When the outbreak of Foot and Mouth disease happened in 2001 I was in my early years of training for the ministry in Edinburgh. The disease hit Scottish farmlands to the south of the M8 corridor between Edinburgh and Glasgow, an area renown for its tranquil, rolling appearance in comparison to the ruggedness of the Highlands.
There are a number of Scottish towns which border Northumberland, my home county and also affected, which portray long-established gentil affluence. On face-value not at all the kind of places where you would expect such terrible events to play out.
However, play out they did, with road closures and decontamination measures, and the pall of black smoke from the slaughter of livestock. It is those images, screened, it seems almost nightly, on news reports, which stick most strongly in my mind.
And yet, in the rarefied air of New College, Edinburgh, I have no strong memory of us discussing events, reflecting on them from the perspective of where God was in all of this, or praying about them, although I’m sure that we must have done the latter.
As the livelihoods and well-being of so many people hung in the balance I have to honestly, and shamefully, say that I don’t know how mindful we were of the effects of the outbreak on others because it wasn’t really having an effect on us.
Perhaps that wouldn’t be the case now? The advent of Social Media, which came along just a few years after 2001, has meant that we are more closely connected than in the past. Instead of relying on the stories that traditional news networks chose to tell we are able to hear directly from people on the ground, their stories unmediated by others.
Perhaps, too, there has been a shift in theological thinking here in the UK since then? Contextual theology, theology rooted in the culture of specific place, once within the purview of Latin America, Africa or the Far East has increasingly found its voice within our own contexts.
Our God-talk and our God-understanding is woven into and comes from our experience of the world around us wherever we are, it is not abstract or academic.
If it were to happen again (God forbid) then I’d like to think that the air around New College wouldn’t be quite so rarefied, that we would feel more strongly our connections to those imminently affected, and we would reflect on and articulate, in word and deed, the presence of God in the midst of the anxiety, sadness and anger of that time.