The psychological and economic dangers of enforced idleness

‘Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus,’ says a discouraging headline in the Catholic Herald. Jesus ‘made the lame to run’ and ‘gave the blind their sight’, but Christians are not like Jesus, however much they may try to imitate him. We lack miraculous powers; and so, in matters of life and death (though not of the afterlife), we must defer to the civil power. On Tuesday, our neighbour rang for my wife, who is a churchwarden, and asked: ‘Shall I open the church as usual this morning?’ After some rummaging on the diocesan website, she found that the answer, following Boris Johnson’s broadcast the night before, was ‘No’. The same applies to the Catholic church I attend. Once the virus was spreading and until the Prime Minister’s broadcast, there were no services of any kind, but a chapel had been open for prayer in front of the Tabernacle. Now, nothing. Obviously this does not, ultimately, matter. God ‘dwelleth not in temples made with hands’. But it is surprising how upsetting the deprivation is. Bishops put out reassuring messages about how the Church lives all the same; but, just now at least, it does not much feel like that. There is a sense of uselessness.

So our parish has established a system of ‘phone buddies’ and ‘shopping buddies’ for fellow parishioners who are over 70 and self-isolating. I am one of the phone ones. I speak every other day to Joan, our organist, who has bad lungs and lives up a steep flight of steps in a neighbouring village. The scheme is a very good idea, and I think Joan is pleased. But the fact is that, unless one is a hermit, the life of the Church is physically communal. Indeed the ancient Greek for church, ecclesia, means originally (see Liddell and Scott) ‘an assembly of the citizens summoned by the crier’.