By Richard Renshaw, CSC, Welland, ON

We are all trying to deal with the unprecedented – in our lifetime – impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of us are thoroughly exhausted now that so many months have passed without any sighting of an end point. We have been isolated, deprived of social contact. Some have had to deal with the day-after-day stress of dangerous contacts at work or trying at home to coax children through the demands placed on them by school closures and at-home learning.

I am old; that poses some different challenges. I moved from big-city Montreal to small city Welland, Ontario at the end of August, 2020. It was a good time to move, while things were calmer on both fronts. That is no longer the case, but I do have to admit that it is easier to deal with the pandemic here than it was in Montreal.

Also, I have picked up a few threads of life that moved to the forefront and have helped me manage: daily walks along the Welland canal while listening to classical music on the radio, daily moments at the keyboard recovering my delight at making music even if from very simple scores, reading good novels that reference places I have visited at some point or another, a project to re-read the writings of Bernard Lonergan who taught me back in the 1960s and reading also a lot of his stuff that was unpublished at the time of his death in 1984. Finally, I have developed a regular life on Zoom both with individuals and with groups and in different parts of the world including Chile, Rome and Washington.

The move from Montreal pushed me from a basement apartment where I could go days without seeing anyone, to a house with 10 other people whom I have known most of my life and with a staff of equal number who look after our cooking, cleaning and health needs. That has meant, on the one hand, that I have much more time on my hands and have had to learn to fill in the hours (with all the stuff I listed above) but it has also meant that I have a group of people to share meals with, to pray with and to engage in conversation.

I pray with the community here twice a day and, most days, I have developed a routine of getting up in the middle of the night for an hour of psalms, readings and meditation that I find extremely helpful. The praying is nothing new, I have done that all my life, but doing it in the middle of the night, breaking my sleep with it, is new and, I find, very positive.

Reading Lonergan is an exercise in examining my own conscious processes for dealing with truth and values. It is really an exercise in philosophical psychology, one that helps me recognise my own inner processes and take responsibility for them. I add that to the years I spent in psychoanalysis and therapy as a way of coming to terms with the vast inner world of my consciousness and subconsciousness. Gradually, what I read as a young seminarian I am now – 55 years later – beginning to understand!

Finally, during these last months, I have found myself confronted more and more with the mystery of life, with the infinite mystery of presence and of love. Sometimes I just want to sit with that.

Father Renshaw is a Holy Cross priest.