I’m a fifty-one year-old parish priest, with two primary school age children, and I like an early night. If you ever hear me talk about clubbing, I’ll be referring disapprovingly to a cricket shot which is more notable for its aggressive intent than it’s graceful technique. In short, I’m nobody’s idea of a party animal.
All that said… even I’m beginning to get a bit stir crazy about the fact that the only place to go at nine o’clock on a Friday night is Asda.
One hundred and thirty-one days after they last walked out of the gates, the boys went back to school this morning. One of the first teachers we met was wearing a face mask. Her eyes suggested that she was smiling at them as she said, “I expect you’ve seen a lot of people wearing these, haven’t you?” Of course, they haven’t. Generally speaking, we don’t wear them around the house – although the boys have been known to adopt all sorts of improvised face coverings when they’re being Ninja warriors (which is most weeks), and there are Hulk and Darth Vader masks knocking about somewhere. Otherwise, no, they haven’t seen lots of people wearing masks.
Rather naively I’d been thinking about the extent to which a return to school would represent a return to normality for the boys, but I find myself wondering if in fact the opposite is likely to be the case. They’ve been living in a domestic bubble which is free of face masks and hand sanitizer, free of social distancing and the regular swiping of surfaces with disinfectant wipes. They’ve been living in a bubble of hugs and sunshine, of long games of cricket and sitting on a knee to hear a story read. The coronavirus lockdown has, in many important ways, shielded the boys from the culture of fear, distance and relentless hygiene which has gripped the world outside our walls. Going back to school is actually a journey away from what normality usually looks like for our boys.
First I collected James, and then we went together to collect Barnaby. The two boys embraced, and talked about how strange it was to both be at the same school and yet not see each other at all, the whole long day.
I asked them about their days, as we were walking home. Barnaby told us that he’d done some learning about the Coronavirus, and that he’d also been learning about the senses: “I had to say what my favourite sound is, and I wrote, ‘the sound of James having fun.’”
We’ve got quite a few different children’s Bibles at home and at church. One of them is illustrated using Lego, and Lego is very popular in this household. It was this ‘Brick Bible’ that Barnaby was reading in church a couple of weeks ago, when he announced: “I’m not going to read this Bible anymore.”
“Why’s that?”
“It makes Jesus say bad things, and it’s not the Jesus I believe in.”
I stopped what I was doing, and asked Barnaby to show me the offending pages. He laid the book on my desk, with an emphatic, “Look!”
And I read, ‘Do you think that I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, but rather division! From now on, five in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three; they will be divided: father against son and son against father…’
I talked to him a little bit about hyperbole – about using wild exaggeration to underline a point; indeed, that the very wildness of the exaggeration was intended to emphasise that the words weren’t to be taken literally.
I don’t know what he made of my answer, but I was very pleased with his questioning.
For some time now, James has enjoyed doing a kind of calligraphy. One of his specialities involves carefully labelling intricate pirate maps of his own invention. Recently, he chose to copy out a passage from one of his Bibles. When he had finished, he came to show me what he had written.
It’s not always easy to know what children are making of the locked-down landscape of our daily lives, which made it so moving to read the verses he had chosen from Lamentations:
‘And now the streets of
Jerusalem lie empty,
Bitterly our city weeps tonight –
Comfort is far from her,
Destruction has come from Babylon,
Enemies have taken her treasures,
For the Lord has rejected her, but remember,
God’s great love will not let us be burned up forever,
His love will never fail because
It is new every morning, great is God’s faithfulness.
Jerusalem, daughter of Zion, you will return.
Keep your heart strong and your eyes focused on the Lord.
Lord, you throne will last forever.
May you restore us and bring us back to you.’
So, a couple of weeks ago, Susie and I took a week’s ‘holiday’ to spend some time with the boys.
One morning, at breakfast, Barnaby had a lot of questions about the lockdown, and specifically, when the lockdown might end. I started waffling on about schools, smaller classes, shops, driving to Epping Forest, keeping a safe distance, exercising outdoors, and all sorts of other stuff I’d read about. Barnaby listened patiently for a while, and then re-phrased his question: “What I mean is, when will we be able to hug people again?”
During our holiday week, Susie had some kind of twenty-four hour bug which laid her low. In our new super-cautious climate, the boys were told to stay away from Mummy’s bedroom, and that they weren’t to go and touch her until she was feeling better – and wash your hands! It just so happened that I’d hurt my shoulder that day too. At one point, James launched himself from the stairs as I walked past, to give me a ‘flying hug’. The pain shot through my back, and I put him down quickly and stepped away from him suddenly. A look of hurt filled his eyes, and I understood at once – did this mean that there were no adults he could hug? I bent down and hugged him close, “It’s okay, it’s just my back is hurt – it’s okay to hug me.”
A moment passed in silence and then the Bishop said to me, "Stuart, how did you get so lost?" It was just a couple of weeks before...
