Mark Whittall

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” These words were written by Julian of Norwich, a Christian mystic and visionary of the 14th century. Julian was a woman well acquainted with suffering and death. As a child, she lived through the Black Death, a pandemic which swept Europe and claimed the lives of half the population of Julian’s home city of Norwich. Julian was an anchorite, which meant that she lived much of her life in secl

This has been another crazy week. The new reality of life in a time of COVID-19 is sinking in. Words like social distancing and self-isolation have taken on new meaning. We have seen the number of cases in Ontario jump from 103 when I spoke to you last Sunday to more than 350 today. That number will continue to increase, and we don’t know for how long. The news from around the world is frightening. And yet, we are also seeing that containment and social distancing in som

So this has been quite a week. It’s been a week of disruption. We’re still reeling from the announcements about COVID-19. I think that on Friday as I was sending a letter out and we were deciding what to do about services, the situation seemed to be changing every hour. It’s hard to keep up, it’s overwhelming. It was overwhelming for me, I was watching way too much news, I was going to my phone way too often, and of course it’s much more difficult for those who have been a