A message from the Dean - 8 January
Dear Friends,
I wish us all a better New Year – though we live in difficult and challenging times. Thanks to all of you who have joined the Cathedral for worship either in person or on-line. Our Advent and Christmas services had to be a mixture of the innovative with the expected. We were forced to cancel the Illuminations, at which we customarily welcome twenty thousand people, yet public safety and well-being has to be everyone’s priority just now. What was planned for Christmas 2020 can get an even more appreciated showing in December 2021. It’s vital we now concentrate on the threat we face.
The current news is very bad. Infection rates are soaring and the loss of life is terrible. Our Health Service is struggling with the rate of admissions. What can we do?
1. Whilst regretting the hesitations, ambiguities and delays by the Government in taking appropriate public health actions (such as an earlier lockdown and timely school closures), we’ve all got a role to play in keeping one another and ourselves safe. Staying at home, not mixing, observing social distance, avoiding unnecessary travel are basic strategies. Carrying a mask (and wearing it!) is as vital as remembering not to leave the house without your keys. Eighty per cent of the population is extrovert – getting a buzz and energy from human interaction and company. Prolonged restrictions for extroverts seem like prolonged agony. Introverts – people who get recharged by having time to themselves – might find lockdown a little easier to handle. Whatever our psychology there’s a need to stay in touch. My advice? Work the telephone. Although electronic communications are great, swift and visual, a good old-fashioned voice conversation, person to person, has real warmth. Yes, I like Zoom, Teams and even Skype, but I realised over the Christmas break, how nice it was to hear from family and friends.
Our voices tell us a lot about one another. As we have two ears, it’s good to use them. Checking in with family, friends, colleagues and neighbours can be a real boost.
2. Practically, the current situation means that the Cathedral will only open for public worship twice each day: the Eucharist (Holy Communion) at 12.30pm from Monday to Saturday and at 10.30am on Sundays. Evening Prayer will be held each day at 5.30pm. The Cathedral will open fifteen minutes before each service and close promptly afterwards. You are kindly requested to leave promptly and not gather in groups. Please continue the good practice of wearing a mask, sanitising your hands on entry and exit, keeping a safe (2 metre) distance between each other and completing a track and trace form every time you enter the building. The Clergy will wear masks to administer Holy Communion in your place, and there will be only one of us in the building for any service (except the Sunday Eucharist when two of us will officiate). It is rather important we don’t act as unwitting spreaders of the virus and so we too must practice a rather more rigorous discipline of isolation and distancing.
Other Cathedrals are adopting measures similar to ours. Alas, we found opening for Private Prayer difficult to oversee. We don’t want to put staff and volunteers at risk and some of the public found restrictions on movement and keeping distance difficult to observe.
3. These are testing times on every front. The situation in the USA is the outcome of four years of consistent lying, the whipping up of White Supremacist sentiment and then the telling of a very big lie – that the Presidential election was “stolen”. Compound all this with the disappearance of local and regional news in the States and people’s reliance on social media, which is in turn manipulated by powerful algorithms giving people the stories they want to hear, then the slide into post-truth demagoguery is inevitable. It has happened. There can be no such thing as a post-truth democracy. Only tyranny. It’s a time for us to be on our guard. The methods of telling a convenient lie, buying into scarcely admitted prejudice, then spinning more half-truths, aided and abetted by media moguls and social media, can take us to dark and dangerous places very quickly. Conceivably, we are perhaps already there in this country also.
Christians are citizens of two kingdoms, this world order and the Kingdom of God. It is part of our duty to strive to bring this world into closer alliance with God’s reign and purpose. St Peter puts it well: “Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith”. (1 Peter 5: 8-9).
We are all on the front-line right now. We can help one another through prudent action and behaviour during this pandemic and we can stay alert to half-truths, downright lies, and virulent attacks on those who tell us things we don’t always want to hear. May our Christian hackles rise when people of different races and cultures, or different socio-economic groups get blamed or targeted for our hatred.
Beside the pandemic (so eagerly denounced by President Trump as the “Chinese Virus” and seen as an avoidable inconvenience) we have a moral climate that is content to let democracy and the rule of law waste away in favour of what is delusional, and from a religious point of view, idolatrous. Once we put self on the throne, there’s no room for God and neighbour. We have much to pray about and understand.
With my prayers, blessing, and love,
Adrian
PS taking a post-Christmas break until 21 January. Normal service will then resume.