The Stark Choice that COVID sets before us

In the old days they would have seen this as a judgment. With a global death toll that has now passed 1 million, this plague would have been interpreted by our forebears as divine punishment or a sign of the end times. Not many people are seeing it that way these days, but maybe our elders had a point. The Greek word for judgment is Krisis – crisis. The great book of judgment in the Bible is called the Apocalypse – the book of Revelation. Judgment was not only seen as punishment, but more as a moment of crisis, a revelation of where we are heading, impressing the stakes of a crucial decision upon us.

At the start of lockdown, in towns, villages and cities across the country, people of all faiths and none volunteered time and money, neighbours knocked on the door of elderly people to offer to do their shopping, family members arranged Zoom calls to keep up the spirits of isolated relatives. One of the churches in my patch began to think about how to respond to the needs that were quickly becoming obvious - increasing levels of food poverty, financial anxiety and loss of employment. They started delivering some food boxes in their local area, and then started connecting with a network of other churches across the country who wanted to do something similar. They worked out a delivery system to help churches to become grass-roots centres of support for people struggling to put food on the table They eventually applied for and received government funding and to date have delivered over 3 million meals through various partners on the ground - churches, homeless projects, schools, foodbanks and the rest. So far, in this one initiative alone, around 250 churches and 1000 other organisations from various parts of civil society have joined together to provide emergency food, debt advice and employment training through over 50 clusters in cities and towns across England.

The Clap for Carers and the NHS, the neighbourhood WhatsApp groups, the realisation that we need to act together to get through this, were all part of a surging of civic life that took us by surprise. Now these were things we maybe should have been doing all along, but the virus galvanised us into action and compassion. 

It gave us a brief revelation of what our social life could be. The Prime Minister himself was so struck by this that he asked Danny Kruger MP to write up a report on how to capture this outpouring of civic virtue. I remember the same sense after the Grenfell Tower fire which happened in one of our parishes, yet it wasn’t long before the desire to do something to help dissipated along with the cooling of the autumn days. Reports are useful, and Danny Kruger’s has some very good ideas, yet perhaps the roots of our civic lethargy go deeper. 

In his magisterial book ‘Sources of the Self’, the philosopher Charles Taylor shows how in the ancient world, people would look outside themselves for moral power or guidance – to God, or to natural law, the Tao or the Platonic Ideas – each of which gave a different, but wider structure within which human life was lived. There was a providential order to the world, that saw nature as a vast interlocking system, which ultimately worked towards the conservation & wellbeing of each of its parts. Since the eighteenth century however, we have turned to look, not outside, but inside ourselves to find moral truth and wisdom - we no longer look towards the heavens but into our hearts. In what Taylor calls ‘the subjective turn’ in modern culture, people in the west began to turn away from the idea of an external moral order, any sense of what Marilynne Robinson has called the sheer givenness of things, from the notion that there was a moral and ontological structure to the world before we ever got here. 

In this historically and geographically particular take on the world, the ultimate moral demand is to be true to yourself, by which we tend to mean an inner nature which can only be self-discerned or defined. The source of moral power we seek is not in the natural order, or the law of God, or even Goodness, as Iris Murdoch thought, but in our own inner selves and identities. The result is a turning inwards, away from sources of life outside ourselves, towards an ever-increasing sense of isolation, alienated not just from the natural world, but also from each other in increasingly secluded bubbles of personal autonomy. All of our moral trajectory over recent centuries has been towards the primacy of the autonomous individual, free from the demands of others to pursue their own path in life, as long as they don’t hurt anyone else. This view ensures personal liberties, but it makes us view each other as at best limitations, or even threats to our own personal freedoms, goals and desires, and gives us no good reason to feel obliged to care for our neighbours. 

Coronavirus has given us a glimpse of the end of this path. It has shrunk our existence. We no longer travel very far, we give strangers a wide berth as we walk along the pavement, fearing them as a potential source of disease. As restrictions increase, we don’t mix with our neighbours, locked down in our own homes and living rooms, watching an endless loop of grim news bulletins, charting the spread of the disease. We cannot even see each others’ faces. The face is that part of us that displays our inner selves and emotions, more than anything else. Our faces make us, at least in part, transparent to each other. Yet as we slip the elastic bands of our masks behind our ears, we are hidden away from our neighbours. We become more of a mystery to each other as we stumble our way through muffled conversations, trying desperately to see what is going on inside each other’s hearts and heads, with only the eyes to give us a clue. 

A friend who lives alone reported that she had not touched another human being in six months, something that had a big impact upon her own mental health and wellbeing. In a world with no parties, no large gatherings of people to enjoy music or sport together, even public gathering for worship closed down for a while, our horizons shrank to our living rooms, our homes, our computer screens, the walk around the block, our immediate households. Lockdown originally had its novelty value, and introverts particularly enjoyed the enforced isolation, the lack of pressure to go out and be sociable, yet even they soon began to long for some human contact. Martin Luther had a phrase to describe the human condition – ‘the heart curved in upon itself’ – and we are seeing a glimpse of what that looks like.  

A crisis like Grenfell or the Coronavirus can galvanise us into action, yet, so often it remains optional. When it becomes inconvenient, we slip back to old ways, behind our four walls and our isolated lives. The problem is that we don’t have a strong enough overarching structure of belief to make it permanent. We are no longer ‘embedded’ as Taylor would put it, in a natural order that makes demands upon us. We no longer have a sense of obligation to love our neighbour because the natural law, the structure of the universe, or the will of God demand it.  

If these past months have given us an alarming glimpse into one future, a future of ever-increasing isolation, our lives shrunk to the scope of four walls, it has also allowed us a glimpse of another way of connectedness - of learning to lose our self-obsession and becoming more interested in our neighbours’ needs and worth rather than our own, living with respect for a world that we did not create. It gives an opportunity to discover a way of life that is ultimately far more satisfying than the self-help mantras and the dogmas of personal wellbeing. After all, the advice to make a priority of loving God and neighbour was never intended as some heteronomous demand to be reluctantly obeyed, but a description of the way in which we flourish best as human beings. But it will need more than an occasional burst of public-spiritedness. It will need a fundamental shift of our moral and spiritual assumptions. 

The problem is that we can’t do this ourselves. We can’t turn our curved-in nature outwards any more than a flower, by sheer self-will, can turn itself upwards. Just as a flower has to be drawn upwards by the sun, the source of life and heat, so too we can only be turned outwards by something more powerful and compelling than the hurts and anxieties that constrict and constrain us. It can’t be delivered by a belief that this world is a blank, faceless impassive place, indifferent to us or to our future. It can only be sustained by believing that this world emerged out of something greater – that it emerged out of Love. This alone enables this flowering of our true selves, not turned inwards in self-obsession, but outwards in love and fascination towards God and our neighbours. 

Perhaps this is a moment of judgment after all. Like in so many other ways, COVID-19 has sharpened the choice that lies before us. We could continue turning inwards to find meaning in our own introspection. Or we could find a lasting sense of connection, a new moral energy, or even find our true selves – paradoxically by losing them, as Jesus taught. This will require a deep personal and cultural conversion. This is the choice, the invitation to lose our crippling self-obsession, and learn to love God and our neighbour - the person we find in the house, street or queue next to us, whoever they are - and to become truly happy in the process.