Â鶹Éç

Available for over a year

Good morning. I don't normally read science fiction but someone lent me a book about a world devastated by a killer plague. By a strange accident one man finds he has survived and he drives all over America observing the deserted town and houses. Then he meets someone and she invites him to have a meal. Although he was not hungry he knew that behind the invitation there was more than the call of the body for food. "There was need now", he thinks "for the symbolic eating together, that first conscious bond of human beings -the sitting at the same table, the sharing of the bread and the salt." Well, we are not yet allowed to meet friends to have meals in their house, but we are allowed to meet up with them, at a social distance, in the open air. And what a joy it has been. At the height of the lockdown as I went out for my daily exercise it was a real pleasure to pass someone you knew and stop for a few words. It made me reflect in a poem I wrote how wonderful it is to live in a digital age, enabling us to communicate when we are physically apart, but how as human beings we want more than this In lockdown, phoning, skyping, sending e-mails we exult how good it is to live in a digital age. To keep in touch like this is what Covid entails, and we're so lucky, so smart, with our digital stage. Then out on the walk we take for our ague what a pleasure to stop with friends for a chat. People for real to see in the flesh and engage. Their faces aglow with being an actual fact, their bodies alive with where they are at, and who they are here, not a photo or phantom. Yes, dust breathed into shape and to dust returning flat, but for now living, breathing and talking in tandem. We are made to see and hear, to taste and touch and feel. God made us embodied, not an image or pixel, but real. God made us embodied. From a Christian point of view we are not souls trapped in matter but bodies animated by the spirit of God, walking sacraments if you like, physical beings with a spiritual meaning and purpose. And how good it will be when we are once again able to invite people into our homes to share a meal with us. Meanwhile we can at least enjoy, two metres apart, not just an image, but a living presence.