I live in a cathedral city, so the word 'Divinity' is often used in a religious sense. However, just before the coronavirus outbreak, we experienced an event that changed the city and heightened our sense of inner divinity, our fallible selves set against our sense of protectedness and immunity. Novichok (1). The death of a Russian resident and his daughter who died from exposure to a chemical agent, the discovery in the city centre of these two people dying from exposure to the nerve agent and the ensuing panic, security lock-down, rocked the sense of security across this small city. It exposed its inhabitants to the intensity of the worlds media, to see the place where you live held to scrutiny in the mirror lens of the wider world can be equally threatening. Subsequently, three other people also fell ill from exposure to the nerve agent and one of them, a mother of three, also died. The night of the first incident, March 04, 2018 I was nearby in a medieval church, built to serve the spiritual needs of the builders of the Cathedral, preparing for an International Women's Day event with local musicians and girls from local schools. We became aware of the incident when my two daughters and a friend went off to buy some snacks after the rehearsal and came back having passed the pizza restaurant where the two Russians, Sergei and his daughter Yulia had been eating that day before falling unwell. The girls reported a heavy police presence and a barrier blockading the restaurant. Later, as we got ready to welcome our audience and to light candles, rumours of the event started to spread on social media. We wondered who would come - should we carry on? The heightened awareness that accompanies 'out of the ordinary' occurrences, created both fear and fascination. Many people decided not to come, some came and then left, shaken by a sense of anxiety. Would a chemical agent be in the very air we were breathing, was it safe to touch surfaces? Was it too late? We were stoic, trusting the guidance of the police and distracted by the demands of music-making, worship and celebration.
Salisbury, is a place with a long-standing relationship to nearby Porton Down (known as the Chemical Defence Establishment in my father's time) populated by scientists and military, and local people connect to the site in a variety of ways. So perhaps in terms of a critical emergency many residents were pragmatic but as the coronavirus was later to demonstrate, dealing with the element of unknown and unpredictable is deeply unsettling.
This unexpected drama, threw a community into a temporary spiral of deep uncertainty. It is the stuff of fiction, the potential plot of a James Bond movie. We will never know the full truth behind this incident, it is too dangerous, too unsettling to be in the public psyche. Chemical weaponry is a callous and cruel concept that is as close to a sense of absolute evil as anything man has ever created. There is no divinity in the creation of devices or agents aimed at mass murder, only those without compassion, driven by greed, overshadowing in its excessive need to provide for 'self' at the cost of all else - only those people could conceive such an idea. There is no godliness in mass destruction and yet those that create such things are motivated by a sense of higher purpose, a sense of power as if endowed with a twisted divinity.
Hard on the heels of Novichok in 2018 there followed the coronavirus, another man-made agent that had the power to kill. The parallels of which cannot be lost on those who have considered both events. We have lived, in a state of heightened awareness ever since. Not just here in Salisbury but around the world, as this biological infectious agent spread with devastating impact. We are now alert, but also weary from mentally and physically living in ways that we hope protect us from further attack but are new and awkward. Caught off-guard, yanked from our hitherto comfortable existence and forced by a need for self-preservation to live in ways that have swept aside the very elements of society that hold us together. Community, coming together, holding each other, celebrating, commiserating. We have become meerkats in the desert, watchful, and guarded, as we grope in the darkness of the unknown future, in our states of heightened awareness, reaching out for the familiar, attempting to re-discover and rekindle what has been lost.
We all have the divine within; a spirit that makes us kind, dynamic, creative, passionate, gentle, compassionate, empathic, and god-like. Perhaps shaken by the realisation that other humans can ignore all that beauty and purity in order to create evil, we need to dive back into ourselves and re-discover our divinity to shine our light, collectively in the darkness. To honour joy, happiness, love, through sports, through art, through music. Life is too short to allow the grubby, the unkind, the selfish, and the cruel a permanent place in our lives.
1 Wikipedia : Novichok (Russian: Новичо́к, lit. 'newcomer, novice, newbie'[1]) is a group of nerve agents, some of which are binary chemical weapons. The agents were developed at the GosNIIOKhT state chemical research institute by the Soviet Union and Russia between 1971 and 1993.[2][3][a][5][6] Some Novichok agents are solids at standard temperature and pressure, while others are liquids. Dispersal of solid form agents is thought possible if in ultrafine powder state.[7]
Russian scientists who developed the nerve agents claim they are the deadliest ever made, with some variants possibly five to eight times more potent than VX,[8][9] and others up to ten times more potent than soman.[10] As well as Russia, Novichok agents have been known to be produced in Iran.[11]