Everything feels precarious. Maybe, just maybe, after two years the pandemic is moving into an endemic phase. Perhaps we can visit with loved ones again soon, and begin to feel more connected and less isolated after so much time apart. Some of our life’s routines may resume, and we find comfort in that. This return to life feels meaningful and important. At long last, we have reached a turning point. On the other hand, so much has unravelled over the past two years and continues to feel unsettled and fragile. The headlines are filled with war and climate collapse and stories of cruelty.
When the pandemic began, we were at least somewhat hopeful that out of this adversity would come something positive. “We are all in this together” became a bit of a mantra, and there was a palpable sense that because the whole world was coping with the same fears and restrictions we would come to feel a kinship. The outcome we hoped for was one of compassion for all and appreciation for the challenges and burdens that the pandemic was placing on everyone. I have certainly heard more people recount hardships of such depth—divorce, life-threatening illness, loss of income, loss of child care and school, care-giving demands, and intense worry and anxiety about family members or friends struggling—than at any other time. I realize that some of that may simply be reflective of my vocation and the stage of life I am in, but I don’t think that fully accounts for it.
I believe the pandemic has been both an amplifier and a clarifier. It has made some of the needs and fractures in our human community more insistent, more unavoidable (if they ever were). We see the housing and opioid and climate and inequality crises of our time more clearly than before. We know that if we are to continue to co-exist with the planet and one another we will have to quite literally make more room, more space for life to flourish. Life in all its forms— beyond our species, or race, or any other category that can separate us.
At this very moment, we understand our interdependence more keenly, and we have seen so much anger and ugliness. A recent Angus Reid Institute and CBC poll shows that nearly 80% of Canadians feel that the pandemic has brought out the worst in people, and a similarly high percentage feel the pandemic has pushed people further apart rather than brought them together. Given how polarized our society is, that is an astounding level of agreement—all agree we don’t seem to like each other very much. We don’t have much faith in one another or feel optimistic about our future. The question that lingers now for me is: what will we do now? Where do we go from here?
The world’s great spiritual traditions have held as one of the highest virtues, the practice of appreciating others (neighbour, stranger, refugee) as we ourselves would want to be appreciated—to truly see and know others for who they are. We are invited, and recently many have refused the invitation, to see the humanity in every person. We are, in every interaction we have, offered an opportunity to remember that the person in front of us has experienced many of the same things we have, and may right now be in the midst of grief or fear or worry. How shall we treat them? How shall we live together? Here and now? In this changed world.
Rev. Shana Lynngood is co-minister of First Unitarian Church of Victoria. She has lived and served in Victoria since 2010
You can read more articles on our interfaith blog, Spiritually Speaking, HERE: /blogs/spiritually-speaking
* This article was published in the print edition of the sa国际传媒 on Saturday, March 19th 2022
