Friday, January 22, 2021

The Cathedral and the Jab

 Great Britain  has been contending with one of the highest levels of COVID-19 infection rates in the world, and with that a disturbing number of deaths. Is it a coincidence that they have a blow-hard white male at the helm of government, as do other nations with high death tolls? 

Fortunately Britain is excelling at vaccinating its population against COVID, using every imaginable venue to give people the jab. I wish Canada could make a similar claim. 

I noticed that one of the vaccination sites is Salisbury Cathedral, one of the many magnificent churches of the British Isles. The first person to receive his COVID shot in this location was a 95-year-old WW2 veteran who was pleased to say that it didn't hurt a bit. 

The dean of the cathedral suggested that there probably wasn't a more beautiful setting to get the jab than the cathedral and I suspect he's correct. Today I heard a report about this location on CBC Radio about this unique location and I could hear the cathedral organ playing in the background. Sights and sounds to make the "medicine go down" or in. 

How wonderful that a 13th century cathedral built to the glory of God, and which has endured through the plagues and wars of the centuries, is now employed as a place of physical hope and spiritual uplift in the midst of a modern-day pandemic 

To segue elsewhere on the vaccination subject, I learned recently that the Mary Poppins film song with the line "just a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down" was written after the songwriter's son came home and assured his dad that his early-60's polio vaccination at school went smoothly because it was administered on a sugar cube. Take that, anti-vaccers -- literally!



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