Meditating on these scriptures in November 2020, I try to imagine the world as it might be in the week of Trinity Sunday, June 2022. Eighteen months ago, I could not have imagined our world as it is today: holiday gatherings stilled by a global pandemic; a US president challenging the orderly transfer of power. More familiar catastrophes threaten joy and peace: violence from systemic racism, extreme weather events from climate change, and increasing polarities of wealth and poverty.

In February 2020 I received an email from Jane, a good student who had not submitted her assignment on time. “I am so distraught by what is happening in Wuhan that I haven’t been able to study.” This Chinese-Canadian Buddhist had a PhD in microbiology and had published articles on SARS. She was reading the Chinese websites and anticipated the devastation that COVID-19 could wreak around the world. After her initial distress, Jane gathered her resilience and presented the realities of what she was reading to the class. Her Buddhism strengthened her as she struggled with the pandemic. She brought warnings about the novel coronavirus that were emerging from the doctors in Toronto’s emergency rooms.*

The Gospel of John spoke to sufferings that were too painful for the disciples to know in advance. For traumas we cannot anticipate, these words live for us too. Reading further in John, they are words of transformation, of restoration, of joy, of peace. John does not ignore the depths of our grief but promises words born of the Trinity—Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer—that meet us when we need them because the unimaginable happens.