God and Nature Summer 2020
across the pond |
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A Column By Mike Clifford
"Conflict"
Last quarter, I contributed a column to this magazine at the beginning of the UK’s lockdown due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. At that point, the UK had experienced over 6,000 deaths. Three months on, we have over 44,000 deaths, but thankfully, the number of cases are falling. Some aspects of lockdown have been lifted; it’s now possible to go to the pub, to visit friends whilst maintaining social distance, and, to the relief of many, hairdressers are once again open for business.
Church buildings were allowed to open for worship starting last weekend, but few have chosen to do so. Many are struggling with how to plan worship that cannot include singing or sharing the peace and adheres to strict hygiene and social distancing requirements. Of course, for some traditional congregations where people sit where their grandmothers sat before them, getting people to remain as far apart as possible will be less of a challenge than for others.
I’m not aware of any church in the UK which broke the lockdown early. However, I understand from friends and news reports that the situation in other countries was different, with a small minority of congregations in the US insisting that not meeting was “a violation of religious liberties”.
At the end of one news report from a US church which remained open over Easter, the reporter concluded that this was another case of the conflict between science and religion. It might be true that some Christians believe that bad things don’t happen to good people, but this is hardly a position consistent with Scripture. On the other hand, whilst there is a strong scientific consensus about most aspects of the virus, some scientists such as Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, are concerned about the wide-reaching consequences of lockdowns.
It’s striking that news reports talk about the balance between opening up businesses to protect the economy and staying shut to protect people’s health, whereas when it comes to discussing science and religion, the word conflict is used. I think language is important here.
Nottingham has had its share of fatalities, but the most obvious casualty of the pandemic has been the collapse of a company that owned and operated two large city-centre shopping centres. The leader of the City Council has responded to this by saying the situation “means [that] the council now has greater opportunity to start to develop a new, sustainable plan for [the] future.” Let’s hope that sustainability is the post-Covid “new normal”.
As someone who loves singing and is involved with a couple of choirs, I found the last four months to be eerily quiet. We’ve tried to sing via Zoom, but it’s a very poor substitute for the real thing. When we eventually meet for worship in the church building, we may have to explore “singing” using sign language, or perhaps hum from behind our masks, since research suggests that singing is a high-risk activity when it comes to spreading the virus via droplets.
Here are the lyrics to a song I wrote during lockdown:
It’s easy to sing in a church full of saints,
To go through the motions with no complaints,
To sleep through the sermon, to murmur the prayers:
Comfortable Christians in comfortable chairs.
But lockdown has challenged our vision of church.
To worship at home requires us to search
Our hearts and our minds and come to the place
Where we can find God in a new sacred space.
Alone together we think and we pray;
Alone together we long for the day
When out from our lockdown we’ll come and we’ll say,
“The Lord has been with us while we’ve been away.”
Our sacred traditions will all have to change,
And even though people may think it strange,
The church must keep moving, we cannot stand still.
So stand up together and follow God’s will!
Last quarter, I contributed a column to this magazine at the beginning of the UK’s lockdown due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. At that point, the UK had experienced over 6,000 deaths. Three months on, we have over 44,000 deaths, but thankfully, the number of cases are falling. Some aspects of lockdown have been lifted; it’s now possible to go to the pub, to visit friends whilst maintaining social distance, and, to the relief of many, hairdressers are once again open for business.
Church buildings were allowed to open for worship starting last weekend, but few have chosen to do so. Many are struggling with how to plan worship that cannot include singing or sharing the peace and adheres to strict hygiene and social distancing requirements. Of course, for some traditional congregations where people sit where their grandmothers sat before them, getting people to remain as far apart as possible will be less of a challenge than for others.
I’m not aware of any church in the UK which broke the lockdown early. However, I understand from friends and news reports that the situation in other countries was different, with a small minority of congregations in the US insisting that not meeting was “a violation of religious liberties”.
At the end of one news report from a US church which remained open over Easter, the reporter concluded that this was another case of the conflict between science and religion. It might be true that some Christians believe that bad things don’t happen to good people, but this is hardly a position consistent with Scripture. On the other hand, whilst there is a strong scientific consensus about most aspects of the virus, some scientists such as Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at the University of Oxford, are concerned about the wide-reaching consequences of lockdowns.
It’s striking that news reports talk about the balance between opening up businesses to protect the economy and staying shut to protect people’s health, whereas when it comes to discussing science and religion, the word conflict is used. I think language is important here.
Nottingham has had its share of fatalities, but the most obvious casualty of the pandemic has been the collapse of a company that owned and operated two large city-centre shopping centres. The leader of the City Council has responded to this by saying the situation “means [that] the council now has greater opportunity to start to develop a new, sustainable plan for [the] future.” Let’s hope that sustainability is the post-Covid “new normal”.
As someone who loves singing and is involved with a couple of choirs, I found the last four months to be eerily quiet. We’ve tried to sing via Zoom, but it’s a very poor substitute for the real thing. When we eventually meet for worship in the church building, we may have to explore “singing” using sign language, or perhaps hum from behind our masks, since research suggests that singing is a high-risk activity when it comes to spreading the virus via droplets.
Here are the lyrics to a song I wrote during lockdown:
It’s easy to sing in a church full of saints,
To go through the motions with no complaints,
To sleep through the sermon, to murmur the prayers:
Comfortable Christians in comfortable chairs.
But lockdown has challenged our vision of church.
To worship at home requires us to search
Our hearts and our minds and come to the place
Where we can find God in a new sacred space.
Alone together we think and we pray;
Alone together we long for the day
When out from our lockdown we’ll come and we’ll say,
“The Lord has been with us while we’ve been away.”
Our sacred traditions will all have to change,
And even though people may think it strange,
The church must keep moving, we cannot stand still.
So stand up together and follow God’s will!
Mike Clifford is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Nottingham. His research interests are in combustion, biomass briquetting, cookstove design, and other appropriate technologies. He has published over 80 refereed conference and journal publications and has contributed chapters to books on composites processing and on appropriate and sustainable technologies.