Light against Shadow

It is an awe-striking thing to see our self-assured, hyper-ingenious civilisation brought so completely to a standstill.  An old peril has returned to stalk the world, and has swept over us with breathtaking speed.  Maybe January’s floods distracted me, but it was not really until the Coronavirus reached Lombardy that I started paying it close attention — and this was on the advice of a friend with whom I had been hoping to make my first visit to Italy in April, and who, having lived through the SARS epidemic in Singapore in 2003, had some idea of the approaching danger.  His early alertness has been completely vindicated.  (On the other hand, the pandemic really has erupted with extraordinary speed, and I don’t think that we need blame ourselves if we were taken by surprise.)  All in all, it was not until perhaps two and a half weeks ago that the scale of the crisis dawned on me, and I realised that it was only a matter of time before it engulfed us in Britain too.

Since then, an uneasy stillness has grown gradually heavier and heavier over our lives.  Even a fortnight ago, central London was perceptibly emptying out, which means I suppose that it was merely very busy rather than, as under normal conditions, pandemonium.  Road traffic subsided noticeably: one evening, on my way back home from the station, peals of church bells came to me in a street where I have never before heard them over the noise, and a blackbird’s song sounded with startling clarity from a branch high above me in the dusk.  Long before the streets fell silent, though, the atmosphere had changed: all was sober, muted, as if we were all marking some joyless anti-Christmas.  Before we were sent home from work a week ago last Tuesday, the air in the office was ionised with anxiety, and however hard we tried, we could hardly talk of anything but the virus.  We knew the wave was coming, and we were waiting for it to break over us.  Now it is upon us, and suddenly, I think still to our disbelief, we are all stuck.  Nothing can happen; nothing can move.  We find ourselves (in the Clerk of Oxford’s words) in the ‘longest Lent of our lives’.

Now the skies are empty of aeroplanes, and the torrents of traffic that usually come stampeding down my road have abated, most strikingly at night.  The new hush is slightly disconcerting, but to one who finds London’s noise immensely wearing, not unwelcome at all.  Being cut off from work, the pub, the rest of the country and from church is still taking some getting used to, though, and what an odd sight it was to see the Prime Minister leaning over his desk on Monday (23rd) to grab our lapels and tell us all to keep to our houses.  His instructions on how to wash our hands a few weeks ago was a strange enough sight… the only other public leader I can think of with such a strong opinion on this subject was Pontius Pilate.

The coronavirus had set me thinking about light and shadow even before I heard the words of last Sunday’s second reading ringing around the walls of Fisher House, the Catholic chaplaincy of the University of Cambridge, over the Internet and out through speakers into our living room.  "Be like children of light," read Fr. Chase, Lent-robed in pixellated purple, and the words of St. Paul as fiery as ever. "Try to discover what the Lord wants of you, having nothing to do with the futile works of darkness but exposing them by contrast… Anything exposed to the light will be illuminated, and anything illuminated turns into light".  Without a doubt, a new darkness has entered the world, but what happens when it meets the light is, as ever, far from straightforward: it is a mystery, one that we in our day are not the first to notice.  Already we can see that its effect is not simply to cast a shadow over things, but to embolden the light where it shines, or to show where it is thrown at different angles, in rays we would never normally see.  What the shadow brings is causing us great suffering: the unexpected and hastened deaths, the pain of the stricken, the fear of the vulnerable (and ours on their behalf), the anxiety of doctors and nurses before the unknown, the ruin of businesses and commerce, the evaporation of holidays and weddings and grand projects, and the load added to the existing troubles of so many (for example, are there people in Worcestershire, Shropshire, Yorkshire and the valleys of South Wales now confined to homes still damaged by flood?).  The shadow is real enough, and may be as grave a menace as we fear.  But it does not go unanswered.

I can see many silver linings being fanned into brilliance.  One is that we have just had an opportunity to prove to ourselves how much we value human life, and I think we have acquitted ourselves pretty well.  Are we prepared to bring the economy to a grinding halt in order to save life, even fragile life?  Yes, we are.  This is worth knowing, it seems to me.

Secondly, we are building new solidarity.  The virus is everybody’s common foe, so our common purpose is to defeat it: we are all on the same side.  What is more, it is a silly little cell with knobbly bits which has no feelings.  There is no other side to the argument; we have no need to consider its point of view: it must be vanquished.  So there is a strange relief with which we can throw ourselves wholeheartedly into that one uniting purpose, even if the noblest pinnacle of our sacrifice is to sit in a chair at home.  In tight corners we find out moral choices sharpened and starkened.  They are not always made easier, but sometimes the right course of action at least becomes clearer, and I think that is happening here.  Once or twice in the past week a rare feeling has caught me, one which I remember once shivering surprisingly down my spine when I came across a photograph of a gigantic, catastrophic pall of smoke over London after a Blitz bombing raid: the East End burning.  Even at a remove of seventy-five years, a cold intoxicating thrill swept over me, the beautiful clarity of war that an enemy brings about by placing himself wholly in the wrong, and us, together, gloriously, in the right.  This can be, of course, a highly dangerous feeling, and one which can be transmuted in seconds into fire-blooded vengefulness.  But as long as we limit our vengeance to the virus, maybe this new just war will do us good, and unify us, straighten our priorities, and remind us of our common humanity.  So it is that, paradoxically, even in this grave situation, there is a sense in which I feel more at home in Britain now than I usually do.

The East End of London in flames, 7th September, 1940. 
From www.ghmartinez.blogspot.com.

But we are forging new and valuable bonds in quieter ways as well.  The Internet is being used with tremendous energy and imagination in order to help the vulnerable and overcome our collective isolation.  (I would include the Church in this, which I think has responded commendably to this crisis, as I rather suspected it would).  There have been the email circulars that various firms have sent to ‘customers and colleagues’ alike, so that civilians like me overhear their thanks to their staff.  (The cynical might scoff, but I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and presume that the message is sincere.)  A colleague at work told me that in the hour and a half she had spent queuing in Morrison’s the previous Sunday (15th March), she spoke to more of her neighbours than in all the fifteen years she has lived in that part of London.  And then there was the extraordinary occurrence in my street on Thursday evening: the audible and visible observance of a national round of applause in support of the National Health Service.  Normally, this sort of thing simply doesn’t happen on our road, in which, one way and another, neighbourhood sentiment is on the patchy side.  Jubilees, Royal Weddings and Remembrancetide had all passed by unmarked, but now applause rang out from the front gardens and windows of neighbours who do not really know each other that well, but had found a common cause.  It helped that we were all bound to be at home anyway, and of course there was no traffic to compete with, but it was still a moving and heartening occasion.  For the first time I have ever seen, there was a general exchange of ‘Good night’ across the street.

I think a time of enforced monasticism will do us no harm, either, and maybe we will all emerge from this strange time a little wiser than before.  There are those of us whose lives only a world-wide pandemic could slow down!  Perhaps we will find new aspects of life to notice.  For instance, we might observe the strange paradox that, even as this virus reminds us of our physical, incarnated nature — that we really are one body — those of us not actually struck down by it are experiencing it as a malevolent spiritual force, invisible and silent.  The material and the spiritual are not so easily distinguished as we think.

In passing, I think I will note some other miscellaneous aspects of this crisis that have struck me.  For instance, that China has sent doctors to Italy and medical testing kits to Spain.  Also, that it is interesting how many prominent people have gone down with the illness: politicians, public figures, and even the Prince of Wales.  And is this the moment at which the phrase ‘to stay home’ (American, surely?) will supplant the British ‘to stay at home’ in our speech on this side of the Atlantic?  Finally, one more reason to hope: it has occurred to me that the pandemic will spark ambitions in scores of youngsters to become pathologists or doctors.  So, although a time of fear and uncertainty like this ‘has the capacity to bring out both the best and the worst of our human nature’, as our Archbishop John Wilson has said, I think we can have every hope that this darkness too will be ‘exposed by contrast’ with the light, and driven away.

I hope and pray that all readers, and those dear to them, are safe and well and as cheerful as we can be in these times.

In the original version of this article I stated mistakenly that the words of St. Paul, ‘Be like children of light…’, the Second Reading for Sunday 22nd March, had been read by Fr. Mark Langham; actually they were read by Fr. Chase Pepper, who was con-celebrating.