‘The disease questions our control over life and death and shakes the psychological basis of our economic and social order.’ Photo: by Aron Visuals on Unsplash.
In your own times: Frank Regan picks up where Ecclesiastes left off
‘We have lived through times that philosophers, poets, theologians and others will be pondering and arguing over far into the future.’
Ecclesiastes is my favourite book of the Hebrew Bible. He sounds like a dour, grim, melancholic, seen-it-all cynic. He sounds just like me, and maybe like you.
We are all familiar with his chapter three, about how there is a given time for everything. He gives a long list of time’s moments: for loving or hating; for peace or war; for tears or laughter; for dancing or mourning and so on. He refers it all to God who has made everything fitting in its time. We cannot embrace within our understanding all that God is working from beginning to end. Yet God has set eternity in the human heart. There, the author seems to say, the search for understanding takes place.
We have lived through moments in our time that philosophers, poets, theologians and others will be pondering and arguing over far into the future. Ecclesiastes debunks our possibly delusional hopes. He debunks the conventional wisdom saying it is meaningless. Yet something in us persists in thinking that the time is pregnant with meaning to be discerned moment to moment, day to day.
This is a time for dying, for tears, for mourning. We are in the grip of a pandemic. More than 48,000 of us have died in the UK; more than one million planet-wide.
Our leadership took on the pandemic with a delusional blend of bluster, boasting and sloganeering. Important meetings were missed, professional advice was disregarded and promises to set the pandemic packing by Easter were not fulfilled.
It was a time for dying. NHS workers sacrificed themselves. More than one hundred have died. Fortunately the NHS was not overrun. Sadly that was because the devastation was outsourced to the care sector. More than 20,000 of the most vulnerable died in our care homes due to lack of testing, proper attention and lack of PPE for staff and residents.
Despite the gloom there was an Easter glow of new life. Society, before reduced to living as individualistic consumers, rediscovered itself. Hundreds of thousands of people, neighbours, became aware of the needs of people living on the same street (for a time I was the ‘go to’ person for getting sausages). People woke up to their common and fragile humanity. They refuted Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there is no such thing as society’. There was an Easter spring in the air, spring in our hearts and spring in our step.
We are still struggling and growing accustomed to the fact that we live near a veritable ‘neighbour from hell’ who has come to stay. We are aware now for the first time in a long time of how weak and vulnerable we are.
It is a time to scatter, to dissolve, to divide. Before the pandemic the national slogan was: get Brexit done. But the slogan was slammed by Covid-19. Signing a deal with the EU, or with the US or with China, seems a long way off. Crashing out without a deal of any sort or with anyone – maybe with Liechtenstein – seems a distinct possibility.
We are also entering a time of economic recession. The pandemic has taught us we do not have significant control over nature, control upon which modern life depends. This is perhaps the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene era, a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Humanity’s impact on nature, accelerating since 1945, is now in blowback mode. The resulting disjuncture is the first which has gravely destabilised our economy. This is a time of confrontation between the way we run our grand household and a hitherto controlled nature which has broken free and is now in vengeance mode.
We have lived decades forgetful of the environmental damage our collective lifestyle has wrought. In just a few weeks Covid-19 has encircled the globe. The disease questions our control over life and death and shakes the psychological basis of our economic and social order. We live a prolonged moment of destruction, distress and decomposition.
As though to underscore our social dis-ease, we witnessed the killing of yet another black man by police officers. During eight minutes and forty-six seconds we heard George Floyd moan he could not breathe. Once again, in the United States, it was a moment to die, to mourn, to weep, to cry to heaven.
George Floyd’s death agony was felt around the world in a way not seen or heard after other similar deaths. Here in the UK, Bristol, the statue of a seventeenth-century slaveholder was thrown into the harbour, replaced temporarily by the statue of a black woman with her arm raised in protest. All of a sudden, at the same moment, in various parts of the world, the collective social memory of systemic slavery awoke. Suddenly, people of all colours want to learn about structural racism. Suddenly, people want to know the story of Rosa Parks and Nelson Mandela. They want to know about Christopher Columbus and colonisation; about the bloodthirsty greed of the British empire; about the history of Haiti; about the Kingdom of Benin and so on. It has been a moment of remembrance, of lament, of new awakening, of shaking the foundations. Our limp leadership has mandated a commission to study inequality and racism, the Lammy Review of 2017, with its fifty recommendations, barely acknowledged.
William Butler Yeats’s poem ‘The Second Coming’ has been called the most plundered poem of the twentieth century. You know the one, with its ‘rough beast’ that ‘Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born’. Let me ransack it once again for its jewelled phrase, ‘the centre cannot hold’. We are indeed in a time of falling apart, of dissolution, of widening gaps and deepening despair. ‘Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world… the worst are full of passionate intensity’, boasting of our world-beating this, our world-class app, our greatest that. So much sloganistic rhetoric has us flattened.
We live in a fraught time. Both nature and society are in turmoil and upheaval. This is not a time for pious platitudes or for soothing slogans. It is a time to listen, to heed, to resonate to what the Spirit, God’s spirit of love, of joy, of new creation might be saying to us at this moment. Come December what will this year have looked like? Apocalyptic perhaps? God has placed eternity in our hearts. What will the next moment bring and can we help to create it?
Comments
I like Ecclestiastes - one of those boks that perhaps does not fit easily into the OT canon. (Fair play to the compilers for letting it in.) My favourite book is Job, which, in its poetry and rehetoric, is suffused with an incredible nobility and dignity. It confronts the question as to why good people suffer, without neatly resolving it. (It points to a “sub specie aeternitas” perspective.)
By DavidH on 13th November 2020 - 14:01
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