We have now been gifted enough time to conjure and hone a new different
SPRING is springing, as it usually does, and along with it we have a hope that we will be out of lockdown soon. We need to continue to be cautious, but we are on our way.
I have been thinking that fear might be a common word as we begin to consider the long exit out of lockdown.
I wonder if there will be a fear to go back into stores, to take off masks, or to cross social distances.
Will some fear that the vaccine isn’t fullproof?
A year of disciplined caution in how we live will take some time to undo.
My biggest fear is a spiritual one.
In all the hardships of the coronavirus year, it has brought with it opportunities.
We have been given a time to stop, to breathe, to reassess and to reboot.
In the midst of the tragic deaths, the mental health crisis and the pressures on health, education and the economy, there has been, perhaps, a grace moment within it all.
In his book Let Us Dream, the Pope wrote:
“In every personal ‘covid’, so to speak, in every ‘stoppage’, what is revealed is what needs to change; our lack of internal freedom, the idols we have been serving, the ideologies we have tried to live by, the relationships we have neglected.” What needs to change? We have been released for an enforced period from the clutter and fuss of what the American writer Marilynne Robinson calls “joyless urgency”.
I believe that, in this coronavirus retreat, there are myriads of lessons invitingly hanging in the air. Are we going to grab them?
Or are these sacred moments going to vanish, wasted?
That is my fear.
Had we only had six weeks, it would have been difficult not to just snap back into the “old normal”, but we have now been gifted enough time to conjure and hone a brand: “new different”.
It would be a sinful tragedy if we just go back.
I am thinking about my pre-coronavirus busyness, the clutter that distracted my life from love and family.
The lazy lure of consumerism as some kind of
pick-me-up, the time spent in a car, or plane, and the environmental price, where the ambition of our lives are directed, our human arrogance giving way to dependence on God.
So many things.
We hope that the time to ponder, to repent, to rebirth, is shortening ahead of us.
The time to act is now urgent. I fear I will miss it. I fear we will miss it.
I fear the “old normal”. Please God, focus our hearts and souls and minds.