article Archives - Gerry Lynch: Priest, Writer, Photographer

This article first appeared in the February 2021 edition of the parish magazine of St John with St Mary, Devizes.

This time of the year always provides a strange intermezzo in the Church’s liturgical cycle. The long forty days of Christmas seem out of sync with the secular world, perhaps starting to drag a little at the point when they are rescued by the season’s culminating exclamation point of Candlemas. Then we have the briefest of spells of Ordinary Time, its only appearance between December and June, before the privations of Lent begin. In the cycle of the natural seasons, the days are mercifully starting to stretch but are often viciously cold. It is a time of being neither one thing nor the other.

So it is with the pandemic. Having not always managed Covid-19 well, as I write the UK has made a bright start to the vaccination process. At this point, it has vaccinated the fourth highest proportion of its population in the world, behind only three Middle Eastern countries: Israel, the UAE, and Bahrain. I have no idea whether that will remain the case by the time you read this, but the local vaccine rollout in Wiltshire seems to have been extremely impressive, with many of you in the highest priority bands having told me that you have had one or even two jabs already. If the scientists are right, the appalling death rate should start to come down quite rapidly as people are being vaccinated, quite rightly, in order of risk to life, along with our frontline health and social care workers.

The rest of us will have to wait, and so the pandemic is far from over, and healthy people in their thirties and forties, who rarely die of Covid-19 but can end up desperately ill in hospital before fighting it off, are probably still many, many, months from vaccination. The UK is unlikely to reach the fabled herd immunity threshold until late summer or even autumn. We will still be living with the tedious restrictions of distancing and isolation for at least the first half of 2021, although probably in an increasingly attenuated form as time goes on.

Article originally published in the October 2020 issue of the magazine of St John’s, Devizes.

Angels guard Christ from above. Folio 220r from the Book of Kells (illuminated ca. 800).

I started my first day as a curate with a swim. It hadn’t been planned in advance. Waking early on a bright and cloudless midsummer morning, I decided to cycle along the canal to Bishops Cannings. Despite noting with concern how narrow the towpath became as it passed the Marina, I felt invigorated by the deep orange sunshine on my face and cool air in my lungs. Due to be commissioned as a Licensed Lay Worker that afternoon, a milestone on a very long journey to ordained ministry, I felt gloriously and intensely alive.

The next thing I knew, my bike had somehow made a ninety degree turn and toppled down the bank of the canal, plunging vertically like the Titanic, and catapulting me through the air like a rodeo rider being thrown. I felt mud in my hands as I scraped the bottom. I couldn’t manage to heave my old boneshaker back up the bank, so I trudged home on foot, soaked and stinking of carp. Worse still, my mobile phone died – it was my only internet connection as my broadband wasn’t connected yet, and I needed to be able to get on Zoom to be licensed. What an inauspicious start to a momentous day!

I said some lairy things to God as I showered. On that day of all days, couldn’t He have protected me from such ignominy? Yet I later began to wonder if He hadn’t arranged that strange swerve to my own benefit. Let me explain.