Where
do you start with ‘irony’ in the sort of build up to Easter that we are having
this virus-infected year?
Our next door neighbours are showing their
piety on Palm Sunday by defying restrictions and working flat out in
constructing and installing the new kitchen in the house that is either going
to be their new home or is going to fetch them a pretty penny when it is sold. Or perhaps both. What there isn’t, is respect for the day
religiously, politically or healthily!
The churches have been closed. The KKK-like religious processions have been
cancelled in Spain. The pope spoke in a
wet and empty St Peter’s Square. In all
the coverage of the pandemic, I have heard little from religious leaders, and
little to nothing of God. Even Trump’s
fanatic fundamentalist base has not vaunted god above science. Just as Capitalism turns to Socialism in
times of crisis, for government to do what Capitalism cannot or rather, will
not do, so Religion turns to Science to cure what it cannot.
To be fair, most of mainstream religion
sees no conflict between religious belief and trust in science. Nowadays.
Those battles, since the time of Galileo, have been fought and lost; and
what Churches now rely on faith rather than Insurance Policies to keep their
institutions ‘safe’?
It is, of course, easy to spin the Holy
Week Story to fit the narrative of the virus; metaphor is a willing
façade. Today, in the Christian calendar
is a day of triumph when Christ rode into Jerusalem in glory – though riding on
an ass: tempered triumph - and that triumph soon to be translated into abject
defeat which in turn transmogrifies into the ultimate triumph of the empty
tomb.
Pandemics do concentrate the mind. A highly technological society brought low -
so much for civilization and medical expertise!
All our bright and glittering technology unable to stop the virus from
killing tens of thousands and infecting, god knows how many. Our society has been literally brought to a
standstill: achievement brought low, but resurrection is a vital concept and
all of us sequestered in our homes and looking forward to, no, expecting a
triumph of medical science to deliver the vaccine that will release us all and
allow a continuation of the old way of life, our own social resurrection.
The Holy Week story is one in which you
can find triumph, deception, hypocrisy, populism, testing, faith, hope, death,
defeat, disloyalty, fear, despair, community, faction, belief, confidence, loss
and fulfillment – and those words only scratch at the surface of the complexity
of the narrative so it is hardly surprising that it fits the present situation.
At the end of this pandemic, will churches
be filled with people giving thanks for deliverance, or shunned by people who
didn’t give god a thought during the crisis?
I will wait to see.
Castelldefels
has just been on the afternoon television news informing us that the Red Cross
has been going to closed schools’ kitchens and ‘liberating’ the food which can
be used to feed those in need rather than staying in the fridges and eventually
becoming unusable. This seems like a self-evidently
good idea and I wonder in how many other places this is being put into
operation. There must also be
restaurants and the like that are never going to be able to use their food
supplies in time? Something to think
about, especially as governments like the one in the UK is already distributing
food parcels to those who need them, surely there must be systems already in
place to take advantage of any extra supplies?
Today
is the start of my annual Holy Week Poem Writing Stint. And yes, I do know that Palm Sunday is not
the official start of Holy Week, but I make the rules here.
I am well aware that this choice of poetry-writing
period is an odd one for an avowed atheist to take as a key time for
production, but it has become something of a tradition and I look forward to it
each year – just to see what I produce! As I have said elsewhere, "I read myself in writing"!
I aim to get the idea for a poem each day,
and then to write it up to the level of a rough draft. Each day, until Easter Sunday, I will try and
get the draft downloaded to my poetry blog at smrnewpoems.blogspot.com. I must emphasise that my ‘daily’ work will
only be a draft and I reserve the right to work on the poem after Holy Week to
get it to a more polished state.
I welcome your company on this annual
journey. The best way to follow my poems
is probably ‘the morning after’ when there should be something to see from the
previous day!
