COVIDaversary
Last week, President Biden addressed the nation on the one year anniversary of WHO declaring the COVID-19 crisis a pandemic. Saturday marked the one year anniversary from when St. Lawrence University, where I work in Alumni Relations, sent all students home for the rest of the semester. And in a matter of days, it will be one year since I packed up my office and started working from home. The world I live in today is, in many ways, unrecognizable from the one I lived in a year ago. The biggest difference, strangely, isn’t external. It isn’t the existence of masks or working from home. Nor is it that I now help lead church services online rather than sit in the pews. It isn’t even that the only people I see in person are my husband, parents, and brother (thanks to living in the same town and being able to ‘bubble’ with them). No, the biggest difference for me is hope.
When the pandemic hit, I knew the coming months would be hard and change the world as I knew it. I didn’t know how long it would last, but I knew it would be longer than we anticipated. My boss gave it a month. I thought that was a bit too optimistic. A year later, that seems to have been a good bet. Knowing challenges were coming, I wanted to chronicle the good things this time would have, because I knew that no matter the struggles, my life contained a goodness that nothing could wrestle from me. I didn’t want to forget all the laughter and love and joy I treasured. To make sure I saved those memories, I started a gratitude journal, writing a pageful of things that had made me smile that day - everything from my cat’s weirdo cuddle moves to the gentle tenderness of my then fiancé - now husband. But as much as I intentionally captured my joy, my love, my thankfulness, my goodness, I realize that I forgot a little bit about hope.
Next week marks a year since I launched this blog. I started this project as an exercise to keep my writing skills sharp as I processed the sweeping changes and challenging questions the pandemic brought to my life. What would getting married look like in the middle of a pandemic? What did Easter mean when it felt like Lent was just continuing on forever? I’m not certain what the future of this blog is when the pandemic someday passes, but since it’s launch, it was a way to find joy, process pain, and nurture a quiet strength to continue on into the unknown future. My posts are authentic reflections of nuanced thought, always ending on a note of optimism, a way to whistle in the dark. Yet, for all its strength, reflection, and sometimes dare I say wit, hope still is not the first word I’d use to describe my writing here.
I was telling a friend recently that the time of year I feel most spiritually in tune with is the early spring — Mud Season, as we North Country folk call it. It’s far from the prettiest season, I admit. It’s colder than anyone wants it to be. Nothing is alive as in spring and yet nothing is dead as in winter. Yet, it’s a season alive with hope. The days become longer and longer, little by little the temperatures climb. The harsh winds blow away the snow, and the rivers swell with ice melt. Each new bird at our feeder is the promise of more wildlife waking up, returning to our northern realm. The buds on the lilac trees start to poke their heads out, and eventually crocuses crown our lawns. As the slighter warmer sun of March melts the snowbanks and reveals the mud beneath, I swear it smells like hope.
I don’t remember reveling in this hope last year, in the promise of brighter days ahead, but this year I feel like a child once more. I’m giddy with delight. Even more so than in the pre-COVID springs. Part of that is it isn’t just the promise of spring, of a world restored to it’s fullness that I am anticipating — it’s the promise of a world restored to it’s health. Every day more and more people are vaccinated. My own parents were vaccinated last month, I get my first jab Thursday. The vaccines are working, slowing the spread of the virus. Like early spring doesn’t mean we can all wear our short shorts and flip flops (though some college kids would say otherwise), it isn’t quite time to go back to “life as normal.” But its a promise that this winter of the pandemic won’t last forever, in fact, like the harsh North Country winter itself, it’s strength is fading away with each passing day.
When I think of my love of early spring, I can’t help but remember C. S. Lewis’s masterpiece of fantasy literature: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In it, when the great lion Aslan, the true King of the land of Narnia, returns, he breaks the curse of the White Witch. The snow and ice that trapped the land in an eternal winter with no Christmas, begins to fade away. A prophesy foretells this coming:
Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.
The restoration of Narnia to a land of spring - of plenty and bounty - is an allegory for Christ restoring the world, and it reminds me that each spring I experience points to that same truth. The world awaiting the new heaven and the new earth has it’s beauty, like the that of the winter, but it is also dead, it’s life hidden beneath the layers of ice and snow. But that doesn’t mean the life there is gone, no more, destroyed. I think about the creation of this world, and God declaring it to be good. Creation never lost it’s value to God — but it became tarnished, covered in layers of metaphorical ice, preventing it from reaching it’s full beauty. Through Christ, that ice melts — in our hearts, and the world. It heals us, makes us whole, restoring us to the value that we were always created to have, blooming into the spring that has only been longing to be revealed. No wonder the spring has always filled me with hope. No wonder this year that hope is even stronger and wilder than ever before. Everywhere I see proof of a world that is healing. The ice melts, the virus slows, and soon, on Easter day, our fast will end and we will shout Alleluia once more, louder than before.
