FOR many long months, as we know only too well, the world lay breathless under the Covid pandemic. Countless people are still suffering around the world as the virus rages, and help from somewhere, anywhere, remains a distant hope.
History would guide us towards a future where life re-emerges, changed and with a new perspective. One may consider world events, whether the 1918 Spanish-flu pandemic, or the devastation of the two world wars, or, more recently, Syria, or Darfur, or Afghanistan today, to see how life can be changed irrevocably by events beyond our control. Other events bear witness to displacement and change for minorities and oppressed peoples. Not for the first time, the challenge lies in creating new ways of living on a worldwide scale.
Much now is being made of “coming out of the pandemic”. We see that, in most European countries, restrictions of travel and daily life are being eased, although more distant places are still beyond our reach, and, even as the impact of Covid-19 recedes, we may wonder what will happen next.
What we do know is that the journey so far has been arduous. For many, the terrible burden of death from the coronavirus is still causing sorrow and heartache. It will be a long road, with setbacks to overcome, but we can be quietly confident that, for the sake of community, for people of all faiths or none, a vision of working together matters for our human flourishing. Jesus’s call to live life abundantly is not something for the faint-hearted.
BY WAY of comparison with our current situation, we could look to the experience of the 20th-century Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His was an extraordinary life: he was a mathematician and physicist, who served with great distinction in the Russian Army in the Second World War.
Arrested under Stalin’s terrors of 1945, he served eight long years in prison, during which he suffered great deprivation and moved several times within the Gulag camp system. In 1953, he was transported to the arid and desert-like Kazakhstan, awarded “exile in perpetuity”. His writings proved to be prophetic and challenging; yet what could they possibly have to do with us today?
I think that it has something to do with the process of re-establishing contact with ordinary day-to-day life.
In one of his biographies — Solzhenitsyn, by David Burg and George Feifer (Abacus, 1973) — we read that, when Solzhenitsyn was newly set free from prison, he observed a fellow prisoner also recently released. Solzhenitsyn noted: “As for coping with daily life, even shopping and the handling of money could become unnerving problems.”
Solzhenitsyn describes memorably a former prisoner “overwhelmed with a kind of vertigo when he found himself entering a shop; he could not grasp how people would remember the size of their shirt collars, much less bring themselves to ask the assistant for a new shirt”. It appeared “perversely refined” to the ex-inmate to recall such details of everyday life, and it set in motion a chain of misgivings about his own place in the real world. “Why”, he asked himself, “should I return to this kind of life?”
Solzhenitsyn discovered that to live in the present moment was essential to maintaining an equilibrium, and even to survival itself. Regrets about the past would only sap energy and drain hope away. In the context of the labour camps, poor morale could be fatal. He also found that looking to the future could be almost unimaginable and exhausting. For many years, he faced a life of brutal uncertainty at almost every moment. To a less intense degree, that, too, is our current experience. The pandemic has brought us face to face with a previously unforeseen stress and, in many ways, with our own mortality.
THE news came recently that Alexei Navalny, a Russian lawyer and anti-corruption activist and a critic of Putin and the current regime, had been arrested and imprisoned (Comment, 29 January). This can best be viewed from within the context of Russian history, and one can be sure that Navalny has read Solzhenitsyn.
Navalny’s commitment to resisting corruption has led to his personal suffering — never for its own sake, but for the greater good, for the dignity and justice of human life. These attributes of steadfastness and integrity can also be nurtured by each of us as we recover from the duration of the pandemic.
It is good to acknowledge that, for all of us in these past 18 months, we have seen life severely dislocated; and, for many people, relationships have broken, routines have been set aside, and, at worst, loved ones have been lost. Working situations, financial affairs, and leisure time have all been put under tremendous strain. It is no easy matter simply to pick up and go on, when the landscape of our lives has been changed.
It may be a long road ahead; there may be setbacks to overcome. In answer to the question “What does it matter?”, however, we can say confidently that, for the sake of community, whether of faith or none, it does matter for all of us, for our human flourishing.
The Revd Jean Fletcher is a Methodist minister and a retired mental-health chaplain.
Next week: the mental-health challenges of returning to “normal life”
