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Good morning. As we hope that Omicron infections may be slowing down we should not forget the more than a million people suffering from long Covid – with more than a third of them for over a year. Unbelievable fatigue and a host of other symptoms. Some recover fully over time, but there are many feel they are no longer the person that they were.

There’s something in our culture which can’t accept this. We tend to value ourselves and to be valued, by what we do. There is little recognition these days that even with ordinary illnesses it takes time to recover, convalescence is important. Dealing with acute illness and saving lives is a priority of course, but people who remain ill also deserve physical support. They need money spent on research, and treatments, and they need to be understood. Those who suffer from ME or Chronic Fatigue syndrome are all too familiar with bad advice: being told their suffering is all in the mind or being cajoled onto exercise programmes which often make them worse. Many doctors are at a loss with these patients because they feel they can’t do much for them, and they, like the rest of us, work from a paradigm in which problems are there to be solved. So Long Covid presents us with a moral and spiritual challenge.

For those experiencing long-term illness there is a natural grief at the loss of capacity and the struggle to adjust to a different and more limited life. ‘Offer it up’ Christians used to say sometimes, and I used to laugh cynically at that, especially when I found, written on a 1930s postcard in a convent in leafy Kensington, ‘Offer it up for the conversion of a labourer’. Upper class piety at its worst. But it is not always bad advice to anyone suffering to try to accept the pain, the loss, and even maybe to offer it to God. Perhaps we are meant in some way to bear each other’s burdens. In 1982 the Anglican priest W H Vanstone wrote a book called The Stature of Waiting in which he said, there are phases of life when we are agents of our destiny, and passive phases in which we are not. Both matter. The first half of the Gospel story is full of action as Jesus preaches, teaches, heals, travels and challenges the authorities. But then in the second half, the verbs go into the passive as Jesus becomes an object. He was betrayed, arrested, tried, crucified. And yet it is these passive events, we are told, which bring salvation to the human race. Those with long Covid and other similar conditions are not useless; they should not be ignored. In the end they may provide medical knowledge and practical wisdom which could benefit all of us.