Comment by Harborough churches: I wonder how we will describe 2022 this time next year?

Viewpoint by Revd Barry Hill, who leads the team of Church of England churches in and around Harborough

If 2020 was a year of isolation, 2021 may have felt more like a year of false dawns. I wonder how we will describe 2022 this time next year?

We start the new year in the shadow of a new variant. Some psychologists talk of four stages of living in this kind of individual and societal trauma. As we are all different, the four stages can come one after the other, but in reality they tend to be all mixed up, overlapping points we return to at different stages and in different ways.

As we prepare ourselves for what we fear may come, it is normal to feel anticipatory anxiety. As things develop this can be replaced by a “surge to solutions”, a heroic blitz-like phase. Then, as challenges persist or re-emerge, comes a grinding battle of disillusionment, exhaustion and even resentment. Slowly, often too slowly for most of us, this exhaustion then gives way to the path to recovery.

As the tail of covid stretches longer than we may have expected, and certainly longer than we would like, it is worth asking where we find ourselves within this individually, as households, a community and in wider society. Such understanding may help us to be more gracious and generous with those who respond differently according to the stage they are at.

In talking with lots of people across our community each week, my observation is that this part of the pandemic, with plenty of disillusionment and exhaustion, dashed hopes and false dawns, is the hardest stage for many of us.

In the world of exploration, more people die coming down Everest having reached the peak than perish on expedition to the summit. But when have you ever heard anyone say “I am training to get down Everest”?

Generosity to one another, especially healthcare professionals and keyworkers often facing the most acute trauma and exhaustion, is key if we are to emerge from covid well, but this often starts with being more generous to ourselves. It is ok not to be ok, although it is not ok to take that out on someone else!

In the Bible, at various points of uncertainty, anxiety and change, God invites people to cast their anxieties on him. On one level that changes nothing. Often the situations remain unchanged at first, but countless Christians find each day that to cast our troubles on God changes everything. To know that someone greater than us is able to hold us, to know that in the unknowing, the anxiety, that we are not alone, changes everything.

WH Auden once wrote, “Nothing can save us that is possible”. At Christmas we celebrated something considered impossible, God emptying himself of power and privilege to be born a vulnerable baby in poverty, so as to offer salvation and hope to the world. Maybe this 2022 we need more of that hope and help. I know I do!

Revd Barry Hill leads the team of Church of England churches in and around Harborough