AS WE REFLECT three years on from the first Covid-19 lockdown, many people will have in mind some deeply personal experiences and losses. There is also challenge, possibility and hope.
To mark this anniversary, and to contribute to the wider conversation about ‘living hopefully in an age of pandemic’, Ekklesia is launching an occasional series of articles and reflections about how small scale human thought and action can be a ‘mustard seed’ out of which larger (even systemic) change can grow.
The first contributions have gone online today – a review of the book we helped to bring into being early last year, Everyday Sacrament: Visual Meditations in an Age of Pandemic, and also the Questions of Life and Death discussion hosted by Marie Curie, along with the National Day of Reflection (and minute’s silence at midday) which we are also supporting.
The idea of encouraging personal reflection came from our associate, Bernadette Meaden. Our contributing editor, Jill Segger, writes: “We would like to invite those reading this to consider writing a short comment reflecting on what you may have learned during the period of lockdown, and upon how you might like to see this taken forward for the post pandemic period. We invite you to write as personally as you feel able.The idea is that policy futures founded in evolving experience have a particular power for change, even for transformation. It is out of micros that we may discover more about our commonality. It does not need to be large and strategic; see it as the mustard seed, perhaps?”
If you would like to respond please drop a note to us using the contact form here, headed Pandemic Reflections. We will endeavour to respond and use as many as possible. We are also asking associates and friends to write longer comment pieces if they wish.
Incidentally, as the World Health organisation makes plain, the pandemic is not ‘over’ and the possibility of future events of a similar kind is real. So Ekklesia continues to welcome the vital work of Independent Sage, Covid Action UK, and Covid Action Scotland, as well as those campaigning around issues like long Covid and particular impacts on disabled and sick people and children. The aforementioned networks will provide further links.
Our director, Simon Barrow, has also co-edited, with Professor Gerry Hassan, the book Scotland after the Virus (Luath Press), which contains stories and poems as well as material on public policy issues and wider social, political, economic, community and spiritual response.