A Year in the Life©
Two Reflections
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
March 14, 2021
1) A Year in the Life
Like many of my colleagues, and perhaps many of you, I have had a song stuck in my head this week: Seasons of Love, from the musical Rent. Perhaps you know it.
It begins:
“Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
Five hundred twenty five thousand moments so dear
Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes
How do you measure? Measure a year?…
How do you measure a year in the life?”
As I mentioned at the beginning of today’s service, we held our last in-person church service on March 15, 2020, one year ago tomorrow. I was very hesitant about having one last service – as that week wore on most of the other churches on Cape Ann, one by one, decided to close. But, because our sanctuary is so large, we decided to take the chance and gather one more time. The day before the service, Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker announced that indoor gatherings would be limited to 25. I assured myself that most people would stay home, and forged ahead, cancelling coffee hour and planning to greet the 25 attendees safely outdoors on the allee at the end. Well, over 50 of you attended that day. I prayed silently that the mayor or the police chief wouldn’t drive by. Once again, I was reminded that we might have changed our church’s name six years ago, but you will always be the Independent Christian Church.
We pause today to reflect on all that has happened since we met that day, just about five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred minutes ago, for that is how many minutes there are since we went into lockdown. We humans often try to understand the impact of events by quantifying them, by creating lists of the impacts, by comparing, by measuring.
How do we measure a year in the life?
In deaths, first and foremost. Ironically, the death toll from Covid-19 stands at 534,000. That amounts to just over one death in the United States per minute in the past year. Let’s just hold onto that measure for a moment.
We measure a year in rites of passage. In births, and christenings or dedications that went unmarked. In tiny backyard weddings. In pages and pages of obituaries, all of which stated that a service would be held at a later date.
We remember the sounds: the nonstop sirens in the cities. The music played by people isolated on their balconies, and the echo of cheering for the medical workers. The sound of birdsong as traffic and human noise retreated.
We measure the creative attempts at social life. In walks instead of coffee. In bundled up winter picnics. In fire pits, outdoor heaters, and lawn furniture.
We remember the evolving shortages: first, personal protective equipment. Masks, and the fabric and elastic to make them. Hunts for Clorox wipes, for toilet paper. For yeast for all the bread baking attempts. More recently, the hunt for vaccine appointments.
We measure the safety measures: the one way aisles in grocery stores, the plexiglass barriers, the spaced out checkout lines. The closed off playgrounds, the spread-out chairs.
We measure our year in Zoom meetings, in online lectures and concerts, in outdoor office hours.
The list of ways we take stock of this year could go on and on. What this all adds up to, though, is a picture of all the ways in which people have tried, despite fear and loss and suffering, to carry on. Our theme this month is Commitment. Running through this year has been a wide seam of commitment, of perseverance; a seam visible through the bedrock of hardship and deprivation. Churches, including this once, shifted online without missing a week. People adjusted to working from home, and schools began remote learning programs within days. Downtowns adapted streets and sidewalks to allow outdoor dining, to help restaurants stay open. Stores and restaurants adopted curbside pickup. People responded with creativity and grace whenever and wherever they could.
We measure this year in the life by looking at all the ways in which life itself continued, finding new ways forward, moving around obstacles. We measure by looking for ways in which love prevailed; where compassion was offered to those who desperately needed help from the community. The name of the song I mentioned at the beginning is ‘Seasons of Love’. We have endured four seasons now where there were many days when it seemed that fear, hatred, and anger could prevail. We will not soon forget the realization that the coronavirus was disproportionately affecting lower income communities and people of color. We will not soon forget the protests over racial justice and police brutality, nor the ugly rhetoric and terrifying images of the aftermath of the presidential election. The love was always there for us to see, but sadly, so was the hatred.
But now, after a year, as spring emerges, we can glimpse light ahead. Fear and hatred don’t give us light. The light we begin to turn toward is being fostered by love, dedication, and commitment; the commitment of all those who have never stopped working to make life better; safer, more just, and healthier.
May all we do as we step forward into this next year be in service to love and compassion. The song, in the end, tells us to remember the love.
Remember the love, today and as we move ahead into the future.
2) Wake to Your Choices
In preparing to talk about this historic Sunday, one year after a state of emergency was declared and we entered a lengthy lockdown period, I went back into my files and read the whole service from last March 15, that last Sunday we gathered in person. I decided to use the same readings I used that Sunday; Lynn Ungar’s poem, “Pandemic,” and the poem entitled “Lockdown” by Brother Richard Hendrick. And as I read Lockdown, I felt deep sadness.
“Yes, there is fear,” he wrote. “But there does not have to be hate.”
“Yes, there is panic buying, but there does not have to be meanness.
Yes, there is sickness. But there does not have to be disease of the soul.”
It saddened me to realize that in the midst of so many people rising to the occasion, offering help, caring for one another, that there was also an ugly undercurrent this year of humans at their worst. We saw denial and selfishness; people putting their own wants and needs first. We witnessed scapegoating; the blaming of Chinese people for the spread of the virus. We have absorbed many scenes of violence and heard much hate speech.
I am a student of history and I had read many accounts of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. I have understood for some time that another pandemic was inevitable. But I always consoled myself with the thought that we knew so much more science, and with our world class medical care we would be able to handle whatever came our way.
Well.
It turns out that much of the behavior that we have witnessed in the past year has been present in all other pandemics throughout history; the hoarding, the conspiracy theories, the scapegoating. In an interview on National Public Radio, clinical psychologist Steven Taylor made this comment, “The conspiracy theories today are just recycled conspiracy theories from past pandemics. There are varying details, but the themes are exactly the same. … There was panic buying. There was stigma or fear and avoidance of health care workers, and there was the rise of anxiety about getting infected. And conversely, there was also this disregard for the whole thing, thinking the thing is exaggerated. The big difference is everything is faster and more of it, because we’ve got the 24/7 news cycle, social media and so forth, but fundamentally pretty much the same phenomena.” (In https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2021/02/12/people-will-bounce-back-how-covid-19-parallels-past-pandemics)
Our knowledge grows; our understanding of science, our knowledge of best public health practices, but it was disappointing to learn that human behavior really does not change much at all. We hoard. We blame people who we think don’t belong in our community. We reject valid information out of fear, and as a result expose ourselves and others needlessly to illness. I had thought, naively, that 100 years from now, the photos of unmasked government officials gathered close together in the White House Rose Garden would elicit shudders of distaste and thoughts of how ignorant we were. I wonder now if 100 years from now, people will be having the same debates over risks and safety.
So as I read Brother Hendricks’ poem, with its aspirations of rejecting hatred, and meanness, and sickness of the soul, it saddened me. Many of us were able to reject those negative emotions and actions. But so many of us were not.
It was jarring for us this year to discover that so many of our fellow citizens reject our vision of community, and of caring and compassion for everyone. Too many people demanded individual freedom to do as they pleased, to risk the safety and health of others in order to maintain their own comfort and what they perceive as their rights.
During this pandemic year we also witnessed the undeniable difference in treatment of black people and people of color. The statistics do not lie; we saw for ourselves how much more illness and death they experienced, how much more risk they faced in jobs without the choice to work from home, in more densely settled communities where the idea of social distancing was just that – an idea. We saw for ourselves the difference in treatment of black people and people of color by the police. And while this led to unprecedented willingness on the part of white people to listen, to open their eyes and their hearts, to acknowledge that Black Lives Matter, it also led to the inevitable backlash by white supremacists; those who reject the humanity of those they perceive as other.
We have witnessed much and have learned a great deal during this hard and painful year. In addition to our own personal losses: of loved ones, of employment, of social life, we have had to confront the divided nature of our country, and the lack of will to try to heal this great divide.
Brother Hendricks tells us: “Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.”
I ask you this: To what are we committed? Can we move forward into this second pandemic year with love and compassion? Can we commit ourselves to foster racial justice, and economic justice? Can we truly embrace what it means to love our neighbor as ourselves? For we have learned this: that despite whatever advances we humans make in scientific knowledge, we can only truly grow by committing to live with open hearts.
As we turn toward the light, as we feel the rising of hope, let us remember:
“…there can always be a rebirth of love.
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe.
Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic
The birds are singing again
The sky is clearing,
Spring is coming,
And we are always encompassed by Love.
Open the windows of your soul
And though you may not be able
to touch across the empty square,
Sing.”
