Keep Calm

 Photo: Canva.com 

In the readings for Tuesday, July 14, God, through the prophet Isaiah, advises people to “Keep Calm”. An invasion is coming but they are urged not to be afraid. It remined me of the poster which said, “Keep Calm and Carry On”.  I first became aware of it in the early days of Covid. As the number of cases and deaths rose from a few hundred to a few thousand and eventually into the millions worldwide, it was hard not to panic given that there was no cure for this virus and no vaccine in those difficult early days. It called for calm perseverance in the face of adversity and suggested that this crisis, as with others like it, would pass.

I imagined that this poster was created around 2020 with the pandemic in mind. But on further examination I discovered it was part of a set of 3 posters printed in 1939 by the Department of Information before Great Brittan entered the war against Germany. They were designed to boost the morale of the population in the face of the conflict to come. The first two posters were widely displayed but the repose to them was relatively negative - they were felt to be patronising. The “Keep Calm” poster was never displayed in public and the 2.5 million copies that were printed were pulped.

But not all. In 2000 the owner of Barter Books discovered one of the original posters in a box of books bought at auction, framed it and put in on the wall. As more people asked if they could buy it, the owner’s wife started to make copies.  It would eventually appear on mugs and tee shirts and became so common that it lost a great deal of its impact. It was often mocked and trivialised with one writer describing it as “authority nostalgia”. Yet in times of crisis like during the financial crash in 2008 and then again with Covid in 2020 it would again tap into the resilience and endurance of people in the face of adversity.  

The call to keep calm is not difficult for some people but for others, like me, who are prone to anxiety, it is something that I need to constantly remind myself of and practice.  Before setting out recently on the long journey from New Zealand to Ireland, a trip that generated all kinds of anxiety, I was given an exercise by a consultant that was to prove very helpful at stressful times in my trip. She called it dropping anchor. It involved putting my feet firmly on the ground, focusing on my breathing and staying in the present.  As my mind constantly jumps ahead and imagines all the things that could go wrong, I need to stay rooted in the present and exercise patience.  Dropping anchor helped me to keep calm and carry on.

Realising that the call to Keep Calm goes back to the prophet Isaiah and was a word from God to people in a time of great difficulty gives it another level of meaning. Christian hope finds its anchor in the faithfulness of God, and this enables people not only to survive hard times but to grow.

Fr Pat O'Shea lives and works in Aotearoa/New Zealand