Gazing into Gethsamene – pondering on post-pandemic writing

Pixabay image in public domain


I’ve never been to Eyam, the Derbyshire village whose inhabitants took the astonishing decision to quarantine themselves when the Black Death hit the village between the years 1665-66. The villagers’ astonishing act of self-sacrifice doomed them but saved the plague from spreading further throughout England. By autumn 1666, the worst of the plague was over, but it had exacted a terrible cost. Whole families in Eyam had been wiped out. One woman, Elizabeth Hancock, had to bury her husband and six children all by herself, as people were too scared of the plague to come and help her. Her family’s graves stand in a separate egg-shaped enclosure known as the Riley Graves, kept now by the National Trust and Historic England. I Googled the images, and they are haunting. I can scarcely imagine the terrible grief and sorrow of poor Elizabeth Hancock.

I felt the same anguish and desolation when I saw a famine cemetery in County Clare, on the spectacular west coast of Ireland. Little stones lie littered in the churchyard, alongside the upright graves. Those little stones mark the spot where a famine victim lies. The famine victims had no headstones, no proper graves, their names were unmarked and forgotten. Those little stones are a pitiful sight … and to my English eyes, an accusing one. The gross incompetence and appalling prejudice of the English government of the time is a deeply shameful episode in our history.

Famine and plague, like war, cast long, dark shadows in history. In the 21st century, we in the West are blessed. We have vaccines (and, please God, may we be generous with them). Bubonic plague still exists, but it is kept under control because of vaccines. Never again will it ravage the earth the way it did during the 14th and 17th centuries.

I keep on hearing from Christians that we need to learn how to lament. I agree. Too often Christians seem embarrassed or uneasy about expressing strong negative emotions like anger and grief, perhaps because we don’t want to look like ‘bad’ Christians, not having enough faith.

Yet our Lord stood at the grave of Lazarus and wept. Even as He knew what He was about to do … reverse the natural order and conquer death as a foretaste of His own triumph over it.

We Christians have also inherited a magnificent songbook from the Jews which is packed full of human emotion, not at all inhibited about expressing anger and grief, even as it proclaims a strong, shining faith in the God of the living. Many of the psalms take us on the same journey, moving from pain, perplexity, despair and questioning right through to faith as strong, stable and serene as a sunlit mountain … but even as these ancient songs call to us to call out to Him, they don’t stint on the emotion.

I heard at least two people say recently that when the worst of Covid-19 is over, they don’t want to watch any TV plays about it. Their emotions are still too raw, the trauma is still with us. But Russell T Davies (whose influential writing credits include Doctor Who, Years and Years and It’s a Sin) anticipates that plays will indeed be written about the pandemic as writers seek to process and capture the trauma of these times.

The decade of the 1920s, with its jazz, bobbed hair, hedonism and kickback against Victorian values, was a reaction to the trauma of World War One. Will the 2020s repeat that hedonism and desire to party, party, party, or will there be more serious reflection and a serious rethink of what we find important? Several secular writers have recently highlighted the spiritual vacuum at the heart of our culture … yet online access has led to thousands, if not millions, engaging with cathedrals and local churches.

Whatever levels of desolation we have wrestled with this past year, we can process the trauma through our writing, and also reach out to others with our stories and reflections. We can show the depth of the darkness but also show the light shining through.

We’ve just emerged from the Easter weekend. We’ve just been gazing into the abyss of Gethsamene. Now we journey on to the dawn that is beckoning us. We have a glorious hope to share, through our stories, poems and songs … but as Christian writers let us not sanitise the darkness either.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 –1889)