Anthropause

We need new words for this new world we’re entering, and I thought “anthropause” was one of the most compelling among them. It refers to the breathing space we have recently had – and may temporarily have again – in our high-paced human activity during the pandemic, a space in which air became clearer, sounds became softer, water turned bluer, animals roamed more freely, and nature renewed its acquaintance. As author E.R. Powell put it in “Glimpses of a New Order,” the anthropause “provided a glimpse within our ordinary lives of the profound influence we exert on the world around us, of how intimately yet often unwittingly we shape the habits of creatures with whom we live and upon whom we so thoroughly depend.” 

He also asked the hard questions: “How will we respond to what we are collectively and individually witnessing? Is a return to the old ‘normal’ inevitable or does this moment invite us to forge (quoting theologian David Clough) ‘new patterns of peaceable creaturely living’?” 

Selected lines from Aleksandar Hemon’s poem “The Old Land” haunt us with what the future could look like if we preserved or enhanced the present unchanged. It would actually not be a future but a perpetually “old land”. 

In the old land,

The mountains were seasonally flattened,

Carved and rolled up like woven prayer mats.

…

In the old land,

Homes were made of honeycomb and straw,

Cars ran on blood, melted pennies, bones.

…

We were living our long lives at home,

Until we sank and resurfaced in this void,

Different skins, goggled eyes, nowhere to go.

And his final stirring image:

Just to be as we were, we had to destroy

All the wrong distant lands, the many

Scared elsewheres, banging at our doors. 

An alternative “new land” could be so markedly different. We could hasten to take those “scared elsewheres, banging at our doors” into – a most fitting female image conjured by Powell: “the sheltering womb of the land.”  

In his article, Powell is describing an engraving by artist David Jones titled The Resurrection of Christ in which Christ emerges from tomb as womb. It is the womb of the earth in this case, as Christ becomes, in Julian of Norwich’s most wonderfully feminist phrase, “the true mother of life and of all things”. (So much for priests having to have male bodies like Jesus’ in order to receive and administer the sacraments!)  Expansion, inclusion, reverence, not only of all genders, but of all that lives and grows is part of this Resurrection, not to mention its re-enactment of the Eucharist itself, bread and wine from all that lives and grows transformed into love for all that lives and grows.

I think we may have to take an “anthropause” to take that all in. At our peril, however, we ignore the message. Powell quotes another author, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, regarding all life which “as hoarded or dominated or exploited speaks of the distortion and ultimate severance of relationship, and, as such, can only be a sign of death.” In contrast, “the Eucharist carrying the presence of the risen Jesus, can only be a sign of life, of triumph over the death of exclusion and isolation.”

Pressing the “play” button now that we’ve “anthropaused,” I feel so renewed and recharged by the idea of being prepared to meet the Holy in any form it may assume, in each other – all others – and all of creation. When we start to think that way, we do start to change the direction of the world toward a truly new land. I liked Powell’s comment and image: “Such encounters can change the course of history. They shift the rudder ever so slightly. But over the long haul, even a slight shift is enough to bring us to a different shore.”