Shanti and Shar Mathias each reflect on living in lockdown with its challenges and ordinariness.

Shanti writes from Wellington: “I hate the word ‘rhythm’,” one of my flatmates tells me. “I think we use it too much.” She is probably talking about me. I have been trying to figure out “rhythms of life”, “rhythms for university” and “rhythms of prayer” ever since the lockdown was announced — and probably even before.

I think rhythm is important. It means that I have something regular in my life. I’ve lost the normal patterns of life: when I go out, see people and attend classes in lecture theatres. Were my rhythms always that external? Almost everything feels as if it’s been destabilised by COVID-19.

So I hold on to what I can. I go running each morning. I go to sleep every night. I eat lunch between 12:30 and 1:00pm. Prayer helps too. With my flatmates we have morning, midday and evening prayer — a routine of turning to God whenever possible. A small stability in our day.

But I’m not sure that the rhythms help much. I still feel stretched thin, a little bit tender, totally inadequate. I change my parameters for gladness and learn my place more and more. I know where the sunlight falls at 3pm. I know which of my flatmates to tease and who will tease me. I know that holding things makes me feel better. I fill my hands with paper and my fingers with bread dough and the humming wood of my viola. I try to pay attention to every scrap of grace for it is sustenance.

Shar writes from Dunedin: The world I know of — international travel, economic stability, restaurants, commuter traffic on my walk to uni, of labs, Church and sleepovers with my friends  —has evaporated. It felt instantaneous, though we saw it coming in media headlines, levels of isolation and government announcements.

But I’ve found a more constant world. It’s the smell of lemonwood leaves, blackberries ripening and toadstools sprouting under pines as the weather changes to autumn. There’s dew in the morning, twittering birds outside my window, pīwakawaka congregating around flax bushes. In the hills of North India I know monkeys will be grooming each other in the trees. Then there are the mountains, pushed up by tectonic plates, on which the snow falls. And the wind blows where it will and stirs the sea into choppy waves.

Beneath, above, around and among our visible world is the invisible world of God’s spirit sustaining life and beauty. We are created beings, able to recognise God’s face in the messiness of fear, the strangeness of airborne illness and imposed restrictions.

God is a constant and we hold to the truths that Jesus died on the cross and rose from the dead. The meaning of this is written into Christian history and into our lives today.

I am comforted by this mystery as I do assignments, watch lectures from home and miss being in the library. On my runs I recognise what is unchanged. I find new ways of being community with my flatmates and learn to knit in my life’s new stillness. I hold on to God’s presence in all of it.

Shanti Mathias is studying at Victoria University in Wellington.

Shar Mathias is studying at Otago University in Otago.

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 248 May 2020