I assert this confidently because my training ground for today’s Covid-19 isolation was a single cell in HMP Belmarsh, 21 years ago.  Those conditions were tougher than they are now.

As I was confined in a far smaller space for 18 hours a day (23 hours a day at weekends) with no modern distractions — no mobile phone, no internet or TV — I had to be resourceful.  Nevertheless, the basic ground rules for surviving isolation are surprisingly similar then as now.

The preparations are all in the mind. Your world has been compulsorily changed. If you resent or rail against the restrictions, your mental health will suffer. The trick is to attempt, no matter how hard it seems, to train your mind to accept confinement calmly, to ask the question: “How can I make the best of it?”

Penal, as opposed to medical isolation, had its own challenges: guilt, the cacophony of prison noise and spartan conditions. Staying emotionally and mentally stable was the name of the game. Yet the Belmarsh pressures did concentrate my mind wonderfully in some challenging directions.

The first priority is to create a schedule and find the self-discipline to stick to it. In prison, I pinned my hour-by-hour timetable on the bars of my cell and rarely deviated. It was no draconian schoolmaster’s regime. My schedule now, as then, was a patchwork quilt of colourful commitments and curiosities.

I was, for example, receiving around 50 letters a day from well-wishers. Remembering that Lord Curzon, while Viceroy of India had dispatched over a hundred letters a day written in his own hand, I somehow tackled my correspondence with punctual diligence and no laptop.

I would also spend two or three hours every day learning Greek. Oxford had offered me a post-prison place to read a degree in Theology. But to pass my prelims, I had to take a paper in Greek, the subject I had lazily skipped at school. I knuckled down to learning it with a single text book, Wenham’s New Testament Greek. To master the 900 word vocab, I would take out little postcards with me on the wing whenever we were allowed out of our cells for meals. My fellow cons used to tease me saying: “C’mon Jono we knows those squiggles on Greek are ‘em codes for your secret Swiss bank accounts!”

I revived a discipline I had learned in school, the ‘Saying Lesson’. This had required every boy to learn by heart and to recite aloud some 20 lines of poetry. Forty years out of the classroom, I discovered that my powers to recall sonnets, soliloquys and limericks were not too rusty. I polished them up and increased my repertoire declaiming the words through the bars of my cell into the sky.

In the loneliness of the night and early morning hours I also stumbled along some rather primitive pathways of prayer. They were perhaps too simplistic and self-centred, yet they nevertheless laid some foundations of spiritual discipline which have continued to this day.

With a little innovation, the motivations of self-improvement and spiritual-exploration kept me going.

It’s the same now. As in Belmarsh, I designate an hour for poetry, usually reading aloud to my wife Elizabeth (her favourites are Wordsworth and Maya Angelou) or occasionally learning verses by heart to improve my fading septuagenarian memory.

And I relish, as I did then, uninterrupted reading. I have embarked on the third and final part of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy, the 870 page volume The Mirror & the Light. Sixteenth century Tudor plottings are particularly fascinating for an ex-politician who has seen half a century’s worth of contemporary betrayals, stabbings and executions (admittedly without the gore!) in and around Westminster.

But it’s not all betrayal and execution. When I have finished my hours with Hilary Mantel I slot in similar encounters with P.G Wodehouse or Nancy Mitford – because they bestow the gift of laughter on their readers.

One major difference between Covid isolation and Belmarsh isolation is that I now have easy access to modern technology. Also I have the companionship of my beloved wife. So loneliness is not the problem it was then.

I also follow Dr Samuel Johnson’s advice: “Sir, a man should keep his friendships in good repair”. And have been touched by the warmth of communications that lockdown has nurtured. I am able, with the help of Zoom and a telephone, to calm fears among my parishioners and laugh at the jokes of my children and godchildren. In isolation, sometimes we find a new closeness.

And I have built, too, on those spiritual foundations laid back in Belmarsh. I conduct the Daily Offices of Morning and Evening Prayer from Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer. The attendance consists of my wife (the congregation); my wife’s carer Jessie Chawda (a Jesuit trained Church Server) and myself (the Priest). On Sundays we celebrate full Liturgical Eucharist with bell, book, candle and robes. Some of the passersby who look into our ground floor flat seem to think the lunatics have taken over the asylum!

The last of my six verbs “surrender” is the strongest of practical and spiritual lifelines. My Belmarsh training taught me that it is as stupid as it is pointless to get angry or argumentative about the circumstances that cause the isolation. Surrendering to them with ingenuity and innovation opens new horizons.

The ultimate surrender in the present pandemic may mean facing up to the last enemy — death. This has long been an almost unmentionable subject in our secular society but not any longer.

A few days ago, with high fever, breathing difficulties and dreamy excursions in and out of consciousness, I wondered whether, as a 77 year-old asthmatic and ex-TB patient, if T.S Eliot’s “eternal Footman” might be holding my coat.

So I prayed — but in a new way. Instead of the predictably self-centred, “O Lord please save my life!” requests, I offered instead prayers of gratitude for a wonderful rollercoaster ride. And then I offered prayers of surrender: “Lord it is you who decide the hour of our death. I gladly and totally surrender my life to your will.”

In a moment of peace I dreamt I heard a voice saying with a celestial chuckle: “At last – you’ve got the point!”

Soon afterwards I began to recover and have returned to my isolationist timetable with even greater joy. As my favourite Old Testament prophet Isaiah has written:

“I will give you the treasures of darkness
Riches hidden in secret places”.

Discovering the riches and treasures of darkness can be the greatest blessings of self-isolation.

“China would not be China without Christianity”

So says Professor Tao Feiya[1. Professor Tao Feiya speaking at Merton College Oxford and cited in Risks to Christians in China Today, from October 2014, by The Very Revd Dr Christopher Hancock (p15). Hancock’s paper is summarised in Appendix D, page 66 of this document capture.], the internationally respected head of Shanghai University’s Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese life. However, in the light of recent negative developments and reports, not least those covered in Benedict Rogers’ powerful blog for UnHerd – ‘The world cannot ignore China’s worsening abuse of basic human rights‘ – further (and better) particulars are needed about both the plight and the potential of the Christian scene in today’s China.

Two megatrends that describe the Church in China today

As a regular visitor to Beijing and as Honorary President of Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), I take a serious interest in this huge subject. The problem in writing a column about Chinese Christianity is that it is… er… inscrutable. Trying to improve on this cliché, the religious scene in today’s People’s Republic of China (PRC) is multi-layered, opaque, nuanced and complex. Westerners often fail to ask the right questions. Volatility, secrecy and regional differences obscure a clear view. Yet despite the confusing clouds of conflicting evidence, two trends have been emerging.

• The first is that state harassment and human rights violations against Christians have increased under President Xi Jinping.
• The second is the paradox that the greater the pressures imposed by the state upon some Christian groups, the greater is the growth of Christian churches and the numbers of Christian believers.

This paradox deserves to be explored from at least five angles – historical, numerical, cultural, political and spiritual.

(1) Historical – Chinese Christians have been around for nine centuries. Christianity in China is not a new phenomenon:

• Franciscans arrived in Beijing in 1295…
• Jesuits and Dominicans have been fulfilling their teaching and preaching vocations to a growing flock of Catholics since the early 17th century…
• Protestant missions in China began in 1807 reaching their peak in the 1920s….

For all its Maoism, Marxism and atheism, the founding of the PRC in 1949 never came close to extinguishing Christianity. Instead the PRC struggled to regulate Christian activities by a system of church registrations operated by the State Administration for Religions Affairs (SARA).

Churches were closed by SARA during the decade-long Cultural Revolution (or Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as it was initially called) – but they went “underground”. After that Revolution ended in the later part of the 1970s “official” churches were allowed but “unregistered” “family” or “house” churches proliferated above ground. Today they are reckoned by many observers to account for over 60% of China’s Christians[2. Ibid, p2].

(2) Numerical. How many Chinese Christians are there? No statistics are reliable but the government’s own figures suggest that there could be between 80 and 110 million – while some experts claim far higher totals[3. Ibid, p3]. Professor Fenggang Yang of Perdue University, quoted by The Daily Telegraph three years ago predicted that, by 2030, there would be more churchgoers in China than in America:

“In 2010 there were more than 58 million Protestants in China compared to 40 million in Brazil and 36 million in South Africa, according to the Pew Research Centre’s Forum on Religion and Public Life. Prof Yang, a leading expert on religion in China, believes that number will swell to around 160 million by 2025. That would likely put China ahead even of the United States, which had around 159 million Protestants in 2010 but whose congregations are in decline. By 2030, China’s total Christian population, including Catholics, would exceed 247 million, placing it above Mexico, Brazil and the United States as the largest Christian congregation in the world, he predicted.”

All that needs to be said about this numbers game is that the figures are formidable and are having a significant influence on the culture and politics of the country. The arresting quote from Professor Feiya at the start of this article – “China would not be China without Christianity” – can be justified evidentially, even though it would be ridiculed officially.

(3) Cultural. Some scholars, including Professor Tao Feiya, argue that modern China’s systems of healthcare, education, orphanages, help for single mothers and other social policies owe much to the growing influence of Christians and Christian teachings. Others would echo the arguments of the Christian writer C S Lewis in his Abolition of Man. Writing of the “Tao”, he argued that there’s a natural law in most human societies, including China and this shared human wisdom could also help to explain the gentler aspects of PRC government.

(4) Political – Rendering unto Caesar rather than anti-Caesar revolutionaries. The politics of the Chinese state towards Christians in the 21st century have ranged from the favourable and tolerant to the hostile and repressive. Some fifteen years ago I attended a conference in Singapore with the title “The City on the Hill”. It was attended (in the capacity of observers) by senior Beijing officials from the Head Office of the State Administration for Religious Affairs. We had a surprisingly cordial and constructive dialogue. The SARA team, who in their day jobs were still busy seizing smuggled Bibles, were intrigued by the fact that Singapore’s large Christian community consisted of citizens who “rendered unto Caesar” because, having read Mark 12:17, they accepted the authority of secular government.

(5) Spiritual – A “precarious” tolerance of unregistered ‘House Churches’. As the next few years rolled by and good Chinese Christian citizens multiplied, it came as no great surprise that unregistered churches on the mainland were widely tolerated even though they remained illegal. A perceptive CSW report published in July 2011 stated:

“In the last few years the Chinese Government has largely tolerated the unofficial house church movement. Many ‘average’ Christians can practice their faith as long as they live quietly – a very different scenario compared to the China we heard about 20 years ago.”

Such tolerant times have changed and the cases of torture and human rights abuses described in Benedict Roger’s UnHerd column are one important part of the story.

A new intolerance

At a less disturbing but still concerning level, the Chinese Governments’ searching gaze and tightening grip on some parts of the Christian community is intensifying. Restrictions on academic theologians, the monitoring of classrooms, the disruption of meetings, the police photography of church congregations, the intimidation of pastors and the removal of church crosses (over 1,700 torn down in one province alone[4. UCANews – a Catholic news agency – reported early last year on this attack on Christianity’s central symbol: “Chinese authorities have taken down the first Catholic Church cross this year in Wenzhou Diocese in the latest sign the removal campaign in Zhejiang province is continuing. Government officials removed the cross of Zhuangyuan Church in Yongqiang parish just before dawn on Feb. 25, two weeks after Zhejiang’s religious affairs director called for “religious stability” ahead of the G20 Summit in the provincial capital Hangzhou in September… At least 18 Protestant church crosses have been removed in Zhejiang so far this year. But this is the first time authorities have targeted the much smaller Catholic community — an estimated 210,000 people — amid an ongoing campaign in which more than 1,700 crosses have been removed since the end of 2013.”]) are frequent forms of harassment.  They are a reversal of the tolerance shown by the governments of previous Presidents of China, which started in the era of Deng Xiaoping.

So why are these “stiff cold winds,” to use a Chinese expression, now blowing so uncomfortably through the Christian community?

The winds of religious change originate from secular politics. The sheer growth of Christian numbers makes the regime uneasy. Communist Party bureaucrats worry that it is only a matter of time before church congregations follow Falun Gong members into political activism and demonstrations.

At the higher levels of government, the old fashioned militaristic and Marxist supporters of President Xi have pressed for less licence and more suppression. They are upset by assertive churches, such as the prominent Shouwang Church in Beijing which is unregistered, internationally connected and can attract congregations of more than one thousand people on Sundays. Such churches have been seriously harassed, allegedly in line with an old Maoist dictum of “kill the chicken to frighten the monkeys”. However, this policy is failing. The Christian chickens keep on hatching. Their churches are staying open.

A new concern of the party leadership is that Christian groups are being “infiltrated by external forces”. A high level 2015 conference in Beijing on religious affairs emphasised the need for all religions to become “more Chinese”. What this means in relation to the Christian faith is obscure. A sign of increasing toughness by the government comes from SARA and last month’s order from its director Wang Zion, ordering all Communist Party members to renounce their religious beliefs. Mr Wang called spiritual faith a “red line” for Party members, insisting that they must be “firm Marxist atheists and stick to the Party’s faith”[5. The Hindustan Times of 19 July 2017 quoted Wang: “Party members should not have religious beliefs, which is a red line for all members…Party members should be firm Marxist atheists, obey Party rules and stick to the Party’s faith…they are not allowed to seek value and belief in religion… Officials who have religious faith should be persuaded to give it up, and those who resist would be punished by the Party organisation.”].

Such negative rhetoric is sometimes taken too literally by Western observers. Anyone reading the latest Freedom House Report; The Battle for China’s Spirit: Religious Revival Repression and Resistance under Xi Jinping[6. The February 2017 report from Freedom House notes that “at least 100 million people—nearly one-third of estimated believers in China—belong to religious groups facing “high” or “very high” levels of persecution (Protestant Christians, Tibetan Buddhists, Uighur Muslims, and Falun Gong)”. It continues, however, “despite tightening controls, millions of religious believers defy official restrictions in daily life or engage in some form of direct protest, at times scoring significant victories.”] might get the impression that repression and persecution are becoming central to Christian life in today’s China. Far from it. As I have seen for myself on recent visits to the country, the number of churches of all kinds and denominations continues to soar. Many of them are full, with a concentration of younger worshippers. The Christian community has a wonderful resilience and adaptability to circumstances which guarantees its survival. It is now far too big, popular, and geographically widespread to be supressed. The regime knows this.

As a leading Oxford authority on Christianity and Confucianism, Dr Christopher Hancock has noted, “the Chinese government’s permissive acceptance of unregistered churches continues”. He also points out that remarkably few individual Christians “find themselves on the wrong side of a generously drawn official line”. Those who want to stay on the right side of the line have to eschew politics and protest. This is well understood, and explains why the silent majority of Chinese Christians remain silent. They have no discernible influence on public affairs or public opinion – except by the daily testimony of their lifestyles.

The only visible exceptions to this picture of discreet Christian submissiveness are a small number of outspoken pastors and human rights lawyers. They are the ones who make waves and pay the price of being bullied – or even tortured. Their plight is distressing and likely to deteriorate further.

Dr Hancock believes that Chinese Christians may have to endure a “10 year dark period of difficulties and harassments”. But he and a multitude of other China watchers also believe that the Christian spiritual fervour which has been steadily increasing in the country for the past three decades shows no sign of abating.

Whether officials in Beijing like it or not, Chinese Christianity is here to stay. And to grow.

There is, however, one group of emergency service workers who have won unexpected plaudits. They are the volunteers from faith groups who spontaneously provided both pastoral and practical services to the local community. Cooperating with each other from churches, mosques, temples, synagogues and charity offices, they responded with immediate effectiveness both outwards to local residents and upwards to decision makers. This extraordinary community effort has been a story of hope, faith and action which deserves further attention.

Perhaps the most important lesson to emerge from the disaster is that these locally trusted groups, working together as never before, have filled huge gaps which mistrusted official organisations could not reach. Faith leaders have also been helping to build bridges and to encourage a mood of calm after the firestorm. This healing will be needed for many months to come.

Chronologically, on the night of Wednesday June 14, the first faith workers in action on the scene were The Salvation Army whose emergency response unit arrived at the foot of the tower an hour or so after the fire started. Their red vans, each staffed by four uniformed officers, dispensed tea, sandwiches, chocolate bars and comfort on such a scale that two more of these vehicles were summoned as reinforcements.

The “Sally Ally” has been providing this type of emergency service ever since the Boer War. It has a professional link, established during ‘The Blitz’, with the Fire Service whose 21st century computers now automatically alert Salvation Army Headquarters whenever six or more appliances are heading for a big conflagration, disaster, or terrorist episode. The emergency units which are on permanent standby in all Britain’s leading cities, are backed up by corps volunteers who “loiter with intent”, as their commander puts it, to offer a sympathetic shoulder, a listening ear or a word of prayer to traumatised victims.

Localism was important in making the contribution of faith groups effective. Churches have networks on the ground, so even in the middle of the night the local pastors and parishioners knew exactly who to call and where to go. The first vicar to jump out of his bed on hearing the sirens and smelling the smoke was the Revd Sean Doherty who lives on the Waynflete Square Social Housing Estate, 300 yards from the Tower. Pulling on his dog collar, he knocked on the door of Father Alan Everett, whose Anglican church, St Clement’s, is even closer. Together they opened up the doors, brewed up the tea urn and welcomed in a steady flow of residents fleeing from the flames. By 3.30am about 200 displaced persons had arrived in St Clement’s, many agonising about the fate of friends and family members.

In those first few hours when police officers drafted in from East and Outer London were, without local knowledge, directing people to mustering points which did not exist, the community turned to St Clement’s as its first port of call.

The local Al-Manaar Mosque received massive relief supplies from the West London Synagogue – a unique partnership between Jews and Muslims created two weeks before the fire

Meanwhile a mile or so away in Acklam Road, the largest mosque in the area, Al-Manaar had just finished the Ramadan night prayer of Ishah. Over 2,000 local Muslims had been sharing in the breaking of the fast meal of Iftar. Most of them drifted away after the prayers without realising that a fire had started in the Tower. But once the magnitude of the drama was recognised, Al-Manaar’s Chief Executive Abdurahman Sayed declared “Keep our doors open for anyone – Muslim or non-Muslim”. So the mosque also became a major relief centre.

As morning was breaking, supplies came pouring in. The Al-Manaar mosque received a huge delivery of food, water, blankets and toiletries from the West London Synagogue.

Synagogue? Hasn’t the mainstream media been reporting for years on the enmity between Jews and Muslims? Fake or at least out of date news. Two weeks before the fire the Rabbis and leaders of the West London Synagogue at Marble Arch invited their opposite numbers from the Al-Manaar mosque to join them in a combined celebration of a Ramadan fast-breaking meal. Contacts and friendships were established. So on the night of the fire, Jewish generosity responded magnificently to Muslim need.

What seemed special soon became typical. The charity Muslim Aid sent large consignments of relief supplies that night to St Clement’s Church and later to the Methodist and Catholic churches near the Tower. By contrast the local authority seemed paralysed. One hapless RBKC bureaucrat said, in a call to St Clement’s when it was bursting at the seams with survivors, “But you are not a designated relief centre!”

Another faith group swinging into action were the Sikhs from their Gurdwara or temple at Holland Park. An important Sikh tradition is serving a Langar or daily hot meal to the poor. So a relay team of Sikhs set up a street kitchen to provide free rice, lentil stew and bottled water outside Latimer Road Christian Centre. “We cooked it, but a stream of Christian, Muslim, Hindu and other volunteers served it” said Gurpreet Singh, Youth Secretary of the Central Gurdwara, “providing food in this friendly way created a sense of community during the time when the tensions were rising so sharply that we feared we might be on a brink of a riot”.

What was needed in those chaotic first days was not just good works but good leadership. It could not be provided by Kensington and Chelsea Councillors or officials who were getting booed and jostled in a worsening atmosphere of animosity.

The Bishop of Kensington, Graham Tomlin (pictured above) played key leadership role

Fortunately, one of the first arrivals at the Tower was Graham Tomlin, Bishop of Kensington. Alerted early by a text from the Chaplain to the Metropolitan Police, Jonathan Osborne, Bishop Graham was allowed within the inner cordon.

He spent most of the morning at the foot of the still burning tower ministering to shattered victims and exhausted firefighters “I just went up to them asking how are you, how are you coping, what’s it been like in there?” recalled Graham Tomlin “naturally some of them were quite emotional. Voicing their experiences, often pretty awful experiences, seemed to be more helpful than bottling it up inside themselves. In or two cases it was appropriate to pray with them. One firefighter who invited me to do that saw me the next day and said ‘you don’t know how significant that prayer was. It came just when I needed it’”.

Bishop Graham, in his purple episcopal shirt and pastoral cross, was an easily identifiable figure. Realising that spiritual visibility could be useful, he emailed the clergy in his diocese suggesting that they too might come to North Kensington as listeners and helpers. Within hours “you could hardly move for vicars” reported Danny Kruger, a former David Cameron speech writer turned charity worker, who lives on a council estate close to Grenfell Tower.

Dog collars have been known to attract ridicule but now they were welcomed as trusted symbols of care and compassion. “Father, can I talk to you” was a much repeated opening. So helpers from many denominations helped out on a myriad of tasks from spiritual comforting to physical heavy lifting. This was essential to shift the avalanche of relief supplies that kept pouring into St Clement’s, Al-Manaar and several other centres. One estimate suggested that over two football pitches would have been filled by gifts for the victims.

There were not many lighter moments in this mammoth operation, but one came when a group of Muslim helpers delivered several cases of dog food to St Clement’s Church.   Dog food? The receiving vicar on duty, Father James Heard murmured some quiet Anglican doubts. O He of little faith! Within minutes some evacuated residents from nearby flats close to the tower came in to ask where they might find dog food for their pets.

Unlike some of the key figures in leadership roles around Grenfell Tower, Graham Tomlin was restrained in his criticism of local and central government. He understood that bridges had to be built between distraught individuals and the authorities who hold the funds and the legal powers. The established church still knows its way around the establishment. So connecting up with a helpful aide at No 10, it was Bishop Graham who chaired Theresa May’s second visit to the site on Friday June 16 when for the first time she met local residents.

That meeting ended after only 45 minutes because of security warnings about the mood of the crowd gathering outside St Clement’s. But the following day Bishop Graham was invited to lead a diverse delegation from the local community to No 10. The Prime Minister listened for over two hours and acted in response to the many complaints about the lack of co-ordination, the need for one central base for relief work, the shortage of ready cash to help dislocated families, and the mistrust about conflicting information about official sources. On all these fronts real movement started.

Nevertheless, one month on from the outbreak of the fire, feelings on the ground remain raw. As Danny Kruger puts it:

“We are not at peace but in a truce which may not last”.

Last weekend visiting the Al-Manaar mosque, I met a victim of the disaster who personified both the present fragility and the potential strength of the truce. He was Hassan Awad, originally from Khartoum. Travelling abroad on the night of the fire, his home was Apartment 203 on the 23^rd floor of Grenfell Tower where he lived with his wife Rasha Ibrahim (they were married in the mosque) and their two daughters Fethia 5 and Hania 3. All three perished in the flames. Their bodies have not yet been recovered.

“I know my wife and children have gone to God” says Hassan, “but every day I get a different story about their remains. Last week I was told by the Coroner’s Office that nothing could ever be recovered from my flat. But yesterday a police officer called me to say that six pieces of human body parts have been found there; Yet it may be weeks before they can be taken out for burial. Why oh why does it take so long?”

Such personal anguish, expressed with inspirational calm and dignity by Hassan Awad, is accompanied in many other distressing cases by understandable anger. This mood will not be assuaged in council offices, even though the new RBKC Leader Elizabeth Campbell has made appropriate statements in the right tone in recent days.

So there is a continuing role to be played by faith groups. They are now rising to the challenge of providing below the radar support to those affected by the disaster. The bonds of loving unity forged by the flames will endure. The visible will be replaced by the invisible. Places of worship of all faiths have already become safe spaces for counselling and comforting. They may also be sources of trusted advice particularly when it comes to holding the authorities to account for the reforms that are being promised.

There are no quick fixes for this scarred community, certainly not if they come too glibly from politicians or the mainstream media.

Yet out of this terrible tragedy there are reasons for hoping that long term good will come. Indeed it is already a reality that the foundations laid by faith groups over many years of quiet service and witness to the community now feel like the surest starting points from which to build the truce into a peace.