For the longest time, we have been wearing a mask. Not the masks we have worn for the past year, though I will admit that it does feel like “for the longest time.” No, these are the masks not seen, or perhaps even felt that have offered the world an illusion to our own convictions. They are the masks of our sinfulness – the communal and individual failures to see each other in the likeness of God. We have given words to love and inclusion without meaning them. We have smiled over our anger, and glazed our eyes to the biases we hold.
For all of its horror, Covid has offered a silver-lined reckoning, for we have been forced to acknowledge our masks by physically wearing them. And now we see the mask for what it is. We have seen our racism; our division; our hate; our demand for superiority, winners and losers; our pride; and our greed. We have had to repent for those masks, in the truest sense – by collectively wearing one so that we may acknowledge what we otherwise would not.
In the season when we are reminded that “we are dust and to dust we shall return”, we are humbled by a virus even smaller than that speck of dust. It has forced us to reconcile who we really are, and challenged us to live differently.
There is so much talk about where we go from here, but we know this – that we cannot return to what once was. When we finally take our masks off, we will have to remove more than one. When we finally feel the breath of life we share, that breath will be different. Could this be the ‘happy fault’ of this moment? Undoubtedly, we have removed the veil of racism, and the inequities that have existed under illusions of progress. As we have worn one mask, we have been forced to admit to many others we have been wearing for far too long. But i cannot help but wonder if we are ready to see and hear our world, and all that dwells herein, for what and who we are without our masks?