On a fertile hillside he dug the soil, cleared the stones, planted the vines, built a tower, dug a wine-press. “What more could I have done for you, my vineyard?” the Divine Vigneron cries out in our first reading (Isa 5:1-7).

Music is beauty made of air. Plato said it gives “soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and life to everything”. Shakespeare called it “the food of love”. Einstein said he daydreamed, thought, even lived in music. Billy Joel says music expresses and heals our humanity.

So runs the chorus of an old English folk song that compares human life to a leaf changing with the seasons.[1] It seems rather fatalistic, with its promise of ageing and afflictions – the ‘frost’ after a relatively brief period of green.

It’s just not fair! When we hear this morning’s parable of the workers in the vineyard (Mt 20:1-16), the shop steward deep within each one of us irks with sympathy for those who’ve laboured all day under the hot sun. Why do those who worked only an hour, in the cool of the evening, get the same wages and even get paid first!

The word pandemic comes from the Greek words pan meaning all – as in ‘panorama’ and ‘pandemonium’ – and demos meaning the people – as in ‘democratic’ and ‘demography’.