I am changing the name of this update again to reflect a slight shift in focus. I am going to be pushing these daily reflections out on Social Media now as well as within the Emmaus Road community, so it is going to be, “Life in the Time of Coronavirus” rather than “Church…”

Our family has recently adopted a new dog – a rescue from the rather brilliant canine charity, Dog’s Trust. In the place of our dearly missed, large, highly intrusive, and often annoyingly needy Siberian Husky, Mushka, and the overweight, arthritic, and practically immobile Dalmatian/Collie, Domino, we now have a happy little 2-year-old Shih Tzu named Nala. And just in time. She came home last Tuesday; this week would have been too late – Dog’s Trust centres are now all closed to visitors. 
 
Yesterday Linda and I joined our daughter Rachel to take Nala for a walk on the common just a few hundred metres from our home. What a strange experience it is meeting other walkers in these days of social isolation. It is as if everyone else just became The Boy in the Bubblethat Paul Simon sang about on his Graceland album. Apart for one careless and carefree youth on a bike, we were all walking around, huddled in family groups, surrounded by a 2 metre force-field of paranoia. We have each become lepers to one another.
 
This morning I drove along deserted streets to our local Spar minimarket. I was met at the door by a shop assistant in latex gloves offering to soak my hands with some anti-viral aerosol before I step onto a freshly mopped floor, now criss-crossed with grid lines of fluorescent green tape. Only 4 customers at a time, we play an elaborate game of human chess as knights, bishops and pawns avoid taking one another out between the sparsely stocked shelves of the bread aisle. I speak to an old friend, but warily, for, though we are fighting a common enemy, none of us knows who may be secretly harbouring a killer.
 
Writing in the Telegraph on Monday, columnist Tim Stanley wrote, "When the coronavirus first hit Britain, our minds went back to the Blitz. But the analogy is completely wrong because the Blitz brought people together. This drives us apart. This isn’t a war, it’s a plague." 
 
Lines from Bob Dylan’s 1971 protest song, George Jackson come to mind: 
 
Sometimes I think this whole world
Is one big prison yard
Some of us are prisoners
Some of us are guards 
 
We are all prisoners now, under house arrest, and expected to be our own guards. But still, it’s not all bad. I’ve always wanted more time to write. Linda and I are in a country village living opposite a grassy field with all three of our adult children home. Matthew, who usually lives in Bristol, is working remotely, his bedroom lit by video screens. Kezia, back from a deserted Exeter Uni, is sunbathing in the garden, supposedly writing essays. I feel sorry for my nephew confined alone in an East London micro-flat.  
 
In Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) he writes of the years 1664-1665 that, “Any observer willing to enter the city during the plague would first have noticed the silence; there was no traffic except for the dead carts, and all the shops and markets were closed. Those who had not fled had locked themselves within their houses, and the river was deserted. Any citizen who did venture upon the streets walked in the middle, down the kennel, away from the buildings; they also avoided chance meetings… The life of London seemed to be over.”
 
Daniel Defoe, in A Journal of the Plague Year (1772) writes of watchmen “set to keep the door, according to public order” of homes where anyone was sick, the doors being marked with a red cross. “Here,” Defoe writes, “were so many prisons in the town as there were houses shut up; and as the people shut up or imprisoned so were guilty of no crime, only shut up because miserable, it was all the more intolerable to them.” What didn’t help the spread of the pestilence, was the fact that, once imprisoned, so many did all they could to escape.
 
Today it’s not that bad. To put our present experience in perspective, during the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam, Anne Frank hid in a 450 square foot attic with 7 other people for 761 days, quietly attempting to remain hidden in order to stay alive. In the end, “in spite of everything,” she maintained, “I still believe that people are really good at heart.” 
 
I know Covid-19 is not affecting us all in the same way, but all most of us are being asked to do is to spend a few weeks at home. I cannot speak for those who have become desperately unwell, but for those who remain healthy, this is really not such a terrible thing. Any sense that you are imprisoned right now is almost certainly mainly in your head. I love the prayer of the ancient Hebrew poet (Psalm 142:6-7) who wrote,
 
Help! They are chasing me,
    and they are too strong.
Rescue me from this prison,
    so I can praise your name.
 
A translation from 1611 (King James Version) catches something missed in modern English. It reads, “Bring my soul out of prison.” It is our souls which need to be free more than our bodies. We are restrained by what William Blake knew were “mind-forg’d manacles.” As Dale Carnegie put it in, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living (1948), 
 
Two men looked out from prison bars,
One saw mud, the other saw stars.
 
We each have a choice. Now is the time to open our eyes to a bigger universe. Just remember, when you are looking up, the darker the sky, the further you can see!  

Chris Denne