We will meet again
The Queen always manages to make me feel a mixture of pride, huge respect and inspired. I don't know what it is about her, but every time she speaks I feel that I've gained something. She has a wisdom and grace about her and she never comes across as being superior or ' apart' from the rest of us. Im really glad she chose to speak this weekend. I think we need her positive rallying cry to keep us focused. We will get through this. And we really are a great country in a crisis. We always have been.
When she was talking about her address to the wartime evacuees when she was a child it really made me think. At the moment many parents up and down the land are thinking about what would happen if a child had to go into hospital with Covid 19. Or a parent. Or a spouse. Not being able to be with someone you love when they are very ill or possibly dying would be super hard for all of us. But if it was your child...... doesnt bear thinking about does it? And yet in the war 1.5 million people ( mostly children) were evacuated from the big cities over the period of a few days. 17,000 volunteers ( mostly WRVS) were mobilised to help organise this massive operation. Terrified parents had barely any time at all to digest the information that their children were being shipped out, pack the bags and say their farewells. They didnt know where there kids would be going and if they would ever see them again. Bombs were coming and the cities would be targets. How many children had to be torn from their sobbing mothers arms? How many fathers came home from work to find their kids were on a train to the countryside? In the days when it would take a week for a letter to arrive, how anxious must those parents have been ? I realise that I have very little information or understanding about what it must have been like. The Queen knows. She was living through it. Her house was bombed. And it was at that moment that she asked if she and her sister could broadcast to the children of the UK to let them know that she was thinking of them. How many children who were evacuated had a father serving in the armed forces and then were billeted to live with complete strangers away from their mothers? The terror and separation and deprivation of those days was so so much worse than it is today. That generation of parents and children were truly brave.
Perhaps the difference between the chaos that the war brought and the chaos that the virus is bringing is faith. In the 1940s faith was still at the centre of our national life.* People went to church. They prayed. The nation prayed. People believed in heaven and hell. In an age before the National Health service they did not take health for granted and with no welfare state there was an understanding that communities had to care for each other.
Yesterday in Northern Ireland there was an hour of prayer between 3 and 4pm. Its impossible to know how many people prayed, but churches all across the country were calling people to join in. Enquiries to faith based organisations are massively on the increase just now and stories are starting to circulate about people coming to faith or coming back to faith because of the virus. We have to believe that God is doing a new thing, a good thing, not necessarily an easy thing. And that it starts with prayer. As the Queen said ' Though self isolating may at times be hard, many people of all faiths and of none are discovering that it presents an opportunity to slow down, pause and reflect in prayer or meditation.' So let's pray about prayer. Pray that God awakens people who used to pray and stopped, people who professed a faith as a child and now dont, people who were brought up in a church tradition and slipped away. We all know someone. How amazing would it be if by the end of all of this someone we know had come/come back to faith? So that we will be able to say of them, with absolute confidence, we will meet again.
* Historians agree that in the late 1940s Britain was a Christian nation, with its religiosity reinforced by the wartime experience. Peter Forster found that in answering pollsters the English reported an overwhelming belief in the truth of Christianity, a high respect for it, and a strong association between it and moral behaviour. (Peter G. Forster, " Secularization in the English Context : Some Conceptual and Empirical Problems", Sociological Review 20 (1972): 153-68)
When she was talking about her address to the wartime evacuees when she was a child it really made me think. At the moment many parents up and down the land are thinking about what would happen if a child had to go into hospital with Covid 19. Or a parent. Or a spouse. Not being able to be with someone you love when they are very ill or possibly dying would be super hard for all of us. But if it was your child...... doesnt bear thinking about does it? And yet in the war 1.5 million people ( mostly children) were evacuated from the big cities over the period of a few days. 17,000 volunteers ( mostly WRVS) were mobilised to help organise this massive operation. Terrified parents had barely any time at all to digest the information that their children were being shipped out, pack the bags and say their farewells. They didnt know where there kids would be going and if they would ever see them again. Bombs were coming and the cities would be targets. How many children had to be torn from their sobbing mothers arms? How many fathers came home from work to find their kids were on a train to the countryside? In the days when it would take a week for a letter to arrive, how anxious must those parents have been ? I realise that I have very little information or understanding about what it must have been like. The Queen knows. She was living through it. Her house was bombed. And it was at that moment that she asked if she and her sister could broadcast to the children of the UK to let them know that she was thinking of them. How many children who were evacuated had a father serving in the armed forces and then were billeted to live with complete strangers away from their mothers? The terror and separation and deprivation of those days was so so much worse than it is today. That generation of parents and children were truly brave.Perhaps the difference between the chaos that the war brought and the chaos that the virus is bringing is faith. In the 1940s faith was still at the centre of our national life.* People went to church. They prayed. The nation prayed. People believed in heaven and hell. In an age before the National Health service they did not take health for granted and with no welfare state there was an understanding that communities had to care for each other.
Yesterday in Northern Ireland there was an hour of prayer between 3 and 4pm. Its impossible to know how many people prayed, but churches all across the country were calling people to join in. Enquiries to faith based organisations are massively on the increase just now and stories are starting to circulate about people coming to faith or coming back to faith because of the virus. We have to believe that God is doing a new thing, a good thing, not necessarily an easy thing. And that it starts with prayer. As the Queen said ' Though self isolating may at times be hard, many people of all faiths and of none are discovering that it presents an opportunity to slow down, pause and reflect in prayer or meditation.' So let's pray about prayer. Pray that God awakens people who used to pray and stopped, people who professed a faith as a child and now dont, people who were brought up in a church tradition and slipped away. We all know someone. How amazing would it be if by the end of all of this someone we know had come/come back to faith? So that we will be able to say of them, with absolute confidence, we will meet again.* Historians agree that in the late 1940s Britain was a Christian nation, with its religiosity reinforced by the wartime experience. Peter Forster found that in answering pollsters the English reported an overwhelming belief in the truth of Christianity, a high respect for it, and a strong association between it and moral behaviour. (Peter G. Forster, " Secularization in the English Context : Some Conceptual and Empirical Problems", Sociological Review 20 (1972): 153-68)
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