Much excitement on Monday, as my attempted sourdough starter was definitely fermenting after several days: it smelt like sick, but who cares? So I tried to add some flour to part of it and try to make some proper bread. But the dough wouldn’t rise. This time I went unleavened and made some flatbreads. Last night, they were ready – they were tasty and interestingly chewy. This morning, after a night in the tupperware, they are basically baker’s biltong. I think I’m going to cut them into strips and gnaw on them to stave off the boredom. I don’t think Janet will feel any need to help use them up. I made an excursion to the local supermarket this morning and we have some proper bread. I’m OK with a short walk early in the morning – it’s easy to avoid people, especially on roadside pavements, and there aren’t many people. But negotiating the shops is harder. I forget the circulation protocols; or I don’t know what to do when I meet someone filling shelves (theirs is a job where it’s impossible to avoid people – Tesco should be giving them PPE); or I can’t organise my shopping in the order that we have to walk past stuff; or I get in someone else’s way. I really don’t want to have the virus unknowingly and give it to someone else.
So we’re not exactly trapped here – but we don’t go out much. Maybe in ten, twenty, thirty years, being indoors is going to be my life all of the time: and that would be normal. I probably need to get some more strategies in place for this.
So, a bit of an anticlimactic bread story. This coming Sunday is often called ‘Low Sunday’, the anticlimax after Easter. Days like Low Sunday are the bread and butter of a living faith – they sort out the women from the girls and the men from the boys. If you can join in worship when there’s no great ‘oomph’ in it for you, if you can love and serve when it hurts to love and aches to serve, if you can keep on going when you don’t really fancy it somehow, then you know your faith is going deep.
In this world though, things are worse than a mere anticlimax. It is a dark time, especially as the US seeks to undermine the global fight against the virus.
I believe that for the United Reformed Church in nearby Yorkshire, the fifteenth of the month is a day of prayer about COVID-19, for the duration. I believe that Jair Bolsonaro declared a day of prayer and fasting a week or two ago – good for him – although I’d be happier if he listened to advice and did more to protect his people.
God of love,
we ask you to comfort those who mourn,
bring healing to those who are sick,
work hand in hand with science and medicine
to bring this horror to an end.
We remember those thousands,
tens of thousands
who loved and were loved,
each one who will be missed.
We particularly think of the
uncounted, untested people,
those vast numbers who are ill
or facing death,
those who have been forgotten by the statistics,
and those who will be broken by
a new poverty.
We pray for the uncounted ones;-
people in residential care
people who can’t be counted
because their governments are poor
or secretive.
We pray, as the virus spreads
silently and unrecorded
through shanty towns,
markets and bus stations,
subsistence farms,
among people forgotten by the developed world.
Living God,
may your love and mercy
fall upon this whole world
from pole to equator.