As I’ve mentioned a few times in the past, the themes and musings present in the services I lead tend to reflect things that are on my mind at the moment. In this case, it happens to be birthdays. Mine is this coming Tuesday. It also happens to be one of those “milestone” birthdays – I’ll be turning 55.
So, the government has now lifted basically all remaining COVID restrictions. We don’t have a traffic light system anymore, we have very few mask requirements, government vaccine mandates are ending and you don’t even have to isolate if a household member tests positive, so long as you monitor yourself for symptoms and do RATs.
Does anyone else feel like this is just another massive change we have to get our heads around? Another round in the whiplash of the last 2.5 years?
For the last couple of years there’s been a constantly changing regime that intrudes into our daily lives.
To be clear, I think it’s been justified and appropriate and I’m grateful for a government that has protected us this way. But it hasn’t been easy, right?
I’ve titled my random musings today “FOMO, Imagined Lives and Reclaiming Joy”. FOMO is an acronym for “Fear of Missing Out”.
I’ll start with a confession. I chose this topic because I suffer from FOMO and it has had a profoundly negative impact on the quality of my life and in some cases, the lives of people I care about. But I’m working on practising JOMO (the Joy of Missing Out) and my life is richer as a result.
A Dead Soldier Looks at the WarListen, or download the MP3
Today’s talk was a reading from “A Dead Soldier Looks at the War” by Rev. David Rankin. Read by Rev. Max Moss.
Links
Opening Song:- “Loving Spirit” from the ‘Common Praise 1998’ hymnal of the Anglican Church of Canada. Words: Shirley Erena Murray (1931- ) Music: Gross Catholisch Gesangbuch, Nurnberg 1631, Piano: Robert Aszmies
When Shirin Caldwell learned the topic I had chosen, she asked, did I realise that she, Jonathan and Brenda had already covered it a few months ago. I did hear their report and it was excellent However, I believe this topic is so massive, it needs to come up frequently, and from all angles.
The angle I want to speak about today is strategy.
Which are the actions we could take that would be:
Burning Down the House was part of the soundtrack of my adolescence.
The song came out two years after the 1981 Springbok tour of New Zealand that had united a nationwide protest movement from across the political and socio-economic spectrum, where tens of thousands of us had marched together periodically in the year leading up to the tour, and twice a week from 19 July — my mother’s birthday and the day our family went to the airport at dawn to protest the Springboks’ arrival — to 12 September — the fourth anniversary of Steve Biko’s death from severe beating in custody and the date of the final test match of the tour. The second match — against the Waikato provincial team on 25 July — was called off after protesters invaded the pitch. Apart from that one match, the tour went ahead. The movement didn’t achieve its aim of stopping the tour.
The introduction to the subject of the tour on the NZ History website has the subheading, “A country divided”.
I grew up in a rural part of Connecticut, in the northeastern United States. My home town, Plainfield, was small, the population was almost entirely white Europeans, and – as far as those in authority in my life were concerned – everybody was cisgendered and straight.
As was the social norm of the time, when someone we knew was gender non-conforming, we were all expected to act as though that fact didn’t exist. Our parents referred to their gay and lesbian relatives and acquaintances as ‘eccentric,’ and to their life partners as ‘roommates.’
We were indoctrinated to the “fact” that being cisgendered and straight was the one true “lifestyle choice,” in much the same way we were indoctrinated to believe our mainstream Christian sect was the one true religion.