Angelus News | January 15, 2021 | Vol. 6 No. 1

INTERSECTIONS
BY GREG ERLANDSON
Health care workers at
United Memorial Medical
Center in Houston treat
patients infected with
COVID-19 on New Year’s
Eve Dec. 31, 2020.
CATHOLIC NEWS SERVICE/CALLAGHAN O’HARE, REUTERS
New year, new normal
The year 2020 ended for me with an emergency root
canal. It seemed a fitting way to close out a year that
had so little to recommend it. It was a ghastly year,
filled with disease and death, upheaval and rumors, ersatz
controversies and real ones. Why shouldn’t it end with an
angry molar whose nerves were calling it quits?
And yet. When we zoom in from the macro dysfunction
to the micro events of our daily lives, there were blessings to
be found in 2020. So my New Year’s resolution of sorts is to
appreciate the silver linings of 2020 in the hope that it will
improve my attitude going into 2021.
Take that root canal, for instance. Thank goodness there
were dentists willing to work during a pandemic and willing
to tackle my “hot tooth,” sticking their hands into my germ
factory of a mouth even when they didn’t know me from
28 • ANGELUS • January 15, 2021
Adam and didn’t know how well I was abiding by pandemic
protocols.
A blessing that I hope lingers is my rediscovery of what
“essential” means. In 2020, I was reminded that essential did
not mean powerful, rich, or celebrated. Essential was the
cashier at my grocery store who showed up for work when
there were no Plexiglas protectors and no toilet paper, when
nerves were raw and the risk seemed oppressively real.
Essential was not just the doctors with the big salaries.
Essential meant the nurses in the ICUs and the ERs who did
most of the caregiving and the handholding and too often
lost their lives in service to others. Listening to the tearful testimonies
of nurses who had seen so many people die alone,
I felt for their pain and for the goodness that drove them to
return to work each day and face that pain all over again.
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