Sacramental Stories – Covid lockdown anniversary

Gillian Straine: You are listening to the GoHealth podcast. The GoHealth Podcast seeks to explore stories how people have found healing and how we can learn from them from their stories of human flourishing, some ordinary, some extraordinary. I’m Gillian Straine, and I run the Guild of Health and St. Raphael. 

So today on the Go Health Podcast we are delighted to welcome Professor Jim McManus. Jim you are amongst other things, the Director of Public Health for Hertfordshire County Council. You’re also a chartered psychologist and a chartered scientist, you are also on the board of the Association of Directors of Public Health, you’re also visiting professor at the University of Hertfordshire, so that’s your short C.V. Plus, you’re the President of the Guild of Health and St. Raphael. You’re a busy man. 

Prof. Jim McManus: Yeah, I don’t get out much. 

[LAUGHTER] 

Gillian Straine: So thank you for giving us this time in in March 2021 as we approach the anniversary of the first lockdown. It’s really a privilege to chat to you about about your life, about your work, and what you’ve been through in the last year with the pandemic. Can you tell us a little bit about…so I’ve given the kind of C.V. version of who you are. 

How did you get to be what you’re doing today, and what drives you? 

Prof. Jim McManus: Well, I have always been interested in health, and I’ve always been interested in theology, so I actually applied to medicine at University and on the first night of the interview I got food poisoning and on the second day my glasses fell on the floor of a tiled floor in the University and smashed and I thought this isn’t for me and I decided to change to theology instead. But kept doing volunteer work and then when I went into, you know, my first job, and you couldn’t be a public health consultant or director unless you’re the medic, and eventually so I worked in all sorts of areas in public health that didn’t require medical degree. And then when they opened it up, I took the plunge, went through the program to get on the register, and basically applied for jobs and worked my way up from public health specialists to Director of Public Health in previously Birmingham and now here. So that’s how I got into Public Health and it seemed to me to be something that both used my values and used my faith because as a Catholic, there is a very strong kind of vocational element to working in healthcare, and there’s a very strong social justice element to public health, and it seemed to me that that this was the kind of place where God wanted me to be. If you like because it, it blended my values that the church had taught me with a kind of a commitment for health of the population and a commitment for Catholic social teaching. So it kind of felt obvious, although it took me awhile to realize that was what was happening. 

Gillian Straine: Yeah, it’s always easier to look backward doesn’t it, to work out where God’s been leading us, rather than look forwards or at least I find that… 

Prof. Jim McManus I, I think you’re right and I’m a bit thick on the uptake as far as God’s concerned so, but there are times when you look back and think, Oh that’s what you were up to, but you don’t realise it at the time. 

Gillian Straine: And as a person of faith, how much, how explicit is your practice of your faith in your work and has being a Catholic got easier in a very public role in health promotion? 

Prof. Jim McManus: I would say that there was a period of about 10 years where it was very difficult to be a person of faith and in the public sector and I remember, in 2012 I did some work with a senior civil servant. We did a survey of every NHS trust on diversity and religion was the area we found to be most problematic and challenging.  I think the mistake we took was to treat faith as if it’s something private rather than something personal. And somehow you leave your faith at the door, but you bring every other protected characteristic in. And I think, by dint of sheer determination, I think a lot of us have ground that down, because for me, the reason I do my job is because of my faith. It is an expression of my faith. And you look particularly at the church’s social teaching and just going back to John 10:10, you know when Jesus says I’ve come that everyone might have life and have it in its fullness. That’s a complete manifesto for public health, I think. So my doing my job is a living out of my faith commitment and I don’t think I could do my job if I didn’t have my faith. 

Gillian Straine: And from the other side, science is beginning to recognise, or health science,  that our spirit, the spiritual side of our beings is important for our physical and mental health. So I wonder if from other angles a person of faith working in health is sort of ratified by what we’re discovering in science and psychology? 

 Prof. Jim McManus: I think you’re absolutely right, and it’s quite interesting that the spirituality and health agenda, and I’m not keen on the S word because I think the spirituality word is often used very sloppily by people, but there is, there is a huge amount of the research in organisational psychology about the role of faith and spirituality in the workplace, and ironically the private sector have done far more on this than a lot of the public sector where faith was a dirty word for too long. 

But if you look at Epidemiology, I mean there are pioneers like Harold Koenig who started this work some years ago. There’s now a massive evidence base that it [faith] can help you be healthy and cope, it can also be a vulnerability factor in kind of making you more vulnerable if your faith is maladjusted or too full of shame, but there’s several journals devoted to religion in health, scientific journals. There’s a body of public health scholarship on the relationship between health and faith, and it feels like what Christians have known for years science has rediscovered. 

Gillian Straine: And correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve done some health work with the Vatican in the past. Is that right? 

Prof. Jim McManus: Yes, so I I’ve done it several bits and so during the last Ebola crisis a few years ago I was somehow roped into a help with guidelines on safe burial and also did a lot of work on hospital and health care chaplaincy with what used to be the Pontifical Commission for Health Pastoral Care and also did some seminars for them on the relationship between science and health and various other things and  I have worked, I mean, I think I have been advising the Catholic bishops in England and Wales since 2003 on health care stuff, which, gosh, that’s a long time, isn’t it? And so yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to serve in a voluntary basis, the church, both at national and international level and there’s been some wonderful opportunities there. 

Gillian Straine: I mean, the church is always been interested in how, since Jesus said in you know, go and make disciples and healing my name there’s always been a healing ministry, but do you, do you think that the churches focus on health has changed over the years? Or are we just becoming more aware of it? 

Prof. Jim McManus: Well, I think there is a change because an awful lot of the focus was on health care. And I mean, as a Catholic,  growing up, you’ve got loads of saints who were doctors or nurses or cared for the sick. You’ve got loads of examples of religious orders, the Camillians is an order I’ve always been very attracted to. I’m a trustee of a hospice run by an order of nuns that is all about hospitals and health care and events in the hospices. But what I think we lost was the insight that has been there any… a lot of people say, well, let’s go back to the early church, but actually, this insight has been around through all of Christianity that health is about wholeness and balance, and the whole person. 

You said in a lecture you gave, that actually the Church needs to rediscover that healing and mission need to go hand in hand. It’s not about bums on pews, it’s actually about healing the world. I discern in the work the Guild is doing another intervention by the Holy Spirit, I think, to take us through rediscovering this Christian insight that health is about balance between person, God, neighbour and environment.  That’s where health sits. And if you look at the history of the church every time the church has become a bit too focused on one thing a movement has sprung up to balance that. I mean, you know the origins of Methodism, for example. So I think the church is called to rediscover that but we need to do a lot more than that. But in a way, people often say that Catholic social teaching is the Catholic Church is best kept secret. Actually healing and balance is the church’s best kept secret and we need to share that. 

Gillian Straine: I couldn’t agree more. I mean what about Church isn’t about healing? From, you know, the Mass or laying on of hands, but also the welcome at the door, that’s make or break point for some people. Whether you go into the community or your mum’s and tots group, you’re dealing with a lot of maternal mental health issues, you know, and making an enormous difference, there is almost nothing that for me…I guess I maybe, I have, I’ve gotten kind of blinkers on a bit, but you know, it’s all about healing. As far as I’m concerned, the whole spiritual life is a movement towards ultimate healing with God. 

Prof. Jim McManus 

I think you’re right, and if you look at the history of spirituality. I mean, particularly like the  Spanish Mystics and so Teresa of Avila is, you know, a great influence on me and she traveled all over Spain despite having really serious physical health issues. But actually, you could say that she was under the most healthy women of her time because she had a clear vision. She was always looking over the back of his shoulder whether whether the Inquisition were coming for her because she was, you know, she was a bright, gifted woman leader in the time of the Inquisition and very open to the mystical side of spirituality. 

 Gillian Straine: Yes. 

Prof. Jim McManus: And I think what that teaches us – and for me there’s several things – First of all, everything about our Christian life and churches like should be about healing. And actually the welcome you give people at the door really matters, but also at the same time you know the healing ministry doesn’t start in wafting oil about and having healing services, it actually starts in how you organise the community in a way to support people be whole people. For Catholics the Eucharist is the beginning and the center of that but actually, for most churches the communal church life should be the place where we can discern, is this a healing community or not? And I completely agree with you. 

 Gillian Straine: I mean, talking about Saint Teresa there I was reminded of another Spanish Mystic I’ve been thinking about in January is St. John of the Cross, whose particular focus was on the dark night of the soul. And I mean in this time of pandemic and suffering and people being shut in that when we are closed down and going through difficult periods, it’s tough, but also an opportunity. And I know from your background, you know health and healing is not just a professional interest, it’s personal to you as well. You Had a time in your life when you face serious illness and I wonder if you might share some of that story with us and how it impacted on your faith? 

Prof. Jim McManus: Oh gladly, I mean, so I remember, in 2012 I started getting a quite a large lump under my left arm and wondering what it was, went to the doctor who says it is just a cyst, have some Flucloxacillin and it grew and grew and grew and then started going over my shoulder and I was in huge pain, I couldn’t sleep and went for a scan. And got the results and got told by the doctor you’ve got a cancer which has spread. You gotta tumour that is 23 centimetres in your abdomen and a big one that has started under your arm and gone…and it was basically non Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Now blood cancers and cancers in general are quite common in my family my sister had a form of leukemia and he said…and you know, you don’t take things in, you think, well, that’s it – I’m going to die…and you need to go to hospital. So I went into hospital on the 4th of December 2012 and came out at the end of March 2013, so it was a it was…it started in Advent and ended at the end of Lent. It was a very long lent and  I don’t think I was expected to survive because it was a grade 4 by the time they got it, but I was lucky because it was a very fast growing cancer which meant it really responded to the chemotherapy. 

But the chemotherapy is a…well, that was fun and you know, so it left me with some I got some inflammations and encephalitis from the Ifosfamide and it gave me nerve damage and a bit of sight and a bit of hearing loss, half a dead foot and a load of other stuff. And short term memory problems and I still have my jaw still out of alignment because I had tumours in the jaw but I I still remember being very very frightened. In a ward in UCLH where the windows were you had to stand up to see at the windows, and I think it was ward 16 I was on and you ended up and it was very frightening, but I got the sudden feeling one day that everything would be alright. 

And I had the sacrament of healing, you know the what Catholics used to call last rites, but it wasn’t last rites, twice during my stay with some friends around and that was a really intense moment.  

I had a lot of pain, I don’t tolerate opiates I couldn’t take morphine and so my painkillers for my cancer journey where some tramadol and paracetamol and I think the doctors thought I was crazy but and I …and it was quite scary. I got several infections, I got pneumonia once and all sorts of other…but at no…I just had this sense of peace throughout all of that and I remember the nurse saying one day, ‘you know the doctors think you unstoppable’ and I said, well, that’s not me that’s you know, I, I think I have  

But a lot of good came out of it, actually, and some of the good that came out of it was I knew what it’s like to be so vulnerable I can’t walk five steps. And I know what it’s like to be very, very ill but I also know what it’s like to experience healing. Now, 15 years ago I would have been dead because the cancer treatments have evolved. 

So it is something that has stayed with me ever since, and I’ve had a one or two scares since where we’ve found lumps and then got into it it’s not lumps it’s actually just an infection. And you never fully right, but I think it taught me a whole load of stuff including that actually all will be well. It’s an experience that, somebody once said to me, why do you say lots of good came out of your cancer?Because lots of good did come out of it. I’m not saying that I’d I’d go Yay, Let’s do it all again, but I do think if if I had to turn back the clock and it was put in front of me, knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t say no, but the benefit of hindsight is a wonderful thing isn’t it. 

Gillian Straine: Yeah, yeah. 

And we’ve been through a period as a as a globe, a nation, as communities as churches, workplaces, and as individuals of a terrible time of suffering with the pandemic, the word unprecedented has just become boring, an unprecedented use of the word unprecedented – but goodness, how do you? How do you describe what we’re going through? With my kids I, I tell them, you know, this is a bit like World War Two, just to try to…and I find that helpful as well, you know, to try to get my head around the scale of what we’ve been through over the last year with the pandemic, how have you stayed healthy during this pandemic? With your workload in your health background? 

 Prof. Jim McManus: It’s, it has been crazy. I mean, it’s been kind of 12 and 13 hour days and at times. And 14 hour days at times and sometimes seven days a week. And the gyms are closed, so I can’t do weightlifting so I have to do walking or cycling or in-house workouts. But I guess the things that got me through this time are – one is, this will pass – science will find a way out of this if we pull together, but we need hearts and minds. I think the second thing personally is actually making time for prayer every day. Among the things I’ve found is, so I try either to read the daily office or if I’m just too exhausted, I at least make sure I do the rosary. And the scripture rosary and I’ve found, and I think I’ve been praying rosary every day since this started it.  I think the third thing is the Bible reading fellowship, Daylight notes, you know chapter. So still setting aside half an hour every day for prayer at least has really worked for me. Setting aside time just to have down time has really worked for me, also keeping you head, because on a daily basis I get emails from people screaming at me that that we’re killing them because of lockdown. But I also get emails from people saying this lockdown isn’t tight enough and you can’t please everybody so I try to stick rigidly to the science and say look there is no perfect solution to this. There is no way out of this, it is going to be traumatic and drawing on my previous experience of dealing with traumatic experiences like cancer helps. But also this isn’t the first pandemic I’ve been in, but it is by far the worst. I do think that I’m not quite sure what I’d do if I didn’t have my faith – it really has kept me going and is giving me resilience and I know lots of people are praying for me and I’ve heard lots of people being supportive, but that’s the kind of attempt to find balance in the midst of this to try and find some peace. 

Gillian Straine: we’ve been praying for you every week in noonday prayer, alongside other healing agencies and all our members as well as those people in need.  

And I love the way you describe that because I asked that question in a deliberate way. How do you stay healthy without defining what health is? And you talked about your physical health, you talked about your spiritual health and you talked about your emotional health and all three are so important, because  

Prof. Jim McManus: Yeah, you really are and they all have to be the same and it’s quite odd to do several national roles and a local role in the midst of this pandemic because the benefit of it is you get to see you get to see things other people are doing that you can learn from. And the downside is you have to put in silly hours but also you see lots and lots of people in pain, so pastoral care for other people in networks you know other directors of public health who have struggled with issues, but also Directors of Public Health and other people who have stuck with me when I’ve had difficult times and the support of the Guild I think has been has been tangible, but it is holding onto that physical, spiritual psychological balance that has kept me going. 

Gillian Straine: Yeah. 

And you mentioned there when you have, I mean, it sounds like people pulling on your time everyday with questions that are difficult to answer and people you know acting out of a traumatic position, we are all being traumatised by this. But you said you go back to the science. 

It seems to me the science is taking a bit of a hit during this pandemic. Everyone is an expert all of a sudden and science the tricky thing because science is actually my interpretation of observations of the world and that might change. There’s an understanding of what science is that has been attacked. 

And also, we’re in uncharted territory, and there is something to do with how we communicate or how, and that’s part of your roles in communication of that. 

What, looking back, how could things have been done better around the communication of the understanding of the pandemic? 

Prof. Jim McManus: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with science taking a hit because I’m, I think what we’ve had is scientism, not science, this idea that science is infallible.  

I do a series of webinars for people in Hertfordshire and routinely get about 250 elected members on them. And I said to them recently, the trouble with science is it’s not an exact science. It’s anything but an exact science. 

Science is faulting and fallible and as you say, it’s about interpretation. So, I think we could have an opportunity to get rid of scientism and scientific dogmatism, but I think the mistakes that have been made: 

First of all, we needed better national communications to keep hearts and minds because all the social psychology says you don’t get out of a pandemic by shaming people you get out of a pandemic by keeping them on board and building a spirit of solidarity and togetherness and you know, and and I think we need to learn that as a country. 

Secondly, I do wish some of the scientists will just stop arguing with one another in public because you get a statement and then what we get, and if you trained in scientists, you understand that this debate going on, but it sounds like to members of the public scientists are all just disagreeing and having an argy-bargy.  

And there is a moral responsibility, I think, if you are going to speak into the public square of at least try to get your facts right and understand the impact this will have on people who actually aren’t is buried in the detail as you are, so. 

Being a scientist, I think, or being some of the kind of media loved scientists at the minute, people seem to think means saying what you like, it doesn’t, you have to really think that through. So I I think there needs to be better responsibility from government, better responsibility from the scientific community. 

I think that, ironically, the corollary of that is it needs to be much greater transparency of both certainty and uncertainty, and an acknowledgement that lockdowns are a really bad tool apart from every other tool, which is also really bad too, because everything you do in this pandemic hurts some folk while helping others. That’s a difficult painful place to be, but how many of our scientists and policymakers are actually acknowledging that difficulty? I mean, I don’t want to be in this lockdown, I think the only reason we’re in this lockdown is because we, we, we took, we took the wrong policy choices nationally in 2020 and we simmered in and out of rises in the virus and then it just boiled over. 

I think we need humility and real kind of discernment and I think Christian scientists and scientists of faith can bring that to the table. 

Gillian Straine: And let’s look at the faith side of it. The church had to respond as well to the situation they found themselves in. There was a virus that was not understood well and it ended up shutting its doors during the first lockdown. Looking back on the same year, how could the church have done it better and what made it difficult for them to respond well in the crisis that everyone faced? 

Prof. Jim McManus: I think one of the problems was that you were getting huge numbers of people who decided they knew better and even coming from an ideological position of the Church must stay open at all costs. And I know we’ve all had personal criticism for that, but I think we had no alternative other than to shut during lockdown, but I think that there was, there were several things we could and should have done better. 

The first is actually sit down and think, but what does that mean? Well, there was a great move to online stuff. Why did some denominations stop clergy going into their own churches? Which is completely unnecessary really. 

There was also a really nasty undercurrent of, and I remember seeing this on social media: ‘Well our clergy should be prepared to die for us because that’s what they did in the year of typhoid.’ And you think what kind of theology is underpinning that? 

And the good thing is the church moved to support and care for people and you know that was, people would have died without that.  

I think we should have inserted more theology into what is God calling the church to do, and PS it is not privatised religion – Christianity is a communal religion. It’s not about your rights and your right to your church. 

It’s about church as the people of God and not a building. But what role does the building have in the mission of the Church during a pandemic? And I think we should have been much more upfront about that. But the situation we’re in now is that the national policy said churches can open, but local decisions can allow them to close, and I think that allows room for discernment, but what we have to do is is the idea that somehow churches closing is an attack on the faith I just don’t get. 

Some people are saying actually I miss the Sacraments and I need the Sacraments, other people are saying online worship has really done something for me and other people saying the social mission of the church has never been as good. So how do you look across that and take the good from there? 

We can reach more people than we’ve reached in a while, there has been a benefit from our mission, but there’s a lot of people hurting and healing, so I think we need to sit down and discern what is coming out of the pandemic and what that means for the Church for the next 10 years. 

And I think the Guild is more needed than ever. If you are because if you get people who never darken the door of a church because of the way the building happens but will go to online worship. That’s a plus, isn’t it? 

Gillian Straine 

It’s interesting, isn’t it? 

We talked earlier about, in general people misunderstand science and think it’s just, you know, it’s just, a fact generator – actually science is the process of interpretation and the best we’ve got right now is kind of, science. It’s the same with theology, theology is not a big thing that is in a box somewhere, we just open up and have a look at to get all the answers. Theology has always developed overtime. It’s always been an interpretation of scriptures and interpretation of what’s gone on in the past, the tradition, but it’s always been an interpretation. Also what we’re going through right now and what big world events even quite small world events can change theology. For example, after the Second World War there was a huge shift in theology and an understanding of where one might find God in the world, given the suffering that we went through in the Second World War. What is your first attempt of what the post Covid theology for the church might look like? How has Covid changed the church and our theological understanding or missiological understanding? 

Prof. Jim McManus 

So for some strange reason I decided it was a good idea to start doing my doctorate in theology and I’m doing it at Roehampton and I have had a month and a half of block. I’m trying to do my doctoral thesis on the relationships between Catholic social teaching, public health and faith and this very question you’ve got has just caused me to have a block and and there’s a whole pile of theology – there are about 20 different books. 

I think currently, and this will probably change, that Covid is an impetus for us to rediscover the basic nature of mission which is about human wholeness, tut that has to be about the common good. And about the kind of biblical view, if you like of caring for the most vulnerable, including everybody and as well as giving everybody hope. 

Whether you choose that from Catholic social teaching or or the scriptures, it doesn’t really matter. I think there is a there is an invitation for us to go back to the Gospels and re look at the Gospels and see that the ministry of Jesus and the person of Jesus as making people whole and making wholeness and healing both at an individual level and at a societal level the front and center in our mission. 

And partly because we will come out of this with huge inequalities, the virus will have brought a wave of virus but it’s also brought with her mental ill health, financial challenges, inequality, racism. You know every difficulty and evil under the sun you could find has been at let loose by it, but it is also let loose light and glory and grace. 

And how do we use this as a kind of Kairos, moment and opportunity to renew the church? To kind of bring people hope in a real, tangible way? And that I think, means something about how we model basic Christian communities around caring for and loving and helping people. 

It also means I think we need to revisit what we mean by sanctification, you know the idea that as Christians you can’t be divorced from the church so and how do we reach out to everybody that we as a church have alienated? And coming at the end of the kind of scandals around child abuse and various other things and abuse of power, I wonder if it’s an invitation for us for a more humble church to kind of go back in and bring people back out of the kind of mindset of individualism and not worrying about others, into much more – we’re in this together. 

Gillian Straine: These gems are falling, I’m so glad we’re recording this. 

I want to come back to the missiological stuff that you think might emerge after Covid but let’s just stay almost with, you know, sort of hard core theology for a bit, because one thing I think I discern, people are struggling with this pandemic is the level of death and I’ve been struck every evening when we’re almost our tuning in the wireless, or I feel that’s what I do – I try not to put the TV news on. We’re tuning in the wireless to find out the death count. I mean how horrifying that is. 

And when I’m leading prayers often, I say, you know, that’s it, we’ve got these statistics, but each of those are individuals surrounded by communities of friends and family, each one of those is a desperate tragedy. Each one of those is surrounded by healthcare professionals, presumably who are being traumatised by what we’re going through. 

And I wonder if Covid has also drawn our attention to our lack of ability to cope with death. Because the Christian Healing ministry is never just about getting better, and it’s one of those things that elevates it above, you know, new age approaches to health or just spiritualities because we actually deal with the elephant in everyone’s room right now, which is death. And I wonder if this pandemic will help us look more seriously at death as part of life and with that sort of theodical approach. And how do we cope with bad stuff happening in the world, you know, as a Christian? How would you tackle these questions today with this overwhelming death count, we’re getting on a daily basis. How can – here’s the classic question – how can a God that wrought us in our mother’s womb, who loves us, let this virus loose? And how do we cope with that at a spiritual and emotional level? 

Prof. Jim McManus: I, I think it brings out several things and the first thing is that it goes back to that line for me in Saint Paul, because when you when I sit and dwell on the kind of issues of evil I am brought back to the fact that most evils we talk about are from the natural world and you know that line of Saint Teresa that you are, we are God’s hands so Christ has no hands on earth but ours – so our duty is to kind of  get stuck in and try and make things better and remedy it.  

I believe with all my heart what Saint Paul says, that nothing can cut us off from the love of God and so I reject the idea that Covid is from God as a chastisement, and I think it is just something that you would expect to occur with the laws of nature. 

We’re getting more and more of these diseases emerging from the animal world, zoonotic infections as we encroach more and more animal habitats. And I think what it says to us is something about the arrogance of humanity that you know the biblical views that were meant to be stewards of the earth, not Overlords and Masters of it using it  and exploiting it as a commodity. 

And so if anything, Covid should make us check ourselves about the consequences of our own Global actions is the first thing. I think the second issue that it brings to me is, I find the discourse around death staggering because big people say, well, there’s only X deaths. 

Well, there’s only X deaths? Why are so few people dying, why are our hospitals not full? Well actually f you walked into it a hospital ward in most areas of England right now, you’d find that a lot of the hospitals were full to overflowing. 

And since when did we decide that there was an acceptable number of deaths from a pandemic is only several 100 people die – well that’s somebody’s mother or father or son or daughter and they are precious and I think it says two things. One is, there’s the utter failure of a society that doesn’t have a sense of mortality at its heart, to cope with death, we shun it and we get scared of it. And we put it away. And I think a calling back to the kind of idea that we are finite and we do have to address death, and I think the second thing it teaches us is they need to understand that vulnerability is a part of everybody’s life before death. But death will bring the ultimate vulnerability. But you know vulnerability to illness. And we seem to want to have a society where every illness can be cured and we can do what we like. And again that to me calls me back to the idea of the common good and the fact that we are not individual atoms in this wee postmodern bubble, that we can do what we like. Actually we owe another a duty from our common humanity. 

I think there’s an opportunity theologically to address that neither the laser beam God who comes in and does you know, I’ll invoke God and God will make this go away, nor the God who is punishing us with Covid, I think represent the God of the Scriptures is inviting us to, in the midst of this trauma re discover what it means to be human and authentic humanity means balanced relationship with God with ourselves with our neighbors and with our Earth, and we’ve lost that most of us are not in balanced relationship or are any of us? Certainly not with the Earth we live on. 

Gillian Straine: And Covid just sort of it, in some ways it hasn’t given any new problems, it’s just expose the problems that were there already and it’s brought them to the fore and in that way there’s opportunities to move and certainly in the Guild of Health, when – I seem to always be working to working on definitions, how do you define this? How do you define that? How do you define healing? 

And for me and for the work in the Guild everything we’re trying to do is to help people flourish to find balance with self, balance with community, balance with the environment and balance with God. Because that is Scriptural and that seems to promote health within ourselves,  if we’re mind, body and spirit, so there’s an opportunity I think of Covid. 

I’m going back to, you highlighted, I think, the missiological opportunities for the Church and Covid, and by that, I mean how the church might be the body of Christ in the world. There’s opportunities to change because of what we’ve been through in Covid, and I think you put that so succinctly and beautifully, and also it’s kind of exciting. We’ve got this, this opportunity is really exciting, that we can suddenly, we suddenly – we don’t have to just bang on about, you know, telling folk about Jesus and expect to come to church and you know put some money in the pot on your way in. That’s not what we’re about. 

We’re actually about creating churches which are hubs for healing that people can come and find ways to feel better, become more connected with themselves and with the community and with God, and to flourish, that’s what we’re about. And I was struck a few months ago that report that was released by an all party parliamentary group called Keeping the Faith and it was a fantastic read. It was the government that, correct me if I’m wrong – the government had gone and done research and asked a bunch of councils all over England, how have you found working with church communities during the pandemic? 

And 80% then came back and said they’ve been amazing. We had no, I’m paraphrasing, this is not what the fancy report said. Basically, this report said they are amazing, they’ve got heaps of connections – we didn’t know about that. They could act really quickly when we said we needed food banks and mental health supports, they acted really quickly – we didn’t know they could do that. Hey everyone, churches are great,  and other faith bodies – it wasn’t just churches, it was other faith based organisations. But it’s a wonderful report. Because it’s sort of what we know about the church but the secret is kind of getting out and I wondered to what degree we now have that opportunity. We’re doing the work of God, but actually the secular bodies are like we need to engage with the Church in order to improve public health. How would you advise church communities to go about this? Keeping in balance – this is not, this is we’re not just another third party to be used – we’re doing this as part of our mission. How do we do it well? 

Prof. Jim McManus: So I think, first of all start from the inexhaustible riches of grace and prayer and theology. That’s where all this has to come from, and I think the mistakes we often make is you know we, we don’t want social workers with a cross round the neck but we want Christians in it and you said missiological opportunities. 

There’s two massive opportunities arise from this. The first is for us to do what the Second Vatican Council called being a leven in the world. So there’s an opportunity for us to educate civil society about  about how the church can be a leven in the world, from its capabilities and its attitudes and it’s people that has to stem from prayer and  from being responsive to Christ’s call to help all people flourish. 

I think the second big opportunity is to get rid of this idea of healing as, The World Health Organization called it a complete state of mental, physical, social and spiritual well-being, well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been there. Actually, health is actually much more about finding balance in the midst of a messy life and teaching people that skill. 

So if you take those two skills, those two big missiological opportunities, how do faith communities go about it? Well, I think the first thing is actually audit your skills. What skills do you have? What capabilities do you have that that you can actually deliver and reliably deliver, so there’s no point promising to go in and you know, give your building over to be a night shelter for the homeless, if you’re not prepared to understand what that means, for example, and then I think the second thing is, build relationships with some sympathetic local councillors. 

And build relationships with your Director of Public Health or the person who leads the equalities work in your counsel and actually start to have a robust conversation and bring everybody else to the table. And I think we have to break engagement with faith out of the equalities box. Actually, faith communities need to be sitting down and talking to the director of adult Care and the Directive children service about what it means to be a healthy child and what can faith communities do there and then you have to break this nonsense about that means we’re proselytizing. 

Caring for people’s flourishing does not mean you have to shove a bible down their throat.  There are so many more things you can do, so I think it it’s that. There is a…I think there’s a 2002 when I was working for Nacro I did a guide on how faith communities and crime and disorder partnerships could work together. And in 2008 I did a guide for the for the then Office of the Deputy Prime Minister I think it was then about how resilience partnerships in faith communities could work together. And so the principles are there about organisational engagement. I think just go and get stuck in and have an honest conversation. 

Gillian Straine: Thank you so much, Jim. We’re drawing to the end, but I just have one final question. This is March 2021, the anniversary of the first lockdown, the first national lockdown for Coronavirus. Looking backwards, looking across your professional and your personal expertise in this area, what advice can you give everyone who’s listening to this today about how to have hope as we look into year two of this situation and beyond? 

Prof. Jim McManus: Yeah, so it’s it’s been a year hasn’t it, which is quite a shock when you look back, but I think my advice would be hold on to the fact that science is bringing us solutions to get out of this. The downside of that is actually we need obviously makers to listen to them and do a very careful opening up, so be vocal that actually the more slowly and the more carefully we open up the more will control the virus and enable the vaccine to do its job. So there is hope. 

I think the second piece of hope is the fact that we have learned a lot during this pandemic about how to recover and keep ourselves sane. This will be a marathon, not a Sprint. We’re not gonna heal all the mental health and trauma in a week. We’re going to take – it will take a decade to get out of this, but we know that. 

The third hope is that the virus has mutated to the point where the new variants haven’t yet escaped the vaccine and some of the old measures still work. That is also hopeful. 

I think the fourth sign of hope I would take from this is that there are countries in the world that have curbed and controlled the virus and have reopened carefully and safely and if we follow their example, we can do that. 

And I think the fifth sign of hope is that and the Church has come through this -we haven’t shut thousands of churches – we’ve actually found relevance, and that relevance will continue. 

And actually, the sixth sign of hope is every little helps. What every single individual does does make a difference. If I treat myself is infected, I stop others from infecting me in getting infected and I reduce the burden on the NHS. If I help somebody with an act of kindness, that’s one person who might eat tonight who might otherwise not, and you may never see that in the media but it is a sign of hope and we have to take that as such. 

Gillian Straine: Professor Jim McManus, thank you so much for everything you do. It gives me hope that you are up there at such a high level in Public Health as a man of faith with such wisdom, helping to guide us through and guide the other experts through what we’re all going through. Thank you for giving us your time to the GoHealth podcast and God bless you and everything that you do. 

 Prof. Jim McManus: Thank you and to you too and the Guild.