The Rev Steve Wilson is Unitarian minister from the US who has visited our Fellowship in the past, and with whom we keep in touch. This message, titled as “The Quiet Opportunity and Cost of Catastophe”, relates some thoughts on the current epidemic.
It is almost too cliché to say that we are presently “living history,” but it so overwhelmingly true that it must be said.
Every e-mail, every newscast, almost every new advertisement, even, has to connect to the virus or risk feeling out of touch. The Coronavirus storyline is so strong, we barely notice it’s spring, that Passover and Easter are right around the corner, that baseball season would have started Thursday, or that the Dems haven’t even completely figured out their candidate yet. This new reality has left most of us working through our day with a mix of “I’m bored” meets “What’s the next shoe
to drop?” I don’t need to tell you that the present drama in which we are trapped has an element of fear in it, a through line of certainly some isolation, but also some down time.
Living in any culture, or at any given time in history is always, mostly silently, a little like being a character in a script. In normal times with a thousand stories and our own lives pulling in different directions, we don’t feel it so strongly, but who we are down to our souls is always greatly both affected and effected by our surroundings. Mostly,
however, it is really only in times of great tragedy or celebration that we feel absorbed. As I said last week, these days feel like we are reading the same script, but it’s a fresh, unfinished script that has no clear ending. It is a moment when the sense that all is lost can rub shoulders with a sense that humanity could turn the page on a lot of false divisions and inequality. Part of the underlying anxiety is that we know this moment could go a few ways.
The full text can be read here.
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