctioned bender.
The seventy-fifth anniversary of VE day next Friday will be a more muted affair. However, we have launched an initiative with many other cathedrals: 'The Big Picnic for Hope'. Everyone is invited to have a picnic in their own gardens, homes or virtually with their family and friends. It's a celebration of the peace that followed a bitter conflict with a dehumanising and genocidal ideology, a chance to toast the future with our hope, to look gratefully at the present and to share our generosity with people who have been left threatened or impoverished by the current epidemic. More details are on the Cathedral's website and you might even see a mention of the event in the press and broadcast media. Just as cathedrals threw open their doors and rang their bells in 1945, I'm hoping the Great Picnic will be a ritual celebration that catches the mood of solidarity, support and sheer human kindness that has characterised these last five weeks.
The historian and commentator Lord (Professor) Peter Hennessy (whom we once welcomed to Lichfield as a preacher on Remembrance Sunday) remarked on this new mood in the country in a recent Radio 4 broadcast talk and in his regular column in the weekly journal 'The Tablet'. He wondered if it was a new 1945 moment. In World War 2 there were 60,000 civilian deaths over nearly six years of war. In 2020 we have seen almost 26,000 deaths associated with Covid-19 in just over six weeks. The severity of the casualty rate is colossal and it rightly makes us want to re-think how we have lived and what we have lived for. Is it fanciful, Hennessy asks, to hear in the cheering and clapping every Thursday at 8:00p.m. "the sound of a people and nation re-discovering their better selves? The question is: can it - will it - be sustained post-corona and be turned into something more durable?" We did it 75 years ago. The post-World War II governments, Labour and Conservative, were pledged to a programme of reform and social betterment that Hennessy says "was powered by a formidable never again impulse". The path to reconstruction had to be cleared of five giants: want, disease, ignorance, squalor, idleness, famously itemised by Sir William Beveridge in his ground-breaking report of 1942.
I share Peter Hennessy's view that we need a vision for a new deal, a new social contract for Britain. I don't think the current mood will evaporate. There has been a real shake-up in our attitudes: we have rediscovered the common good, our lives are part of a fabric from which we cannot disengage, the political weather is being changed by what we value, and, as this glorious spring has shown us, health is membership not only of a human race but a healthy planet, its water, its soil, its air.
Can we see those in the political class, asks Hennessy, "who can conjure the words to convey the spirit (of the moment) and the skills to turn it into policy and practice?" The corona crisis has seen a terrible death toll, but it has reacquainted us with the "better angels of nature".
In the Church we have wisdom to share about how life can be lived and we can offer safe space for some of the necessary dialogue to take place. You could ask why has the national Church been so quiet during the crisis? We have been very cautious - church closures have been necessary as part of public health measures, but banning streaming from churches (the opposite of what the Catholic Church has done) has given the impression that we don't care. There hasn't been much official recognition of the change in public mood nor thorough and persistent cheering for all the signs of God's Kingdom coming to birth when we see manifestations of charity and love.
So, for the avoidance of doubt, here at Lichfield let me say we will do all we can to restore worship as soon as we can in whatever graduated steps we can.
Let me also say that the Christian Church's wisdom on the practical concerns of today might find some traction if we all understand what those principles are. Here they are in headline form (I'll talk more about them in the months ahead):
- The fundamental nature of human dignity
- The Common Good
- Solidarity
- Subsidiarity
- Social Sin
- The preferential option for the poor
These principles could give us really penetrating and interesting things to say and contribute as we try and remodel our lives, society and economy post Covid-19.
With my love, prayers and blessings,
Adrian