Offering shelter

Ron Ferguson considers the impact of the Coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic.

A COUPLE of years or so ago, who would have thought we would soon be reading about a pandemic that would kill many people in different parts of our world?

It would have seemed unthinkable. Yet it arrived, with a vengeance, bringing fear and anxiety in its wake. It brought other things as well, and we’ll look at that in a minute.

One doesn’t need an honours degree in history to know that the unthinkable can become very thinkable in a flash. Many previous generations have had to contend with plagues and other forms of devastation, taking the lives of countless people in a relatively short space of time. Our ancestors knew what it was to live constantly with a lurking expectation of instant visitations by self-appointed grim reapers – some of them claiming divine authority.

Up here in Orkney, the sight of Viking ships on the horizon did not leave people imagining that a Sunday school picnic was on the cards.

In more modern times, human beings – at least in the Western world – have generally felt more secure in the world (yet who would have predicted that a civilised and cultured nation at the heart of Europe would harbour people who would slaughter Jews, Romanays and gay people with apparent abandon?)

What the Coronavirus has done for our generation is to shatter the illusion that we are invincible, that we can control events, that our brilliant technologies can deliver us from evil. It has also exposed a vicious human tendency to look after one’s own interests when trouble strikes – the squalid fights over toilet rolls in supermarkets are a case in point. This modern plague also puts a question mark against our complacency and our pretensions. Sinner man is naked and has no place to run to when a radical crisis comes. One doesn’t need to be an uber-Calvinist to understand the biblical insistence that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

I mentioned earlier that the pandemic also brought other things in its wake. It triggered an avalanche of good things: acts of random kindness, sacrificial giving, heroism on the front line of the struggle, particularly by members of NHS staff – some working to the point of exhaustion. They modelled how to love each other from a distance. They challenged the unfettered individualism so visible in society, the “Me First” mentality that undermines any sense of loyalty to a wider community. To use a theological metaphor, at our best we are members of one another and we flourish best when we care about one another. Surely we won’t have to continue battling to make sure that the NHS is adequately funded.

I want to recommend a brilliant book. Titled In the Shelter: finding a home in the world, it is written by Pádraig O Tuama, a brilliant Roman Catholic poet-theologian who was leader of the Corrymeela Community, a peace and justice group working for reconciliation in Northern Ireland. It is based around an old Irish proverb: ‘It is in the shelter of each other that the people live’.

What the coronavirus has done for our generation is to shatter the illusion that we are invincible, that we can control events, that our brilliant technologies can deliver us from evil.

This is a title for our times. Sometimes we should offer shelter to those who need it, other times we need shelter ourselves.

It is sad if we need a virus to teach us the meaning of virtue. So be it.

This article appears in the May 2020 Issue of Life and Work

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