We have a chance to rebuild society today
LIKE MANY an old dog, I’ve had, over this strange last year, to learn a lot of new tricks. And learn them quickly. I’ve hardly seen my youngest grandchild in the flesh for half his life. Instead, I’ve watched him discover the joys of walking and talking, over a weekly family video call.
In my working life, I can put on a passable performance as an amateur cameraman, ensuring the lighting is angled correctly toward me before recording a video message for those unable to get safely to church. Along the way, I’ve even picked up the skills of bread making.
We old dogs don’t learn new tricks unless we have to. By comparison with many, I’ve had it easy. I haven’t had to learn how to educate my children at home, nor how to care for someone who ought to have been in hospital. I haven’t had to cope with redundancy or bereavement, in a world cut off from friends and relations.
All in all, we old dogs – and many not so old – have been amazing in what we have learned. We’ve expanded food banks, brought many of the homeless in off the streets, clapped our support for key workers, and lightened the mood of the darkest moments with funny videos. In lots of simple, practical ways, we’ve drawn closer together under lockdown than before.
We stand now this Easter at a moment of hope. The war may not yet be won, but with the rapid rollout of vaccines, it feels like the decisive battle has taken place. To continue the military metaphor, we are closer to Easter 1945 than Easter 1940.
That very first Easter Day, around 2,000 years ago, something happened that had never occurred before. A frightened bunch of men and women who had, only a short while earlier, watched their teacher be executed, discovered he was alive again.
This was not simply the resuscitation of a body – another miracle akin to those Jesus himself had earlier performed. This was what Christians learned to call resurrection. The Jesus of Easter Day and beyond was both recognisably himself – the marks of the nails in his hands and feet proved that – but strangely different.
Within weeks his followers were beginning the task of spreading his gospel of love and forgiveness, his vision of a world worth God himself dying for, across the length and breadth of the Roman Empire.
Two millennia on, the message of the risen Christ, that love is stronger than hate, that light conquers darkness, and that to defy evil is better than to seek vengeance against it, lay at the core of how I worked with the people of Manchester to respond to the terrorist attack in our city in 2017.
By 1945, one of my predecessors as Bishop of Manchester,william Temple, had become Archbishop of Canterbury. During the war, he had worked with politicians and others on what sort of Britain should emerge once fascism had been defeated.
At the heart of their vision, inspired both by Christian faith and the shared experience of Blitz and battle, lay the concept of a National Health Service: health care funded by general taxation and free to all at the point of need. Their creation has never proved so important as it has through the coronavirus pandemic.
Alongside better health, there was to be no return to the mass unemployment and dire poverty of the 1930s, nor to the punitive restrictions on welfare that had led so many shell-shocked veterans of 1918 to become wandering beggars.
The Victorian slums were to be cleared away, making room for homes fit for the families of our returning warriors to live in. The end of war would, like that first Easter, herald a new beginning, a time to learn and deploy some new tricks.
I may be an old dog, but I’m excited about the opportunities that lie ahead for a post-covid, post-brexit Britain. The next few years could be as pivotal as the second half of the 1940s. We can envisage a time, maybe just a few months ahead, when some of the new tricks we’ve learned may no longer be necessary.
AND that faces us with a choice. Do we want to go back to things as close to how they were before or, like Temple’s generation, to use what we have discovered in adversity to build something better? We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to define the kind of society we want to become.
My prayer this Easter is that it will be one built on the “new tricks” learned from 12 months of lockdown. My hope is for a land where we recognise the importance of caring for mental as well as physical health, where we continue to value the key workers who have borne the brunt of risk of infection, and where we take responsibility not only for keeping ourselves free from disease, but for protecting our fellow citizens too.
Or, as Jesus put it so succinctly, in that greatest of all new tricks he taught his disciples, where we love our neighbours as ourselves.
Do we want to go back to how things were, or use what we’ve learned in adversity for change?