Contagion and Pestilence: my sermon this week

       

      As I imagine millions of others have, I've felt depressed in this time of special measures brought about by the advent of  COVID-19. I think this is especially so because it is dawning on me that, science or no science, no-one really understands just what is going on.

What I feel, even if, like the science, I don’t understand it, is how much we miss not just our friends but those people who are our nodding acquaintances as we go about - or used to go about - our everyday lives.  I met such a person by Totnes’s ancient Northgate while on the walk I take every day as part of my ‘permitted’ exercise. He lived alone, and he wasn't complaining about it, but he had discovered that he missed people.  “After forbearing these weeks of self isolation I find that I am missing those I meet in the café or the library or wherever. Whether I live on my own or not, I am a human being. I crave the company of other human beings. Sometimes I think this imposed self-isolation is more like moral blackmail and then I feel guilty for having this thought.”

We said our farewells at the Northgate in the shadow of Totnes  castle and I wondered how many plagues the castle had stood sentinel over. I wondered too how the experience of our current pestilence compared with those who had lived through them in the past. 

Looking towards the Northgate, Totnes

When I returned home, in order to satisfy my curiosity, I looked through my copies of the diaries of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys who both lived in London at the time of the plague in 1665-1666. I discovered there had been fear and terror among all the population, and those who suffered most lived in the most insanitary, crowded accommodation while the threat of poverty compelled them to stay at work in order to feed themselves and their families.. 

The wealthy took every opportunity to take themselves and their families out of city to their country residences away from the worst ravages of the plague but for most business went on as usual. It is remarkable reading the diaries to find that Evelyn and Pepys, who as government officials remained in the city, seemed  just as  anxious, if not more so, about a naval battle with the Dutch than they were with the plague.  Businesses across the city closed down not as a consequence of any government edict such as we have today but because the owners and their employees had succumbed to the plague. Mainly the poor and the agèd died. Not much changes.

     During the 1665-6 plague in London  -  a city which then had a population of 460,000  -   more than 75.000 souls perished.  Every day bodies were carted away to mass graves. 

    

London, 1666

A high proportion of the poor and the vulnerable have died in our current plague and this may lead us to question the mantras we hear daily from government ministers, senior scientists and medical officers like “This virus is indiscriminate,” or, “We’re all in this together.” My first thought was to go along with these - as they seemed to me -  truisms, but as the weeks have passed I have become less certain. We are seeing patterns develop related to who actually dies and these are beginning to offer some answers to the question, "Why are they dying? Of course the answer is, "Because they caught the virus." Yet we are becoming aware, if we did not know already, that there other issues which make a considered answer to the question more complex. The Government, as we see by its manipulation of statistics would prefer that we did not concern ourselves with these complexities.

The following is an excerpt from Jacqueline Rose’s impressive essay review published in the current issue of the London Review of Books, “Pointing the Finger.” which challenges  government propaganda and begins to eke out some painful aspects of the pandemic which our government, our community in the United Kingdom, and the world community should confront.

“Today the insistence is that ‘we’ are all in this together, even as social disparity  -  the frailty of that ‘we’  -  has never been so obvious: in that the gulf that exists between families and those housed in airless, cladded tower blocks, a distinction disregarded by police rounding on people in parks; between the jogging culture of North London and the slums of Bangladesh, where the idea of social distancing , let alone soap and hand sanitisers in abundance, is a sick joke; between the medical care given to the prime minister, assigned an ICU bed at a time of acute shortage while still fit enough - or so we were initially told - to govern and the negligence suffered by Thomas Harvey, a nurse from East London who had worked in the NHS for twenty years, whose family were advised he didn’t need to go to hospital (they called four times) before he died gasping for air in his bathroom.”

       COVID-19 may be indiscriminate but in the way we set ourselves up as a community we are guilty of discriminating. We are not all in this together.

      We may have lessons to learn that we have not yet formulated, nevertheless, despite all the human disorganisation and frailties that will inevitably obstruct our way, we should be determined to seek these lessons out.  They must lead us to learning how to look after each other and how to share things more fairly. This pandemic has thrown a great deal up in the air. We should not let it all fall back in the same place.
     I hear people say that this will be the lesson drawn after all this is over and that altruism will outweigh cynicism. If so, it cannot but be a mighty struggle and this time we should not allow the powerful and the selfish to inherit the earth. 

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Notes  

Jacqueline Rose “Pointing the Finger” in London Literary Review  Vol. 42 No. 9   pp3-6  May 2020

This is an essay review of  The Plague by Albert Camus.

The Diary of John Evelyn Vol II, 1665-1706

The Diary of Samuel Pepys (Complete) 1660-1683