How are you responding to the Covid-19 pandemic? The answer undoubtedly depends on the identity of the “you.” If you are the offspring of an aged parent who is presently infected, at risk of infection (or has even already died of it), you might have a different response than a relatively immune, vigorous 40ish couple pulling your young children through the snow on a toboggan.
And, there is the question of money. If you are a middle-class pensioner you can feel relatively secure (even though just yesterday that pension might have seemed modest!). But what if you are a contract worker or impecunious hourly employee? Are you in a vulnerable workplace like a restaurant or a fitness gym? Did you practice frugality and assiduously save for your old age and your children’s legacy only to see your savings eroded by a tanking stock market? Are you wondering how to deal with an aging parent in the most vulnerable class of prospective patients now restricted to an apartment or seniors’ residence?
Are there any helpful elements to be drawn out of this global assault? It is risky to share reflections on Covid-19 at this point, given the rapidity with which the bug leaps from person to person. I speak only from my own highly circumscribed (and relatively comfortable) circumstances – in my 90th year and therefore in the endangered class in which most fatalities occur, and yet at an age where I have a good life behind me, and without the severe economic concerns felt by many. There is a perduring anxiety for one’s children and grandchildren with a prayer that the worst of this pandemic will pass over them.
One of the most penetrating insights to come out of this global threat is the contingency, precariousness, and unpredictability of our human life. The great religions have always known this, and for awhile built up a good business promulgating a salvific remedy. The self-confident mastery of modernity obscured this human vulnerability. Covid-19 (not to mention global warming) now scarily shouts to us “not so fast. We’ve got a lethal arrow aimed at your heel.” (It is a telling indication of religion’s diminished status that houses of worship are largely being portrayed, in the current climate, more as potential “victims” of contagion than as sources of insight and wisdom.)
In damaging, even dangerous circumstances like the present it has been my practice to try to discern what good can be salvaged from calamity. Immediately, Joseph’s reconciling words to his brothers (fearful now that roles are reversed and the once-vulnerable, now-powerful Joseph will punish them for their murderous crime of throwing him into a pit) come to mind: “You meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).
Admittedly, the Covid-19 pandemic is evil, but can we find any good in striving to deal with it? Let me attempt to answer by pointing in another direction. One of my all-time favourite books, A Testament of Devotion, by Thomas Kelly used a well-known Quaker mantra for a chapter heading: “The Simplification of Life.” Those words have challenged me for a large tract of my life. And also rebuked me because I did not embody the way of life conveyed in that exhortation to simplify – at least, not very well.
Now, it is being forced on whole societies who are being compelled to free themselves of an excess of consumption. We’ve been told that one of the ways to arrest global warming and save the planet is to fly less, at least one flight less per year than we would ordinarily take. With the advent of the Corona virus, who would want to – in fact, who can – fly anywhere? I have a grandson studying in Denmark but presently stuck in Greece. The one flight to which he looks forward is the one that will bring him back home.
While it is true that people are being urged to observe “social distancing,” this is not the same thing as being anti-social. Only now the springs of human interaction, instead of being those of mass-produced, standardized commercial enterprises, have the chance of flowing from warmer creative reservoirs of human imagination.
No, I am not being naïve here. Although I hope the "plague"-imposed conditions of social withdrawal may inspire, for example, the re-discovery of reading books and talking to each other at the dinner table, I recognize that the lure of the computer in such conditions is stronger than ever.
The simplification of life imposed on us by the Corona virus may, as an unintended consequence, lead to a beneficial simplification of life. It may well be said that the price paid in suffering and death for this gain is far too high. But let me stress that I am not claiming that this is a negotiation in which one chooses to enter at the outset. Instead, out of an unsought adversity, good might be salvaged.