My grocery store has a sign up at its cash registers: “Due to the COVID-19 virus, we no longer accept reusable grocery bags.” Instead, they’ll give away free plastic bags.
Not that long ago, the same store encouraged reusable bags, to cut back on single-use plastic bags made from fossil fuels that ended up in landfill sites. Or swirling around the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
I cite that as a single instance of the way the coronavirus panic is suddenly upsetting -- rightly or wrongly -- many of the notions that we took for granted.
The biggest of all sporting events, the 2020 Olympic Games, will not take place this summer. Since 1896, only the two world wars have broken the Games’ four-year schedule.
I’m a Rotary member. Rotary International used to insist -- indeed, it was written into their Constitution and Bylaws -- that clubs must meet every week. Now clubs have cancelled all in-person meetings. Even regional conferences and training programs closed.
Re-thinking our priorities
All my life, churches have stressed the importance of regular attendance. Either for the sake of my immortal soul, which needs a top-up every week. Or for the sake of building a caring community.
But apparently those things don’t matter as much anymore.
My Catholic friends were told they had to attend mass every week. Even during epidemics. Because the wafer and wine, as the symbolic body and blood of the sinless Christ, could not transmit germs.
Umm…. maybe not anymore.
The coronavirus pandemic has rattled the cages of conventional assumptions.
The first indications of panic started with personal hygiene. Wash your hands. Wipe down surfaces that might hide invisible viruses. Cough or sneeze into your elbow. Don’t touch your face. Maintain a minimum distance between yourself and others.
But two people have difficulty holding a heart-to-heart conversation six feet apart. With five or six spread out, any kind of coherent conversation becomes impossible.
So restaurants and coffee shops are shuttered. Sports arenas are empty. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has even closed those iconic institutions, the British pubs.
Side effects
Drastic measures may indeed be needed to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus. I can’t challenge the decisions of medical authorities.
But I’m concerned about the spin-off damages, the side-effects of isolation. Because it seems to me that the solutions to the coronavirus run contrary to everything we know about social health.
Perhaps I’m over-sensitive to this issue. My wife died two weeks ago. I have never been so lonely in my life. Now, because of COVID-19, I’m supposed to isolate myself further, to make myself even lonelier? This is not good for my mental health.
Nor for a lot of other people’s health. In two of his books, The Broken Heart and A Cry Unheard, author James Lynch contends that loneliness leads to more deaths among the elderly than any disease. The death certificate may cite heart failure or pneumonia; the underlying cause is loneliness.
Seniors in a care facility may meet for meals. Then they go back to their rooms. The TV is turned on, but they’re not really watching. They see no one until the next meal. The cycle repeats….
And in a lockdown, they never leave their rooms at all. Even interactions with staff are prohibited.
Most societies today consider prolonged solitary confinement to be a form of torture. Isn’t this?
Need for human contact
For those not in institutions, the loneliness must be even more intense. I wonder how many people will die alone, and no one will even know about it for weeks. Months.
We humans are social creatures. We need human interaction.
While the electronic media can help us keep in touch, they can’t substitute for person-to-person contact. You can’t hold hands on Facebook. Or get a hug on Skype. You can’t cuddle on Zoom.
I’m not short of news. But no one has touched me in two weeks. I wonder when someone will be allowed to.
Lonely-hearts columnists offer stock answers. Get out, they say. Find clubs that share your hobbies or interests. Volunteer for local charities. Sign up for a gym, a yoga class, a dance group.
Yeah. Right.
I wonder how society will change, when this is all over. If it’s ever over, if some new global crisis doesn’t surge in on the backwash of the COVID tsunami.
Will we take a second look at norms taken for granted for generations?
Will we re-assess our reactions to a crisis, to see how much damage the cure caused?
Or will we just slide back into the old ways as if nothing had changed?
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Copyright © 2020 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.
To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN
Before I deal with your letters, I should add some words of explanation. There was no column last week, because my wife died the previous weekend, and I could not make my mind create coherent messages. And because of deadlines, the column the previous week, on the efficacy of prayer, had to be written and posted before her death -- that’s why there’s no reference to it in the column itself.
And that’s why the comments below may seem to deal abstractly with notions of prayer and of serenity, and don’t offer sympathy.
Tom Watson liked my closing line: "Maybe prayer is like doing these simple things together."
Tom wrote, “I'm reminded of what Martin Luther said when asked what he would do if he knew the world was going to end tomorrow; he said he'd plant an apple tree. Just a simple thing, but something he could do.
“You mention simple things all of us can do to stem the tide of this Covid-19 virus. All those things are collective prayer. Prayer is not to have God do something but in prayer we change ourselves so that we do what we can.”
Dorothy Haug agreed: “Doing simple things together. I like that. I like it a lot.”
Tom got support for his ideas from C.S. Lewis, quoted by Rachel Pritchard. In 1948, Lewis wrote about the sense of panic over nuclear weapons: “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
Rob Dummermuth tackled the efficacy of prayer: “We may share some concerns about the nature of prayer. You reminded me of a story about a young lad who wanted a bicycle, so he prayed to God to give him one. He was then told that God did not work like that, so he stole a bicycle and prayed to God for forgiveness.”
Although it’s called the Serenity Prayer, Isabel Gibson reminded me that “we also have to remember the rest of the prayer: ‘... to change the things I can.’ My mother was fond of a saying from the Talmud: ‘You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.’ Or as Mother Teresa said, according to a framed poster in our most-recent rental, ‘We cannot all do great things. But we can do small things with great love.’”
James Russell responded to my main theme, “To which I can only say, in my non-praying way, Amen.”
David Edwards: “My deepest thanks for your reflection about our response to the COVID-19 crisis. I have been feeling as if the whole planet, and my life too, was under a dark cloud, and you have shone a small light for me.”
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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PROMOTION STUFF…
To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.
I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)
ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE
The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns.