“For some organisations, near-term survival is the only agenda item. Others are peering through the fog of uncertainty, thinking about how to position themselves once the crisis has passed and things return to normal. The question is, ‘What will normal look like?.’ While no one can say how long the crisis will last, what we find on the other side will not look like the normal of recent years.”
This quote is not about Covid, but by a banker about the financial crisis of 2008. It reminds us that there always has been anxiety about a “new normal”. There is nothing new under the sun.
“'Thus were we all at once coopt up together”. So wrote Vice-Chancellor Butts of the University of Cambridge in 1631, describing being “locked down” in his rooms, as yet another epidemic of the plague hit the town. By then, Cambridge had had three hundred years of waves of infections, since the Black Death arrived in Weymouth in 1348.
Then, like now, large gatherings were prevented. For instance, in 1625, the King cancelled the “Sturbridge Faire” near Cambridge, because “the holding whereof at the usual tymes would in all likelyhood be the Occasion of further Danger and Infection to other Parts of the Land, which yett by God's Mercy stand clear and free”.*
I have not been able to find any accounts of the plague in Whittlesford. But records suggest the population was fairly constant at around 100 rent-paying households between 1279 and 1674. At the time of the Spanish flu, though, our churchyard records twelve deaths in the years 1918-1920, from a population of 720. As far as we know, 1920 was the only other time our Church was closed because of an epidemic.
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The truth is that our lives have never been certain or predictable. When we get ill, lose a loved one, start a new business, or contemplate a new job or relationship, we embark on another “new normal”.
The experience of previous generations is that these transitions, from one normal to the next, are good moments for reflection. It is not pleasant to have our certainties swept away, but it does give us room to remind ourselves what we really value. And sometimes this is good time for that spiritual part of ourselves to grow, to learn about another sort of new normal.
In 1956, Oswald Chambers, a Christian ,wrote a book of thoughts that is so popular, it has been in continuous publication since, and translated into 39 languages. In it he wrote:
Certainty is the mark of the common-sense life: gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways, we do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness, it should be rather an expression of breathless expectation. We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. Immediately we abandon to God, and do the duty that lies nearest, He packs our life with surprises all the time.
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Alasdair Coles
· The plague in Cambridge, Raymond Williamson, Cambridge History of Medicine Society, 3 May 1956.
· A History of the County of Cambridge and the Isle of Ely: Volume 6. Originally published by Victoria County History, London, 1978
· Oswald Chambers My Utmost for His Highest, 1956
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