What’s Worth Keeping From This Pandemic Year? Maybe Quite A Bit

Are some lifestyle changes, some lessons we learned in the pandemic year worth keeping?

I had the privilege this week of guiding an online retreat on the topic of community, sponsored by St. Benedict Monastery in Bristow, VA. Several people shared that they are in no hurry to “get back to normal,” even as the country moves closer to reclaiming our former way of life. I was heartened. I thought I was the only one who felt that way.

To be sure, climbing out of the pandemic is a good thing. As more people become fully vaccinated, fewer will lose their lives. Grandparents will be able to hug their grandchildren again, and friends will be able to gather freely to share a meal. But are there some things the pandemic has normalized that are worth keeping?

The theologian Jonathan Montaldo talks of the need to “ruminate on the text of our lives.” Such chances arrive rarely. The pandemic year has offered just such an opportunity.

I, for one, appreciate the slower pace we’ve experienced. I don’t yearn to see the inside of a crowded restaurant or bar, or travel on a packed plane, or drive to the supermarket every time I need a carton of milk. A twice monthly pickup at the supermarket has been working just fine.

Perhaps it is the monk in me, but I relish the additional quiet and the solitude. Solitude isn’t the same as loneliness. Loneliness is what we feel when we don’t want to be alone. Solitude is something we embrace. Solitude allows the body and mind to revive.

Loneliness isn’t the same as solitude. Solitude is something we seek.

Solitude –and its frequent companion, silence — is also the natural antidote to the relentless distractions that sidetrack us from what we need to do, and what really matters.

“We seldom notice how each day is a holy place where the Eucharist of the ordinary happens,” the poet John O’Donohue has written. Over the past year my home has become my sanctuary. I often took it for granted, like breathing or the beating of the heart. Now I feel the personality of each room. Each room offers me its own brand of refuge.

At home, the pace of work changes. I pause more often, spend time staring out the window. Sometimes I catch a tribe of robins flying to and from a redbud tree, and stop to admire their spontaneity. Other times, I’m awed by the surprise sight of a single red cardinal perched on a lonely branch.

Like most people, I rarely thought about the simple act of breathing or the constant beating of the heart. The pandemic changed that too. I began attending an online Yoga class as the pandemic started. Our wonderful instructor, Melissa Rusk, asked us to focus on the number and length of our breaths. I wondered why. I realize now what Melissa had subtly been trying to teach us: that each breath is not only a miracle, but a privilege given to the living.

“Take time each day to run your hand over your heart,” said the late Benedictine Sister Agnes Honz.

It is something those fortunate enough to survive a battle with COVID know all too well.

Every day I think about those who have died. It’s hard to wrap the mind around 532,500 dead. It means 532,500 individual faces. It means 532,500 individuals can no longer clasp another’s hand, take an afternoon walk at dusk, inhale the fresh morning air, exhale a long relieving sigh, or place a hand over the chest to feel the beating heart.

I am reminded of Marie Howe’s wonderful poem “What the Living Do” in which the poet walks down a street in winter after the death of her brother. Suddenly she feels “a cherishing so deep” for her own blowing hair and chapped skin that she stands speechless.

I think too of the words of one of my Benedictine mentors, the late Sister Agnes Honz, who used to say, “Take time each day to run your hand over your heart. Let the heart know that you appreciate it.”

A slower pace of life might become one of the legacies of this pandemic year. (Photo by Pat Leyko Connelly).

There have been other lessons as well. The fleetingness and fragility of life has made abundantly clear the futility of arguing and the waste of energy that is anger. “Useless care,” as the great spirituality writer Thomas Merton referred to it, is something I work now to excise from my daily life.

Perhaps this pandemic year has taught us something mystics like Merton recognized — that every morning is an opportunity to feel gratitude, experience beauty and grace, and wake in our own heaven.

In an essay called “The Night and the Dawn Air,” Merton tried to distill this experience. “Here is an unspeakable secret,” he wrote, “paradise is all around us and we do not understand. It is wide open … ‘Wisdom,’ cries the invitation of the dawn deacon: Shall we attend?”

Shall we?