“Happy COVID to all, and to all a good night”

On November 4, Kim and I became sick with COVID-19. We were quite ill for a week, and it has taken us longer than that to feel OK. Strange that we waited to get COVID-19 until after the pandemic ended, eh?

Sadly, our infections are hardly surprising. Official figures — for the small amount they are now worth — report about 700 million cases have been logged worldwide over the past three years; and seven million people have died. However, the real figures are probably over two billion cases and more than 20 million people dead. Many researchers think that two thirds of Canadians have been infected at least once. A lot of Canadians have now been infected multiple times, and 50,000 of us have died.

It is not surprising that Kim and I would finally succumb to this virus as it nears its third anniversary. This fall, we have been many more times exposed than in fall 2020 and fall 2021; and most of the world’s public health authorities have given up the effort to contain the pandemic. Testing is individual instead of collective. There are no longer requirements to isolate when sick. Indoor air has not been cleaned by filters. Mask mandates are gone. The world has “moved on.”

Except, the virus has not moved on. It continues to flourish, mutate, and cause severe health problems. We’ve had COVID as well as four vaccine shots; but we will not be immune for long. There is no hybrid immunity. We’ve had COVID, and with each subsequent infection, our immune systems will be weaker. We’ve had COVID, and our years of remaining health are probably now diminished. Under the pressure of COVID and its immune-suppressing effects Canada’s public healthcare systems are cratering.

In November, the United Nations declared that world population had finally broken eight billion. But I doubt it will reach nine billion. Childhood looks like it will return to its status from 100 years ago – a fraught time in which many children don’t make it to age five. Senior living looks similarly bleak. We may soon return to a time when reaching 65 years of age is rare.

I appreciated a comment I heard recently that said Canada is not moving from a public healthcare model to a private one. Instead, it suggested we are moving to a “Third World” system in which no one, whether rich or poor, can find adequate care.

I was sad that COVID meant I was unable to sing with the Richard Eaton Singers (RES) in “The Music of Vaughan Williams” on November 12. But we tested negative that morning, and so I bought a ticket near where Kim was sitting, and we heard the music at the back of Edmonton’s Winspear Centre. I was thrilled with the concert, especially the setting of Walt Whitman’s U.S. Civil War poetry in “Dona Nobis Pacem.”

Unfortunately, the RES conductor, Len Ratzlaff, went directly from the concert to the hospital ER. He was in the University of Alberta Hospital for two weeks with as-yet undiagnosed heart problems. I plan to sing with the RES in its December 9 and 10 performances of Handel’s Messiah with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (while masked), but we won’t be led by Len. I pray his recovery continues.

Being sick with COVID led me to re-read all of my sermons from March 15, 2020 onward. I quite like them, and I urge you all to read them as well!

Other than my focus on the 45th president of the United States, the biggest complaint I received about my sermons was how frequently I talked about COVID-19. But I’m glad I did so. The pandemic and the lamentable way that most leaders have tackled it has been a key feature of life for most of the last three years, so why not focus on it?

In mid-November, Kim and I saw “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and I got emotional in two strange spots. One was a scene set in Mexico in 1570 in which a large group of indigenous people are dying from tuberculosis. This made me think about the unfiltered air in the theatre and of today’s medical scourges.

Other scenes were set in an idyllic version of contemporary Haiti, which, unfortunately is now in a state of veritable collapse. On November 13, Thomas Homer-Dixon in a New York Times column described Haiti’s situation as one of “poly-crisis.”

One of the characters in the film is named after Toussaint Louverture, the key leader of the Haitian revolution of 1791 to 1804, and this fact also stirred and saddened me. I love how the Black Panther movies criticize colonialism and dream up mythical nations in The Global South that have avoided its depredations. Unfortunately, the real world is one still riven from top to bottom with the unhealed wounds of colonial violence.

For more on the depredations of colonialism, I also recommend my sermons! (See, for example, “Your one wild and precious life”)

Unfortunately, many links on these pages no longer work. In September, Mill Woods United Church changed to a new website, which among other things no longer lists “Recent Spiritual Gatherings,” which provided information and access to all the services there between 2016 and 2022; “Mill Woods Highlights,” which was a way to track the many special events at the church over the past eight years; old Annual Reports and “Connections” newsletters from 2013 onwards; and many other items. Last year, I started archiving all the weekly “What’s the Buzz” e-newsletters, but they are now gone. I also archived all the weekly bulletins during the pandemic, which are now gone. In looking at the website, there is no clue that I was ever the minister there from January 2014 until May 1, 2022.

Still, websites can be arbitrarily huge, and it may be that some or all the deleted items listed above will reappear; not that I’m holding my breath.

In my eight years of ministry at Mill Woods, I preached an anti-imperialist message, but I’m sad that it didn’t seem to get through. On November 11, the church posted a “Lest we forget” Remembrance Day message on Facebook despite, for example, my “Lest we remember” sermon from 2014. Oh well. Virtually none of us can think clearly in a world gone mad, and Canada’s annual focus on poppies is just another example. It has been 103 years since the first Remembrance Day. Perhaps Canada needs another two or three hundred years before it can finally come to grips with the reality of WWI!

On the other hand, I was thrilled with Season 5 of “The Crown,” which Kim and I binged in early November while we were sick. I especially appreciated two episodes that featured King Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936.

Episode 6 showed him with his father King George V in London in 1917. As they inanely discussed shooting birds, word came from Russia that the Czar and Czarina were requesting asylum in Great Britain following their deposition by the Russian Revolution. The episode showed how, despite being the first cousins of King George, the Czar and Czarina were denied asylum because of anti-German sentiment in the British Empire — this despite Czarist Russia having lost three million soldiers in fighting against the King’s elder first cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, who was Queen Victoria’s first and most beloved grandchild!

The monarchs of Britain, Germany, and Russia were all first cousins. In 1917, the British Royal Family had changed its name from the House of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha to the House of Windsor to calm anti-monarchical feelings, which had been exacerbated by the incestuous German heritage of Britain’s monarchy.

Instead of spending their declining years living in luxury in Britain, the Czar, Czarina, and family were executed by Russia in 1918 as the British-supported White Army came close to freeing the Russian Royal Family from their exile in Yekaterinburg.

I had included information about the arbitrary and wretched nature of Europe’s monarchies in my sermons (see for instance “Past troubles and future dreams” from April 2016), but without much interest from the people who heard them. So, I am thrilled when a major entertainment property like Netflix’s “The Crown” includes background on the violence-drenched royals.

Episode 3 of Season 5 of “The Crown” begins in 1946 in Alexandria Egypt, which — despite the “War to End all Wars” of 1914-18 and the struggle against Nazism of 1939-1945 — was still a British colony. It shows abdicated King Edward VIII (then known as The Duke of Windsor, although The Duke of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha would have been more accurate) enjoying post-war luxury in this British enclave, and how Mohammed Fayed, an Egyptian entrepreneur, was enthralled by the royals. Later, it shows Fayed hiring Edward’s Bahamian personal valet at the time when Fayed purchases the Parisian Hotel Ritz in the 1970s, and which was the last place Princess Diana was seen alive after she and Mohammed’s son Dodi left the hotel by car 1997 with marauding paparazzi in wild pursuit.

I’m glad I kept blogs of all my sermons from 2009 onward that were separate from various church websites, and that in June, I copied all my COVID-19 daily blog entries from MWUC’s website, from March 2020 to May 2022, to my hard-drive. Perhaps one day I will prune the links that no longer work.

In my sermons from March 15, 2020 onward, I often proposed the goal of eliminating COVID (see for instance Still dreaming of Aukland.) But in the absence of this goal, I can understand people like myself going back to restaurants, choirs, and other communal settings despite the ongoing pandemic of COVID-19. The plague persists. Many of us will probably die sooner because of its persistence. But we still seek ways to try and enjoy life.

I see the pandemic as a “civilization-ending” plague, although, of course, I could be wrong about this – as could the epidemiologists and public health doctors I follow on Twitter. But can it really be true that most of our leaders won’t do the straightforward if difficult work of bringing the plague to heel? Are our leaders really unwilling or incapable of stopping mass death?

Yes! As one can see from long-term problems like climate disaster and weapons of mass destruction, our leaders have given up hope for the future of humanity. In this sad state, they will sacrifice us for the goal of achieving power. It’s their “short term gain” for humanity’s long-term extinction. We live in a “Mad Max” world, and its effects are crashing on more and more of our heads.

But for now, we are still alive, and another Christmas is coming. Despite war in Ukraine, horrible violence in Syria and Yemen, starvation in Somalia and Ethiopia, weird and destructive weather everywhere, and the continued success of COVID in the face of human stupidity, I wish you and yours a Happy Christmas. May we make it is as merry and bright as we possibly can.

Until January, Ian