The Sick and Infirm

Rev dear Rev: How is it that in a parish up north in the countryside and in the Scottish style deanery I often visit, with parishes full of young priests at the local parish in solidum, the sick and the housebound and the infirm have been sorely neglected by the clergy for the last 2 years - is there a legit reason for such neglect of house visits?

MDs and GPs and general medical locum doctors too of the hard pressed NHS have had a lot of complaints recently about the cessation of face to face and home visits during the last 2 years, a feature of a new technological NHS with its Zoom facilities, and indeed one national newspaper has led an avid campaign about the issue and managed to win many new concessions from the health minister, but yep, hmmmm it is called a deadly pandemic of gargantuan proportions, excuse me if I pose as the Firm. To begin with, it would seem you might have prima facie some solid grounds for your feelings, as we read in the Letters of Apostles in the New Testament. And many of the lighter sort of Christian generally loves to quote Holy Writ when reflecting upon their medical conditions, not realising that the Holy Writ of the Bible is usually supposed to report in to us about humankind's spiritual maladies and malaises and not the more conventional medical kind. But this is often just a knee jerk response that denies the new situation now obtaining. The fact is that something else is out there:

Holy Writ? In a medicaid pandemic? The Letter to St James it must be said advises that the care of the sick christians occurs during the healing ministry and suggests that if there are sick people among the community of saints, let them ask the ordained Christian presbyters to come along and lay their hands upon them and anoint them with holy episcopal oil, and the prayer of faith will save the sick person, hence the formula of anointing and blessing - Through this holy anointing, may the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit + may He who frees you from sin save you and raise you up, Amen. So yes there is some little precedent for legitimate expectation it cannot be denied. Legitimate expectation. No wonder we as a parish have issued holy oil and holy salt to the christian flocks to be getting on with during the pandemic - we expect the christian believers to anoint their sick members of the family themselves with this formula above when the ordained presbyters are simply not allowed by the government to come calling at the doors of the saints. But what of the Lord and Master of all this faith healing? Jesus too had to cope with the unreasonable demands of flocks and crowds of people once he began his own faith healing and spiritual industry of deliverance way back when in Israel and in Egypt - people can become quite panicked when there is a free health service in town - when they sense that it is a free healing ministry that is around though even then in those times, the healing ministry was not really free, since the Master, Jesus the Physician, asked people to make acts of faith and hope and charity and to contribute to the charity of the missionary outreach in the common purse of the apostles and disciples - much like the panic buyer journalist Peter Barry on GBNews TV recently who went head to head with Rebecca Jane on the programme with Dan Wootton called The Clash - panic buying helps nobody since it leads to unreasonable and bizarre forms of individual selfishness, like the buying of oceans of petrol at petrol stations in the modern world, and the filling up of cars plus canisters too at the same, and is driven by fear and panic - so Jesus too had to deal with such panic buyers in the ancient world, albeit not so much about fuel, except the fuel of the spiritual aspect of humankind. But there you go - the human person can be quite unreasonable when the lion of the pride senses that there is a crisis out there and the cubs and the lionesse might suffer. NB but whatever about elaborate and positive quoting from the Bible's holy writ, the medical fact is that the deadliest pandemic known to humankind since the 1347 Black Death Plague with its death rate of 47% has de facto overtaken many such merely biblical considerations however important the Bible seems to be for modern and ancient Christians to quote from in their hour of neediness -

NB - The first death from Cv-19 occurred in Wuhan in December 2019, the local UK govt lockdown was announced on the 23rd March 2020, and since then all hell has broken out several times over. Local bishops and diocesan wallahs, buoyed up by their success with applications for judicial review, have striven hard to make sense of it all by imposing new rules and regulations, but they have in the meantime locked down too with restrictions on clergy movements and even on clergy sacraments except with a cotton bud. Tough times. Tough stations. Sorry you feel the sick and the housebound are neglected, but these are difficult times, and bishops have hard decisions to make, chiefly how to hang on to their clergy so that few die in the deadly pandemic. Many bishops recall the dark and dim days of the early pandemic when 9 priests of the one diocese died in one week doing their duty in the pandemic in Bergamo in Italy, one of the first locations in Europe to be sorely afflicted by the influx of lots of Chinese tourists from cruise ships in that timeframe. So it is 1347 come back. We must all strive hard to forgive the sorry state of affairs, and moreover to overcome our sedate and sedentary "nursing home" models of parish and deanery. We are not nursing homes or hospitals for the highly specialist care of the sick with ventilators that this specific condition often requires, aside from the courses of medication with Vitamin C and with other doses of treatment that this virus needs, rather first and foremost, we are gladiatorial training camps designed to train Christians how to fight in a modern internet governed world. Fight Club the Movie is our specialist format - that is what people pay us for. Guidance on how to fight for rights when those rights are compromised by state actors or simply by fellow man and mankind's inhumanity to man, which is the more likely standard format for human rights abuse since the HRA of 1998. Tough times. Tough circumstances. We must all learn to forgive and get a grip on our unreasonable expectations that fly in the face of the hard science of the present time, in the face of the hard science of practical common sense and medical aid too.