Ritual & Accompaniment After One Year of COVID-19
Arundhati Roy accurately likened this time of pandemic to a portal, an invitation to pass from this world to something else. In her words, “pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”
Perhaps enough of us can pass through the portal with the clear-seeing and resolve needed to make another world possible. If we choose, we can claim COVID-19 as a collective rite of passage into a more just and loving world.
Any one of us can create moments of ritual and reflection in our own lives and communities, with the goal of emerging on the other side of pandemic with deeper courage, compassion, and commitment. Adam’s full article and our ritual resource guide can offer some starting points, reflective questions, and experimental prompts for the weeks and months ahead.
