Use your mask to show unspoken respect for others

I want to say something about face masks, and to begin with a detail from a story in the Bible.
Christopher Furlong/Getty ImagesChristopher Furlong/Getty Images
Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Long before Jesus was born, Moses led the children of Israel out of slavery in Egypt. They then spent forty years journeying to their promised land.

At one point, Moses goes to a mountain pray to God. When he comes back, the bright glory of God shines from his face and people are afraid. So Moses puts a cover over his face and gets on with daily life.

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Seeing a person’s face is thought of in the Bible as seeing into a person’s mind and soul.

We might have lost our sense of the face as a window into someone’s whole identity because we are so familiar with photographs.

But a snapshot is not the living image; nor is a video recording. You cannot look properly into someone’s eyes in a photograph or on FaceTime and have the sense of communication you get from meeting that person face to face.

People with hearing difficulty often become highly skilled at reading faces. This is mainly because of lip-reading. But it is also about the skill of reading a person’s mood and accurately detecting anger, laughter or fear.

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We might not like Government regulations that tell us when and where to wear a face mask. But wearing the mask is one way to protect others and ourselves.

Compliance with this demand is a small, public contribution to supporting the work of the NHS, by respecting its limited resources and the huge demands for medical care that this winter might bring.

This is like many other things that we have had to re-learn during the lockdown. The loss of meeting and seeing another person face to face has reminded us just how much we value communicating facially, in unspoken ways.

A good outcome from the present lockdown regulations would be that we look at each other with a greater degree of respect. A genuine smile is so different from a sneering grin.

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It will also be important to register encouragement and reassurance in our faces, as we seek to overcome the fear of other people that has spread so widely as a result of needing to resist the Covid pandemic.

And I shall continue to believe that beneath every mask there is a face in which the glory of God is hidden.

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