Twenty Four Hours After You're Symptom Free

At the end of February, I caught a cold. I didn’t have a cough or a fever, but I had a runny nose and felt exhausted, and out of an abundance of caution, I got tested for COVID-19. As I said, it was just a cold; the results came back negative the next morning. However, I still had to self-isolate until 24 hours after I was symptom-free. That’s the thing about being sick: you don’t usually get better all of a sudden. Instead, your symptoms start to improve gradually, until one morning you wake up and decide that you’re well enough to go back to life as normal. I suspect that this is how the pandemic will end. There will be no magical day when a switch is thrown, and everything goes instantly back to normal.

This is what worries me when I hear people compare the end of the pandemic to Easter. Yes, we all need the hope of resurrection and new life. Yes, when this is all over, there will be much to celebrate. But even when alert levels are over, many will be uncomfortable gathering in large groups. Our lives and habits will have been so disrupted by the changes of the last year (and more) that it is far too naive to imagine a day when bishops can lift all the restrictions and the churches are miraculously filled again in all their glory. To compare that kind of scene to Easter is not just to be unprepared for what a full reopening will look like, but also to miss the point of the first stories of Easter.

“These people are both cheering and weeping at the building of a new temple…”

This post originally appeared in the April 2021 issue of Anglican Life.

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