My fears for the future of my church have been realised

The only memorable argument I have ever heard in that tedious debate about whether Shakespeare was a Catholic came from the poet Tom Paulin. I remember him claiming in a lecture that the ‘bare ruin’d choirs’ sonnet must have been written by someone who had seen the despoiled monasteries, desecrated churches and ravaged holy places of a faith of which they were a part. Famously, such an argument only gets you so far, for by this logic Shakespeare was also a king, empress, ex-king, sailor, magician and fool, among many hundreds of others. But part of the rationale stayed with me. Which is that the bitterest truth of all is that loving a thing does not mean you can protect it, and that even the things you consider most sacred can be trampled over.

This may seem a slightly histrionic way to return to the subject of what the national church is doing in the era of Covid. But it feels appropriate to me after news of the closure of my family church.

Long-term readers might know of my conflicted, not to say confused, attitudes towards religion. The last Church of England vicar in whose congregation I regularly sat once broached the subject with me over the post-service coffee. ‘I don’t like to ask. I mean it really isn’t my business,’ he began. I eventually pulled it out of him. He had read something about me online and someone had referred to me as an atheist. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he stuttered out again, ‘I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s not my business.’ ‘It really is,’ I assured him. ‘More than anyone’s really. It’s complicated,’ I added. ‘Isn’t it?’ we agreed, and both did some circulating.