Last updated: May 21, 2024

It’s remarkable how the coronavirus crisis that first appeared in January has quickly become a worldwide pandemic that has caused much of the world to go into varying amounts of – whatever you want to call it – a shutdown, a quarantine, a shelter-in-place, a lockdown, an isolation?  I know that there are different nuances to these terms, but mostly it just means staying at home and going stir crazy.  Still, I’m grateful that I have safe shelter, I’m not at risk for losing my job, and I have plenty to eat. 

For me, it’s been a full three weeks already of being shut inside, except for walking the neighborhood, picking up takeout, and going to the grocery or pharmacy.  I’m trying to get used to teleworking full time, but of course it has called for new virtual computer tools and a big spike in the amount of email I have to both initiate and respond to.  My three-week experience is that teleworking is very inefficient. But on the positive side – we haven’t been doing any video, so I could stay in my pajamas all day if I wanted to.  I’m not though.… at least not yet…. I’m trying to lower my expectations at work, in order to get through the long haul.

I’m also finding it a little hard to see a wider perspective sometimes, amid all of the particularities of worry about getting sick and about how the world’s economy is likely to affect me.  Even finding information that is reliable and trustworthy can be a struggle. It’s all just so stressful and I am seriously considering going on a news blackout, because the news is dire, I am sensitive, and most everything is outside of my control.

One of the main difficulties of this situation is, even though I said the virus is spreading quickly, everything feels like it is moving in slow motion, with the anticipation that we are probably (here in Houston) still stuck on mile one of a marathon. And of course, the not knowing is the worst part. We still lack any good idea of how long we will have to be in this shelter-in-place status.  Hurricanes are awful, but at least you know when they are going to make landfall and they sweep through in a matter of days, not a full month or more.

Nevertheless, in the public interest, I would like to share with you the one thing that made me smile 🙂 and that most lifted my spirit during the past three weeks. Of course it should be no surprise that it is music!  Students at the Berklee College of Music in Boston collaborated in what they call a “virtual orchestra” which mixes clips of different students performing the Burt Bacharach song “What the World Needs Now.”  Seriously – go ahead and sing along – I did! And I recommend bookmarking the link – you may want to listen to it more than once.  Now that I think about it, that might be a positive way for me to start each work day. 🙂

Another thing I would like to share with you has to do with the whole 20 second hand washing mandate. Who knew that 20 seconds could be so long?! The conventional suggestion is to sing the alphabet song or the happy birthday song, but I wanted something more intentional. I decided to take prayer to hand washing and to test it out with a timer. I found that if you say the Our Father at a pretty quick clip or the Hail Mary at a moderate speed, that’s about 20 seconds. I also thought it might be a good time to to learn a new prayer, so I decided to look into the Angelus Prayer.

“Pour forth, we beseech you O Lord, your grace into our hearts, that we to whom the incarnation of Christ, your Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by his passion and cross be brought to the glory of his resurrection through the same Christ our Lord. Amen.”

This ancient prayer is traditionally associated with the noon hour of the liturgy of the hours that is frequently a time to pray for peace. I love the image of God pouring grace into our hearts directly!

Also, I went looking through my artwork for something appropriate for the moment – something inspiring and hopeful, but also honest.  And what I ended up with is the sketch above that I titled “Dark Night of the Soul?”  I can’t remember exactly when I created it, but it was at a time when I was reflecting on painful experiences I survived and grew stronger from.  The insight I had was that, even though it was dark and difficult, there was really a lot of fluid movement going on in that depression.  I think it might be helpful if we focus on that – on what movement is going on in our lives right now, even though we are stuck at home. 

And so maybe it is a good time to ask big questions or clean out our closets or have crucial conversations or bake cookies or read a good novel or be creative in whatever form that takes.  

I pray that we will all use this insular time wisely.

UPDATES: This blog post was updated on November 1, 2020 and again on May 21, 2024 to check links and to make minor editorial changes.  Note that you can also find the Berklee video on YouTube, where it went viral, with more than 2 million views.

Video: https://www.berklee.edu/news/berklee-now/what-world-needs-now-student-made-video.

Image 1: Dark Night of the Soul?, Julie Henkener, 2020.