I took myself our yesterday for a very brief walk. My legs are quite bad now but I said I’d wait until lock-down was over before I troubled the surgery. So, it was a brief walk up Gorefield Road and back. For those who don’t know, Gorefield Road today is like the A47 twenty years ago. It is a country road but in common with many country roads now it, nevertheless, seems to support a constant stream of traffic travelling down it, much of which goes fast, and some as go illegally fast. Or at least that is how it was until the great lock-down happened.
Many people were commenting a few weeks ago how much fresher the air seemed for lack of road traffic and, presumably, other industrial fogs. I concurred. And there was something lovely about the lack of noise pollution as well. However, when I went out yesterday I was met with the acrid smell of car exhaust and the traffic coming down the road was as great as its ever been. It seems that many people now consider lock-down is at an end. Probably, over the next few weeks and months, people will return to work and the general populace return to going everywhere in their cars, whether they have to or not. It will, in other words, become business as usual. The prospect depresses and disappoints me.
The question should really arise, ‘what have we learnt?’ ‘what is there still to learn?’. What was already becoming plainer and plainer even before Covid 19 was that we could not continue as we had been. The world sometimes moves into different forms of living and working together in a gradual and protracted fashion, but sometimes it leaps into a new form with a great jolt. When Corona hit, and during the lock down, it was becoming clear that we might be on the cusp of a ‘jolt’ change. The virus would come to wreak havoc and death for many thousands of families but to some extent it would also provide our culture with a great opportunity to reorient ourselves to a more productive, less destructive, way of life. We could think about the possibility of living a different way of life in which, in particular, we could start working toward an evasion of the very great possibility of environmental break down.
Covid 19 will go away. It was always going to go away eventually. It has been truly horrible and deadly for many of our people and there are many families that have found theirselves devastated and grieving at the loss of loved ones. But it was always, eventually, going to go away. The next crisis, if it is indeed an environmental one, will not. There will be a point where things become irreversible and the death toll from this will make that from Corona virus look tiny. That is what almost all authorities on the matter agree will happen if we return to business as usual in the fullest sense. Of course there are those who will tell you that this is all a media fiction, not least the President of the United States, but the facts, and therefore the most probable scenario based upon them, tends to lean the other way. There are those who will tell us that fear-mongering over environmental break-down is part of some conspiracy, but then there were those who once told us that the world was being taken over in a Jewish-Marxist conspiracy. The question you need to ask yourself is, ‘where is the information you have coming from?’, ‘what qualifications has this source got for saying what they are saying?’, ‘what are the great majority of their peers saying about it?’.
In any case this is only half of what I wanted to say to you. One of the things that irritated me most about all the activity upon Gorefield Rd on Saturday was what it said about the restlessness of my fellow citizens. This was something that concerned me when I was a Vicar. People find it very difficult to keep still. Now, of course, many of the people out and about on Saturday will have been going back to work and setting about essential tasks – so be it, I acknowledge that there are things that people have to do. I know that many people will have been waiting a long time to see loved ones, many desperately need to go to work and earn and many need the children back in school. But this is not the whole reason and perhaps it is not the principle reason for the majority who were now glorying in being able to bustle about, drive their cars and fog the place up again.
Restlessness, doing, activity and lots and lots of noise are the mark of our age, and it betrays in many instances a rather fearful area of mass neurosis. People cannot live with silence, if the world outside them is thus or especially the silence in their heads. It terrifies them. In the depths of the soul.
Every soul is engaged in asking certain questions about the meaning of existence. I don’t mean that they ask in the same way as philosophers do. Rather they do it intuitively, instinctively, unconsciously, implicitly and tacitly. It is all part of the mechanism of survival and self defence. It is on a continuum with the intuitive questioning of every knew situation, where we instinctively scan from threats and opportunities. But these ‘great existential conundrums’ the mind often tends to hide from so that we can get on with every day tasks. They stay in the back of our heads until such a time as there is a great crisis and they are forced to the surface. Then we ask such questions as: ‘what is my life for?’ ‘what is my purpose’, ‘what is really good and important rather than just fashionable’? What is worth fighting for?’ ‘Is anything?’ What can I hope for in this life and beyond ? With regard to the last question I would suggest that it is rooted in a horrible suspicion that we are all merely chaff in the wind and when we die we will become simply extinct. We feel sometimes as though In a couple of generations time will no one will even know we, or our children and everything we love, were ever here.
As I say these questions are asked intuitively by most people in the depths and recesses of the soul. The problem is that we live in an age in which the answer to such questions, shaped over 400 years of capitalism, industrialisation and the cult of science, is that our reality is just a mute, revolving, indifferent mechanism; it is one giant machine without feeling, without sensitivity and without sympathy and therefore it is entirely indifferent to us, to ours and to all we love.
This answer to the great questions of existence that all human beings intuitively ask – albeit most of us ask inchoately, inarticulately and without theorising it – sound in the stillness and in the silence. They sound in the depths of conscience and contemplative imagination and for many, many people in an age like ours the sound is the sound of the abyss. There is nothing there, no life outside humanity and no spiritual dimension to confirm us as spiritual entities thus with potential for surviving our material bodies somehow. The answers to the great questions, therefore, are all too often that ‘you are nothing and your loved ones are nothing’.
It’s little wonder that most people would rather ‘do’ than ‘be’, with the latter consisting of taking a great deal of time in quiet and not doing anything but meditating on the meaning of existence, the possibility of God and all things. They are like it because they need the noise and distraction. They are like it because all they can hear in the silence is death.
Sometimes my chief objection to the way in which our country is so completely repudiating their Christian heritage is not so much because as a culture we replaced it with something else, as because we replaced it with nothing. The existence of a myriad of individual, subjective inclinations toward many weird and wonderful consumer spiritualities is no substitute for serious religion and a cultural, overarching framework of belief. I think that in many ways lock-down provided us with an opportunity to find ourselves again – forgive me if that sounds a bit cliched. It might have helped us find perspective again, see what is most important, orientate ourselves away from things that we use as noise and activity entertainments not to have to think too much of the emptiness of existence. It might have helped us to form a way of life that wasn’t constantly using up resources and belching pollutants into the atmosphere. It might have helped to save us, not just from environmental breakdown, but like all spiritualities are made for, it might have saved us from a soulless and pointless existence.