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The Rev. Lynn Ungar, who serves as minister of lifelong learning for the Church of the Larger Fellowship, is also a poet and a dog trainer. When her recent poem, “Pandemic,” went viral, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune was curious about the poet who had written it. Ungar said, “I have very few useful skills, right? I am good at writing poetry and training dogs. You do not want me at a medical emergency.” The columnist responded that “sometimes emergency aid includes helpful words and Ungar has given us some at a moment of need.” (Chicago Tribune, March 13)
Writing for the Washington Post, the Rev. Galen Guengerich of All Souls Unitarian in New York City warns against fear-based xenophobia, saying that if you “get too close to an infected person, you might get infected, too. While this is obviously true and worth taking precautions against, it’s also true that the person is not the infection. When you conflate the two, you become susceptible to a moral disease, one that gets transmitted not by bodily fluids but by fear.” (Washington Post, March 14)
As the numbers of people with COVID-19 increase, it comes closer to home for many of us. This was true for the Unitarian Church of Evanston, Illinois, where a church member tested positive for the novel coronavirus. (Evanston Now, March 12)