Knowledge and Experience: Spirituality In The Time of COVID-19

This issue is on the relations between spirituality and COVID-19. We begin with the Icon on the cover. Lauretta Agolli, began to practice the ancient Christian art of Byzantine icon writing as a prayer and spiritual practice in 2012. The cover icon, written in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, represents God's messenger, the Heavenly First Responder, bringing the message to the world of God's constant love and God's presence in our struggles. The photograph of the icon was taken by her husband, Sermet Agolli.

What other theme than spirituality and COVID-19 could the editors of this issue of Spiritus focus on at this time? This issue of Spiritus is based on how all of us—in different ways—are experiencing the spiritual journey of wondering and wandering through the pandemic of COVID-19. What does COVID-19 mean for us and how does it affect our spirituality?

To explore this question, I have invited each of the members of the Spiritus Editorial Board to write a relatively short essay on the theme spirituality in the time of COVID-19. Not all Editors are in a position to write just now, but the majority have contributed to this issue and together have done a wonderful job of wandering and wondering about this major theme. Mark Burrows, our Poetry Editor, has also contributed a discerning essay on the subject. Displaying honesty during uncertainty, all of the contributors offer their own unique perspectives on the relation between spirituality and COVID-19.

In his book, Looking at Mindfulness, Christophe André writes on breath and the heart during meditation:

Here [in his reflections on breath and the heart in meditation] is yet another example of, the incredible difference in kind between knowledge and experience, two worlds that are further apart than you might think . . . But when you can go through suffering just by accepting that it's there, not reacting with agitation but just with awareness, it's always really strengthening! It is the meeting of theory, intentions, speeches, and reality . . . It makes us feel that we're on the right track, safe and consistent—it works! I know, I've done it.¹

What do these essays on spirituality and COVID-19 suggest about experience and about knowledge in a pandemic of this proportion? One of the essays—by Pieter G.R. de Villiers—focuses on how and why the best we can say about experience and knowledge amid a pandemic, is the possibility of mercy. In the midst of the experience and knowledge found in these essays, may you find peace and mercy even in the confusion, uncertainty, darkness, and suffering of this past year and in preparation for the time to come.

We begin this issue of Spiritus with Timothy Robinson's SSCS President's Address for the Society of Christian Spirituality. Though recently retired from the position, Robinson has been Spiritus' book review editor for the last six years. His Presidential Address was not intentionally focused on spiritualty and COVID-19. But the fact that he does cover material on this theme indicates that the theme is currently…inescapable. Robinson's essay is entitled "He Talked to Trees! Thinking Differently About Nature with Howard Thurman." Is talking to trees crazy or is it a modality of sanity in an uncertain, frightening world? The essay is sharp and to the point; in essence Robinson writes a convincing essay describing how, through experience and knowledge, Thrurman is indeed a nature mystic. With well-placed examples of Thurman's own experience and knowledge in a world of suffering and hope, Robinson shows Thurman to be, simultaneously, a classic and a unique nature mystic.

In talking to trees, Thurman sought understanding, wisdom, and solace in nature and with the trees during days of intense segregation and white terrorist violence in the South that left deep scars on Thurman's soul and spirit. Described by Robinson, Thurman did "not depend (solely) on human relationships but rather found connection, consolation, and a sense of his own dignity and worth as a part of a vast living...