Many in my congregation were in tears on Sunday morning as I announced that churches were being ordered to close their doors once again. I had found out only a few hours earlier, since the Prime Minister hadn’t seen fit to mention it in his public statement the previous afternoon. “The right to freedom of religion is enshrined in Magna Carta and it is of the very essence of our common life that the liberties and freedoms of the people of this land extend to public worship,” wrote my own Bishop in a letter to his clergy. But Johnson didn’t bother to explain why — or even that — we were being shut down. We were in the small print, announced after the fact.
Some might wonder what my congregation was so afraid of? After all, private prayer is still allowed. But this argument profoundly misunderstands what churches do and, particularly, how they function to combat loneliness. By loneliness I don’t just mean the experience of being alone, but something far more existentially corrosive.
Millions of us are once more being locked into the fortress of our own homes, with little relief, without the comfort of company, without the presence of another’s touch or conversation. Even before Lockdown 2, loneliness was at epidemic proportions in this country. Now it represents a full blown emergency — with huge consequences for our mental and physical health.
There is, though, a difference between loneliness and being alone. And many who have chosen a form of lockdown for themselves do not experience loneliness; at least, not in the same way. Members of religious communities, for example: monks and nuns. Some live lives of silence and quiet contemplation, eschewing the sort of social connectedness that most of us take for granted. Yet we also speak of such people as living “in community” — which can seem an odd phrase, given that they have chosen the monastic life partly because it relieves them of the whole buzz of social engagement, the very thing we generally mean by “community”.
No, what living “in community” means in a monastery is participation in the worshiping life of a place, by which one is connected to others on a profound and intimate level through the love of Almighty God.
I have no idea how the new Covid restrictions will affect those living in closed communities, sealed off from the outside world. It strikes me as patently ridiculous that Mass will not be said in such places. Not, I suppose, that the Government would ever find out if it were. And I hope they do continue to come together and say their prayers and receive the comfort of holy communion. Because without that, I imagine that many of them will be lonely indeed, perhaps for the first time in their lives.
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