Introduction Steven Chase (bio) Essays Belden C. Lane opens our fall issue with a beautifully written essay on the relation of nature to our own experience in these strange and often difficult times. Belden is a master at giving voice to the seeming silence of nature. Many have an inclination that nature, as are human persons, is engaged in the process and community of suffering and hope brought on by the Coronavirus. The essay is multilayered, but Belden focuses in particular on one conversation partner to begin the “great conversation.” He has had “25 years of practice praying to/with a 100 year-old cottonwood tree in the park across the street from my house.” Lane calls the tree, “Grandfather.” From this practice of prayer, he imagines what “Grandfather might be saying to the human community on behalf of the forests of the world” about the rise of Coronavirus. Lane, in this essay, explores the relation of the human community to the community of nature, especially the community of trees. He ends with a powerful and convincing conclusion that it is, “time we accept responsibility of which we are a part,” and that, the responsibility is to listen to the trees. If we learn this inter-species conversation, Lane believes that, “the crisis [of the Coronavirus] offers an enormous opportunity for learning.” Not only an “opportunity for learning,” COVID-19 is also a pain-filled opportunity for taking the time to form new configurations of community. Following the essay on human/nature conversation (another form of community building), Anna Harrison offers a stirring essay on “Mass in the Time of Quarantine.” In it she reminds us, as we are reminded daily in different ways that, as her Priest says, “We live in a different world, do we not?” Harrison hears a solitary voice respond, a solitary voice that speaks for the whole assembly: “Yes!” Most of the time the place is empty. But today the Priest wails at them. “His loneliness is as easy to read as is the ‘Yes!’... drawn from a common pool of sorrow, and it makes me [Harrison] feel somewhat less alone. If community is in part a sense of mutuality born of shared suffering as well as shared joy, the Priest’s cri de coeur has helped create community.” As the title of this essay suggests, the “cry of the heart” is a “common pool of sorrow” that somehow makes us feel just a few elements away from being alone. Harrison’s focus on [End Page ix] this cry, this pool of sorrow, is the potential emptiness of Mass in the time of Covid quarantine. Nevertheless, Harrison somehow finds life in the depths of emptiness: the liturgy of Mass is the presence of the sacred through the representation in quarantine of the elements of the Mass itself. Ask COVID-19 if it is not. Ask your encounter with COVID-19 what it does for community. A portion of an abstract from Nathan Garcia’s essay on the soul, according to James Hillman’s interpretation of psyche runs: “James Hillman’s archetypal psychology offers a soulful perspective on living in the modern world. However, core tenets of his program are atheistic, as he believes the essence of religion to be radically opposed to Hillman’s approach. I argue that those core tenets in Hillman’s program are not only capable of being religiously appropriated but have been historically lived out in the lives of the Egyptian desert monks beginning from the 3rd century CE. The desert monks lived a soulful life pursuant to Hillman’s tenets and thus set a precedence for Christian spirituality to be placed in dialogue with Hillman’s archetypal psychology.” Centuries before Hillman’s coniunctio oppositorum (following Carl Jung), Garcia finds soulfulness in the lifestyle of desert monks. Soul and desert, desert and soul, some of the cruel components of Covid, and still we find meaning and empathy in the community of the desert. Professor Lane’s opening essay on communication with the world of trees is a kind of opening and introduction to all of the essays that follow in this issue, for instance: Harrison’s essay on Mass...