We live in unprecedented times...Do we?

 

Listening to the radio over the last few days I’ve been struck by a phrase regularly used by commentators that goes something like: We’ve never seen anything like this before. It’s got me thinking if that is actually true?

Take, for example, this current spell of very warm and sunny weather.  The grass is parched and Wimbledon didn’t have to be extended this year as rain hardly stopped any play.

Although this sort of weather doesn’t come our way every year, depending on the Jet Stream, I very much remember the long hot summer of 1976 – perhaps because I was sitting school exams – when the reservoirs dried up and the ice cream ran dry!

Or how about the Pandemic?  For us, this worldwide phenomenon started in December 2019, yet a hundred years earlier the world was emerging from the 1918/19 Spanish Flu Pandemic that killed more people than those who lost their lives in the First World War. 

And now there’s the political uncertainty as No 10 Downing Street falls vacant after a tempestuous few months.

It’s significant that the body organising the election of a new Conservative leader has the title of the 1922 Committee. This group, set up to represent the views of back benchers was actually established in 1923, a year after they effectively rose up in collective strength and forced the resignation of David Lloyd George whose Premiership of the Coalition was faltering because of accusations of sleaze and wrongdoing.  Baldwin described him as a Dynamic Force of the wrong kind!  All sound a bit familiar exactly one hundred years on?

We have been here before, yet we quickly forget that.

During these days of Covid I’ve often wondered why, at school, we hardly touched on The Spanish Flu Pandemic? And then, recently, I heard a historian point out that we have a tendency to forget the hardships we go through.  It’s a sort of self-preservation mechanism that enables us to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves down and try to walk more optimistically into the future, rather than get stuck overly conscious of the past.

Yet, in doing so, perhaps we forget too much.

We forget that we do, individually and collectively, ‘fall down’.  Often, we can recover and stand up again.  Indeed, that is the basis of the Christian idea of redemption.  We can begin again, receiving both the forgiveness, acceptance and new beginnings offered to us by God and those around us.  It’s the reason why the story of the return of the lost, prodigal son being greeted by the forgiving and welcoming father, remains one of the best loved and most relevant of all biblical narratives.

So, when I hear that phrase, we live in unprecedented times I’m just a little sceptical.  We’ve probably been here before in some senses, and we’re likely to be here again.  Yet we hang on to the belief that God shares every day and every challenge with us, be that in 2022, or 1922.