Year: 2020

“What I’ve tried to do, in order to deal with this uncertainty and anxiety, is to find spaces in my life which I can do something about, and use them to provide islands of stability. For me, it has been about the rhythm of prayer, about taking exercise regularly, about keeping up with my reading. All of them would be easy to lose in a welter of obsessively checking the latest news. But insofar as I have managed to keep an even keel over the last months, I think those practices have been essential.”

“The pandemic has changed how many of us sleep, not usually for the better. The private worlds of sleep, in which we usually work through the past day and prepare for the next, have often been unable to cope with the uncertainties and anxieties of these past months. For some of us sleep has eluded our grasp completely; others have slept fitfully and only in the shallows, never properly resting. The ordinary strangeness of dreams has become still more bizarre.”

“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and…your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.  This was not just radical because of its decree to love but also because up to that time Jews had to adhere to 613 commandments. Our Lord distilled them down to two: love God and love your neighbour as yourself. Love is all you need.”