by Brian Bard, Spiritual Director | brian@brianbard.com

Brian Bard is a spiritual director and workshop leader who is attending to one of the most important needs of our time -- helping people process their experience of Pandemic with ritual and conversation. Wood & Water invited Brian to write about what we need as we move "From Pandemic Era to Recovery Era," the subject of a workshop series and consultation services available online at www.invitedinvocation.com.

Envisioning a New Era

Given everything we’ve been through the past two-and-a-half years, it’s no surprise many of us are hankering to leave the Pandemic Era behind. But, given everything we’ve been through the past two-and-a-half years, I don’t think this era can end, unless we envision where we go from here and take an active role in that process – a ceremonial role.

In order to truly end the Pandemic Era, we have to first honor it, then initiate the Recovery Era we need next, meanwhile holding Transition Ceremonies to facilitate that.

To help enable a Recovery Era and Transition Ceremonies, I’ve designed a set of free post-pandemic resources that communities, small groups, fellow spiritual directors, and everyone else can use – please check these out, share, and use them with everyone you know! These can give us all a practical starting place, but here I hope we can also engage in a bigger-picture conversation.

What are some necessary ingredients for the Recovery Era and Transition Ceremonies we need? Let’s look at reorienting to (1) Sacredness, (2) time and place, and (3) relationship.

(1) Reorienting to Sacredness

This Pandemic Era has held a crisis of meaning for our world. We’ve been contending with a viral force of nature, and subsequent social failures, beyond our full understanding. We’ve been shattered after losing loved ones and essential life experiences. And rather than the intimate grieving processes and proper goodbyes our human Souls need in order to get through something so painful, we’ve had to work with splintered, surreal experiences: numbers in the headlines, faces and touch and emotion mediated by masks and screens and distance. 

How do we begin to make sense of all this, to heal, to find God’s presence with us?

In our Recovery Era and Transition Ceremonies, we need to finally find catharsis. We need outlets to reconcile with the events of the Pandemic Era, to reconcile with God. We need, as the word ceremony denotes, sacred, special, set-aside contexts, where we can honestly acknowledge the significance of what we’ve been through. An appropriate analogy may be a kind of funeral or mourning period, or a rite of passage marking the change in seasons of life – except these on a global scale. We need such imagination to find our way back to a sense of Sacred meaning.

Individually and culturally, we will probably always carry the wounds of the Pandemic Era. But by initiating a Recovery Era and Transition Ceremonies, we can at least transfigure our wounds. Rather than deluding ourselves into thinking we can simply “move on” from them, only allowing them to fester – we can sanctify them.

(2) Reorienting to Time and Place

These past few years have also entailed a major disruption in our sense of time and place, to the point of earning a name – the Pandemic Era – marking them as a relative discontinuity in history. We have the new paradigms of working from home, asynchronous classes, online events, etc. These, for all their convenience, can leave our lives feeling arrhythmic and cramped. (How does it impact the psychological and spiritual health of season-tracking savanna-animals like us to interface this much – including with other people – via small, rectangular screens?) 

Maybe we’ve had much less structure in our daily schedule than before, or much more, and in either case much less ability to predict the future. Maybe we’ve felt confined in our homes or neighborhoods, meanwhile dizzied and numbed by awareness of hardships across the world. And haven’t we all experienced some version of “COVID-time” or “COVID-brain” – the timeline since 2020 alternately all bleeding together or distending in our memories? All this disharmony with our physical and temporal existence leaves us disoriented and dazed, feeling unmoored and maybe even unreal.

In our new Recovery Era and Transition Ceremonies, we need to rebuild this natural harmony. We need to reinvigorate forms of liturgy everywhere we can, and introduce new contexts unique to this moment in history – COVID memorial days and monuments, grand reconvene-ings, and Transition Ceremonies themselves. We need to find more reasons to interface outside, unscreened.

We thrive on rhythm and intimacy with our environments. A Recovery Era and Transition Ceremonies can help restore these gifts.

(3) Reorienting to Relationship

The Pandemic Era has also constituted a crisis of relationship. We’ve seen unprecedented isolation and loneliness, exacerbating the already-great tragedies of illness and death. Depression, anxiety, addiction, animosity, and escapism have driven us into hiding from one another.

The fabric of belonging has been torn, and now must be mended if we have any hope of making ourselves whole. Any Recovery Era or Transition Ceremonies must be undertaken together, as family.

Do we have wisdom to see that, now more than ever, family is what exactly we are? Indeed, this is the first time in history the entire human family has been so united in a single common hardship. We’ve each lived every day with the knowledge that others are suffering or dying or protecting themselves from the same thing as us, and that the effort to survive and solve problems is mutually, globally interdependent. We have been bonded, consciously or not, as if we were living under one roof.

In our new Recovery Era and Transition Ceremonies, we need to dedicate our lives to this awareness. We need to come out of hiding again and meet each other face to face, hand to hand, heart to heart.

This may be the hardest task ahead. But there are no Recovery Era and Transition Ceremonies without it.

Answering the Call

I hope this conversation can inspire you and others to join the global effort: honoring the Pandemic Era, initiating the Recovery Era, and facilitating Transition Ceremonies. I hope these free post-pandemic resources can help in that. Given everything we’ve been through the past two-and-a-half years, God is now calling us to a great, visionary task. I hope we can answer.