BBC Radio 4: Thought for the day - 4 December 2020

In a remarkable interview on this programme yesterday, artist Tracey Emin spoke of her harrowing experience facing death after being diagnosed with bladder cancer in June.

Within weeks she underwent major surgery that removed several of her organs.

“They’re calling me miracle woman,” she said, relaying how she thought she might not even make it to Christmas and the overwhelming sense of relief that came with her miraculous recovery.

When you come face to face with your own mortality and then in a sense get a reprieve, you’ll never take anything for granted again and you will try to do your best in life, Emin said.

As a person of faith, I heard in her voice an unbridled sense of joy and of relief, and found resonance in the words she used with, for me, a theological understanding of grace, renewal and rebirth. “I feel like I’ve been forgiven, or like a big giant curse has been lifted off me,” she said. “I feel like this is the real, true beginning.”

You could say it’s like she’s been born again.

I believe the post-Covid world presents us as a nation with an opportunity to be born again, too, like Ebenezer Scrooge who wakes up on Christmas morning a transformed man wanting to do good in the world.

Some of us have already seen signs of this rebirth in lessons that 2020 has taught us about whose lives matter,

the importance of connection at a community level, the appreciation of nature,

the spotlight on UK poverty, the vital importance of our key workers and the questioning of whether we’ve got the balance of work and life right thus far.

We are at what economists Daron Acemogly and James Robinson described as a ‘critical juncture’ – a sudden and unforeseeable jump such as a war or a pandemic that disrupts the status quo, the existing balance of political and economic power.

A critical juncture provides a crossroads at which there is an opportunity for real change, for rebirth.

But what could this re-birth look like for us as a nation? In the months ahead as we begin to emerge from the ruins of this year, having collectively come face to face with our own mortality, what will we take with us into this new world?

My hope is that we will be born again into it; but that each of us must recognise the part we play in making it a reality. I hope we’ll become kinder, more generous, more aware of the needs of those around us. I hope we’ll never take anything for granted again.

Because perhaps, as in the words of Tracy Emin, we’re on the cusp of something and there’s no more messing around.