What Is God Saying Through This Pandemic?

 What is God saying to the world through the Corona pandemic? ‘Creation sings and its time to listen’ says Paul Gutteridge of Initiatives of Change. His friends and colleagues tell how they receive fresh insights as they garden, and others comment on how, now human frenetic activity is stilled, they hear the birds sing. Many wonder whether creation is hitting the ‘reset’ button. Paul writes:

I just caught the end of a BBC TV programme on Japan. It said that since World War 11 Japan had emulated the West. Now, however, doubts put that in question. Deep in Japanese DNA is the ideal of harmony with one another and with nature – the Western rat race destroys this harmony.  It is time that the West, too,  changes its fundamental values.

The pandemic is surely God calling us:  to accept our vulnerability, calling us to restore humans and all creation as a Communion with the Creator. The world can no longer be organized as an infinite rat race based on ‘More’ and ‘Faster’.  It is a call to live simply that others (include creation) may simply live.  This does not rule out fresh discoveries in science and in the spirit.

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute^[2] have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of people who simply change their beliefs if their last two social interactions agreed with a new one.

 New monastic movements have surely been put in place to prepare us to dispense with the Twin Towers of empire building and rape of the earth and of  the poor, and to succeed this with a large-scale following of  ‘The Way’, something of  which the Universal Christ has impregnated in all people but which is supremely revealed to us in the Gospels.

 Our calling has been summarized as the Cave, The Refectory and the Road. Enforced isolation is an opportunity to discover fresh treasures of the Cave. How may those in solitary isolation redeem the situation? I suggest four P’s:  Projects, Prayer pauses, Persons (via the internet etc) and Physical exercise.

 A daily CAH morning prayer is posted on this web site: https://ascensionealing.org/whats_on/. 

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 My latest book Tree of Life: Celtic Prayers to the Universal Christ is published by Anamchara Books.