‘Anniversaries and reflections’
Good morning,
Today is the first anniversary of the first Companionship email/blogpost. On Sunday 15 March 2020, I wrote to the Chaplaincy mailing list with the first daily message of the then new season of isolation, offering its opposite – companionship – in words, images, music, prayers and more. Four people replied, expressing their gratitude. Over the following days and weeks, other chaplains, students and friends contributed, from different faiths, cultures, traditions and philosophies of life. A daily message was sent for 78 days until the end of May, and then relatively often since then, a total of 130 messages. In December it became a daily Advent Calendar window. If you want to explore the archive they are all here.
That first day, I wrote about the University Madrigal Group who had sung a couple of evenings before in St Salvator’s Chapel. I remember saying that night that it would probably be the last concert in the chapel “for a while”. I don’t think I suspected that that “while” would be a year, and who knows how much longer before we can sing together, or fill every seat in the chapel, or be untroubled about the distance between us in restaurants and shops, trains and concert halls, lecture-rooms and labs, Mansefield and McIntosh Hall, waiting rooms and queues for ice-cream.
Here is an image from that concert on Friday 13 March 2020. Would that before long we can stand together, and sit together and sing together, and all without our faces covered.
We are not returning to daily Companionship emails or blogposts, though we are perhaps even more conscious now of the need for community in a time of isolation. But members of the Chaplaincy team have been reflecting on this year of Covid-19, of losses and encouragements, and have been preparing messages and images which will be shared over the coming days and weeks.
For this strangest of anniversaries, let me return to the Madrigal Group. This YouTube video is a medley of songs with photographs of them rehearsing in 2016 in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the group. 2021 is their 75th anniversary. Congratulations to members present and past, and I hope it’s not as cold as Frobisher Bay (their signature song) wherever you are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJEhr-dvZ9E
Cold is the arctic sea
Far are your arms from me
Long will this winter be
Frozen in Frobisher Bay
Frozen in Frobisher Bay
I hope that companionship, however you find it, offers warmth and hope in this second year of the virus.
Yours,
Donald.
Revd Dr Donald MacEwan
Chaplain