Because the pandemic forced many of our in-person services, conversations, and relationships to virtual spaces, it also distilled many of these activities into their most basic forms—often in surprising ways. Thinking back to my own Easter celebration, sitting on my bedroom floor (where the lighting was the best and the background the clearest—back when I used to care about those things) and holding my own bread and wine up for the Zoom blessing, I agree with Williams that the necessity of a virtual eucharistic blessing pushed me to engage deeper and with more intention with my physical worship practices.

Williams wrote these entries not just during the first six months of his country’s experience of the Covid-19 pandemic, but also during the last six months of his transition to retirement and subsequent move to Wales in September 2020. As a trauma chaplain working in New Orleans—a Covid-19 hotspot early on—my experience of the first six months of the pandemic was dramatically different than Williams’s. The same weeks he meditated on the spiritual lessons of packing up books, my team was struggling to fit a growing number of bodies into our already overflowing morgue. I affirm with Williams that “there is nowhere and no-when that is simply waste because the living Jesus is present and active wherever we turn,” but I struggled to connect with the stories of his quarantine experiences. However, I still found myself resonating profoundly with the narrative of divine presence through transition and the unknown that undergirds the whole of this work. His overlapping contexts of personal, professional, and global upheaval will likely allow readers to resonate with his reflections even though they are, for the most part, quite concerned with the concrete and particular experience of Williams and the local St. Clements congregation who was their original intended audience.  

The first chapter of Candles in the Dark marks the beginning of social distancing in the U.K., and the last the ambiguous middle period of pandemic-time, one which many countries are still very much in the midst of almost a year later. I began Candles in the Dark the day after receiving my first dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, and I am writing this review the week I received my second dose. While I now feel much less under direct physical threat, I am still concerned about the physical health of my loved ones, the still unfolding economic consequences, and what the emergence of new virus variants might mean for whatever “normal” is going to be. Being drawn back through Williams’s spiritual reflections on the early days of the pandemic to my own memories energizes me insofar as it reminds me of how far we’ve come, how amazing our capacity is to adapt to the unknown—and the surprising ways that God provides answers to questions we don’t even know to ask.