It strikes me that what’s different about the present crisis is that, while markets may be reeling, what worries us most deeply is that people, flesh and bone people, are not able to contribute their part to our common life. The images of actual lives being cut off from each other is even more vivid than plummeting market returns.
Even in this time of social distancing, we are still blessed with an abundance of social capital. We have so much love to offer one another! We have so much love to offer a whole world that needs it. Never has the Church needed to be the Church more than now.
Since any statutes of limitations should have expired by now, I’ll risk confessing to you that we didn’t own a television set when our kids were very young. At times we worried someone might report this neglect to Child Protective Services. But since we didn’t have a TV, some kind soul had pity on our son Alden and gave him a broken remote control to add to the small collection of rocks and sticks his heartless parents had convinced him were actual toys.
“Thanks to memorizing John 3:16 at age 8, three years later I would understand something about my favorite professional wrestler, the notorious Stone Cold Steve Austin, that I wouldn’t have otherwise.”
We met Triff and Mary at the flower festival at St Mary’s Church in Topsham, a village in the southwest of England, which was identical to the image in your mind right now of a flower festival at St Mary’s Church in Topsham, in the southwest of England. Years ago Mary had seen their house, a place called Wixels, on holiday in Topsham while Triff was still a practicing architect in Norwich on the other side of England.