Welcome to another issue of The New Age, and enjoy having a good read!

Maybe even quarantine yourself until you have read every word. Quarantine is the March 2020 word of the month as a considerable number of people are needing to or being told to “self-isolate” for two weeks until they know for certain if they have or have not got coronavirus.

I read about a married couple on a quarantined cruise ship, holed up together for many days, who later said that they had found it a really positive experience. They rediscovered each other, came to treasure their time together against the backcloth of possible serious illness or worse, and spent a lot of time touching each other, laughing and being happy together. Maybe they told each other things they’d not said for years!

The word ‘quarantine’ itself means ‘forty’ which is a lot more than two weeks! Maybe quarantining began with some illness or plague which took a full forty days to manifest or work through. One association we know of about Swedenborg is that as a youngish man he broke quarantine on board a ship and came to shore in London (or somewhere) with a few others and he could have been executed for breaking the law. I think a friend of a friend put good words into someone’s ear and, wonderfully for us, he was allowed to live. But forty is also the number most associated spiritually with temptation. Noah’s ark rose up above the flood caused by forty days and nights of rain. Jesus was tempted by the ‘devil’ in the wilderness for forty days and nights. The Israelites were forty years in the wilderness – and there are many other instances of forty in the Bible. Interestingly, a google search on the Biblical meaning of forty brought up such things as ‘a very long time’, ‘trial and hardship’ and one I liked was ‘the best part of someone’s adult life’.

However you are being quarantined or tempted in your life, may the Lord be with you.