The mood of unity is gone. Some people who have continued to work throughout lockdown are expressing resentment at the luck of those who have been paid to stay at home. The furloughed don’t feel lucky, though. With the government announcing the gradual withdrawal of support to their employers, they are likely to lose their jobs and with them their income.
This is a dangerous moment. As lockdown restrictions ease, the willingness to follow the new instructions rescinds. The new rules are harder to understand and we are divining their spirit, rather than following them to the letter. And the Dominic Cummings saga really hasn’t helped. A few weeks ago, ministers were giving us instructions, not requests. Now they say there was always leeway in exceptional circumstances. Much of the fury comes from people who have never forgiven Mr Cummings for winning the Brexit referendum and then delivering a majority to Boris Johnson, more dangerous to the government is the rage of people who couldn’t say goodbye to loved ones who died in the last few weeks. Their anger is apolitical and unlikely to go away any time soon.
There’s a growing sense that the government made bad decisions early on, particularly in allowing thousands of people to rub shoulders at sporting events. The clarity of the government’s messaging is gone, and public compliance was already weakening by the time thousands of people ignored social distancing rules to march on the U.S. embassy over the appalling police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. All of this will surely lead to a rise in infections. Some are saying that the hidden government plan is for more of us to catch Covid-19, because herd immunity is still the only way out of this; others disagree vehemently, and the mood is turning ugly. Shouldn’t we have been better prepared for something like this?
The eight o’clock clap was embraced in our neighbourhood, but it’s gone now. Word went round that it would be better to have a last enthusiastic bout of clapping and cheering than to let it peter out. I was disquieted by this, but I knew - we all knew - that it was getting a bit less special each time we did it.
And yet the crisis has not come to an end, and the people we were applauding have not been relieved of their burden. 2.2 million people in the UK are still shielding, and that means they experience much more intense feelings of isolation and anxiety than most of us. Nurses, doctors, and other key workers are still working through danger to serve us all. And our will to make audible our support for the shielded and the essential is not what it was.
We knew this would happen. The human spirit can rise to the occasion, but unity and resolve are finite resources. We can’t help it if the well is dry now. We don’t want to wait any more, and we’re not prepared to put aside our differences, either. On social media, people are declaring which side of a new divide they are on. Never mind whether you’re a Remainer or a Leaver, now we are pro or anti-lockdown. Either way, we're sick of waiting, and afraid of what we are waiting for.
The Bible is some solace, because so much of it is addressed to suffering people who don’t want to wait any longer. Throughout its pages, there is a combination of promise for the future, and a present lived out in relation to the promise. Often, the message is that we should feel joy because of the good things that will happen one day, but sometimes it’s that we should act to avert disaster.
Much of the Bible is expressed in terms of a communication from God to humans, but in the Psalms there’s a strange mixture of human and divine voices. Humans cry to God in distress, even anger, but their voices are mingled with affirmations of God’s power and love. For Christians, this plurality of voices includes the voice of the Spirit, and even Jesus, alongside King David, or whoever the Psalmist was.
Throughout the Bible, people live in expectation of God’s promises. Something is going to happen, and that something must define how we live in the present. Christianity, as well as Judaism and Islam, is a religion of waiting, and of deciding what we are going to do while we wait. This is the truth of our lives, and of the crisis we are living through. Our thoughts about what we are expecting condition how we behave in the here and now. We don’t need to express this in terms of a divine judgement being passed on us, but even so, judgement comes to the atheist as much as to the theist, and to you and me, as much as the politicians. One day, the Pandemic will be a thing of the past. On that day, we will be unable to add to or subtract from the story of what we did and didn’t do during this crisis. Irrespective of divine or karmic reward and punishment, we all are condemned to live with the memory of our actions. This is true when someone dies, and it’s true when a crisis passes. Religious or not, with crisis comes judgement.
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