We find our place among you
Come, my people, enter your rooms and shut your doors behind you. Hide yourselves for a little while until the fury has passed by. Isaiah26:20. I’ ve been to paradise, but I’ ve never been tome. Charlene. IMAGINE, if you will, a world not salted with meaning, nor peppered with purpose. Imagine there’ s no consequence for our actions other than those that we mutually co here, and socially implement (“no hell below us, above us only sky ”). Imagine our choices being bound only to our beliefs, not tarnished by our fear of repercussions. Imagine, for example, that I built Mon a, not out of Catholic guilt nor evolutionarily mediated status-seeking, but in a passionate attempt to entertain, and edify, and enable.
You’ d have to have a vivid imagination to imagine that last imagining. Mon a was ceded to its audience out of some per verse longing to remould some tiny segment of my world to my own ends (whatever they maybe ), to augment my understanding of things I should know but forever doubt( opinions vary—some people really like vegemite, or Donald Trump, or prayer, but their opinions grace them as nobly as mine en noble me ), and to up hold and expand my social covenant( Mon a isa friendship filter—if you like it, there’ s an increased chance you’ll like me).
That social covenant, that changed dramatically with the advent of C OVID. Had Mon a stayed open, the very audience that we communed with would have been threatened, with the threat enhanced in non-linear proportion to the size of our community .“First ,” we might have said ,“do no harm .”
But our community is harmed. There have been deaths, and some suffering, and loss of opportunity. But there is also resilience, and forbearance, and an enhanced sense of belonging. I wanted to jump in the deep end of our pool of community, andre-open-on Christmas Day.
“No ,” my minders sensibly said ,“at Christmas people want their families, and their turkeys, and their mythologies .” So, Mon a will be reopening on Boxing Day. We are still casting our gaze over the horizon and over our history, but we’ ll also be looking upward, and forward, and inward.
When we opened, I thought our place was among the seekers-of-the-new—a space program for the creative urge. Ten years, and three million visitors, and a pandemic, have taught me that our place is with you.