Lockdown is different for each of us. I’ve been pondering what I’ve experienced, going through this on, and with, an island community. It’s a work-in-progress!
Here we are on Bute, isolated on our island… (And the pedants will happily point out that “island” and “isolated” are from the same Latin root!). We can’t come to your island, nor you to ours, without a very good reason. The ferry folk, and pier staff here in Rothesay and Rhubodach, who have to ask us why we want to sail, have been doing a wonderful, difficult job.
Our roads go round the island, or stop at the ferries. We don’t have that sense that I recall from the mainland, of our community “fading out,” into the wider world beyond. In a sense, we’re isolated individually, and we’re an isolated community.
Some days, our “island isolation” feels like safety, sometimes a bit like a siege! Yet on Bute, we’re also profoundly connected as a community, helping, hoping , “hingin’ the gither” –connected, you might say, to each other, while yet isolated from the rest of the world.
In our online church service yesterday, John’s Gospel had Jesus, the evening before his arrest and crucifixion, sitting with his disciples, just talking. The world outside that little room has become threatening, and they are very anxious. So he tells them:
“Your life is out there in the world. You’ll return to it. But the meaning of your lives is in here: in this community, in your relationships with each other, with me, with God – and in that most basic relating of all, which we call “love,” not sentimental, but tough and practical and resilient, identifying what the other needs, and meeting that need.”
But isn’t that exactly what so many of us have seen in our communities over the last two months,? People there for each other, identifying what others need, meeting the need? World, and society distanced for now, but community very real. Maybe our experience here, and yours there, aren’t that different after all…
Loci Communes 
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