This must be the strangest Thought for the Day I’ve ever done, sitting looking down on Rothesay below, quiet, closed down, hardly a car parked along Victoria Street.
I was chatting on the phone to a lady in the congregation looking at the same ever-changing, unchanging, ravishing view I look down on; the pier, the bay, the Cowal hills. “It’s all so strange!” we said. Shopping is strange, social distancing is strange – but, we reflected, like everyone else on Bute, we are blessed that we sit out coronavirus in a place like this.
It’s made us very, almost guiltily mindful, of all the people who don’t. Is this our version of something you feel? How different, how difficult, it must be for others? We can’t usually imagine the different lives that others live, so, God forgive us, we don’t usually try. But now, in this moment, we can’t avoid it. So we think about the lives of others, imagine how we could help. It isn’t that we know what the lives of others are like that is the truly precious thing. It’s that we suddenly grasp that we don’t. It’s a moment of insight, and of options.
In the Gospels, John the Baptist arrives in a time of turmoil and uncertainty. People flock to him. “Repent!”, he says, and we snigger, because it sounds so old-fashioned. But “repent” actually just translates two very simple words, a Hebrew one which means “to recognize that you’ve been going in the wrong direction, and turn in a new one”, and a Greek one which means “get a new mindset.”
This, says John, is a God-given moment of insight. You’re aware of things right now that you weren’t before. Right now, you can grasp this insight, change things, and get ready for what comes next, or you can miss the moment, and carry on as before.
What if, while things are strange, we grasped the new insight we have? The point isn’t “being in this together.” It’s being together in this, and after it, more aware of each other’s lives and needs. Maybe, if we embrace that, we’ll have embraced hope in this strangeness.
Loci Communes 
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