Space

Life in lockdown has caused me to reflect about space. Confined mostly to our homes, and outside them still restricted in travel and work, we have, I think, become aware of the bounds of our world in a new and pressing way. Life has come to have very clearly defined borders—the home, the trip to work or shop, an hour or so’s walk or bike ride. This has now been partially relaxed (perhaps not wisely, given our country’s lamentable death and infection rates) but spacial restrictions still apply, in some ways more obtrusively. We can go out, chat at a safe distance, but not visit those who mean the most to us.

These restrictions encourage us to find new ways to use space, for reflection, hobby, home improvement, entertainment, deepening relationships and finding tolerance and understanding.

They also has their downside, in frustration, a sense of imprisonment, worry about finances and survival itself. Mental health issues have multiplied. And tragically restricted movement has brought a new freedom to abusers of adults and children, locked away from scrutiny, and has vastly diminished their victims’ chances of escape.

It has raised issues of space for the church, as well, particularly the Church of England. Congregations can no longer meet for worship and fellowship, and in the case of the CofE, even clergy have until recently been strictly forbidden to enter their churches to pray. They could go in to check the building for insurance purposes etc., but definitely not to pray, nor to record or live stream acts of worship. Let us not ask cynical questions about priorities here....

At present, this too is being relaxed, as the bishops back-pedal and recast their dubiously legal instructions as “guidance” and now allow (sorry, advise) limited access for the purposes that the government legislation allowed all along.

We (mostly) all agree that the church is the people, not the place, and that the presence of God is what sanctifies a place. Those who have decried the retreat of the CofE “into the kitchen” (a reference to Justin Welby's broadcast worship from Lambeth Palace’s kitchen, rather than its chapel) are castigated for denigrating the domestic, and “gendering” the debate.

But this seems to miss the main point at issue. Spaces matter. Our bodies delimit us in space, and in many ways govern the way we can act in the world. We share spaces with others, in home and workplaces. Spaces define our communities, and the local areas in which we are comfortable, and those in which we are uneasy, as strangers or lost. We recognise safe p laces and danger zones.

The incarnation involves the Word of God coming into the space of his body, the space of Nazareth, of Galilee and so on. Into the danger zone of the world.

How we use spaces therefore matters. Whether we make them places of safety or danger, welcome or exclusion and above all whether we recognise them as the spaces in which we live out our discipleship. To be a follower of Christ is not about what goes on in our heads but also in the space we occupy, and the actions that we perform there.

Our homes are of course, spaces where discipleship is carried out. Prayer and worship are offered there, service is offered to members of our household (where they exist) and to neighbours, even in these spatially constrained times.

Yet the way we use wider spaces matters too. For a very long time, church buildings have occupied a place in the public space of our communities. They have been a statement that the people of Christ are active in the midst of our shared space. We belong, and have much to offer to the other inhabitants of our local space.

Certainly the danger of infection and disease transmission means that gathering for worship in our historic places of worship is a very bad idea. But to withdraw entirely, to forbid the broadcast of prayer and worship from the space that has long lain at the heart of the local community seems a backward step, a retreat into privacy, that “privatised religion” of which we have long been warned.

So I for one welcome the news that we can now be seen and heard (where bells may safely be chimed) to still be in business in the local space in which we are called to discipleship.

Of course, the church continues to be involved as disciples of Jesus in the public space. Church based food banks (tragically more necessary than ever) continue to operate. Church members, both individually and in an organised way, deliver food packages and offer support and contact to the frail or lonely. This is hugely important. And yet, for the church’s spiritual life to be seen also as part of that public, communal space surely matters more than ever.

Our local church bell chimes each evening at 7.00 p.m. with the message that prayer is being offered, there at the heart of the community, and that prayer undergirds the efforts of many local Christians to live out their faith in love and support for their neighbours.