A Faith Reading of the Pandemic Caused by Covid 19.

By a member of the Lay Fraternity of Charles de Foucauld

Shared with us by Paul Glover

Most of those who have reflected on this Pandemic say that the time has come to “stop along the way” to see what has happened to us, but that we already have all the elements to understand it. All that remains is to clarify the origin of the virus, but we already know what to draw on to start creating the future because, as it is said, "the world is no longer and will not be the same". But do we have all the elements clearly yet?

These reflections are a contribution to that search: we are going to do a faith reading of what has happened to us, to better understand what we are experiencing and to build the world of the future from now on.

Our reflection will have three points:

1. What reality is it about?
2. Reading this reality

III. Faith reading of this reality.

1. WHAT REALITY IS IT ABOUT?

It’s a reality of death, but not so much because of the number deaths it has caused since, as has been repeated many times, the number of deaths caused by COVID 19 is much lower than that of other epidemics and deaths caused by other situations that we have eg. deaths from hunger, violence, dengue fever, etc. but due to two circumstances that are unique to Covid-19: contagion so fast and so universal, to the point that at this moment it can almost be said that all of humanity is infected and because of the economic repercussions that accompany it: it has bankrupted or at least, had severe economic consequences for all the countries affected.

This reality of death must always remain in the background of any reflection about this Pandemic.

1. READING THIS REALITY

Above all, keep in mind what we understand by "reading reality" -

"Reading reality is approaching reality not to judge it but to learn from it, to discover and elaborate the message it contains" (E. Morin) There are therefore two ways to approach reality: one "to judge it, measure it with rules” the other is to learn from it, to discover the message it contains. It is what distinguishes the reading of reality from the manipulation of reality or taking advantage of reality to proselytize or promote an ideology or judge it with doctrines or norms. Precisely what has impressed me the most from what I have been able to read about everything about COVID 19 is that 80% of the comments are framed as searches - very few take advantage of the situation to attack, blame, or support one ideology or another.

Reading this reality leaves us with five lessons or convictions that can (or should) change our way of thinking and acting, that are a challenge to build a new humanity and that arise almost spontaneously in the way that the whole world is living this Pandemic.

These five convictions or teachings are as follows:

1. The bottom fell out of all our securities, of all kinds. We are essentially fragile beings.
2. This world belongs to everyone and for everyone. We are all the same, but different.
3. The first and fundamental value that we have to defend and enrich is human life.
4. Nature, the planet, is our common home that we have to take care of and place at the service of human life for everyone.
5. Our relationship with others is the essence of what it is to be human and what gives us authentic happiness. Our essence as human beings is not to be rational (Aristotle) ​​but to be relational (E. Levinás).

Let's expand each point a little:

1.THE COLLAPSE OF ALL OUR SECURITIES. WE ARE ESSENTIALLY FRAGILE BEINGS.

COVID 19 knocked down all our securities, everything we had put our trust in. Everything fell to pieces. A French philosopher is perhaps the one who best expresses this sentiment in a small brochure dated April 2020 entitled "A Festival of Uncertainties" He writes: "All the certainties of the 20th century that prophesied the future from the currents of the present, collapsed ... the irruption of the unforeseen in history had not entered into consciousness. Certainly, the arrival of the unpredictable was always foreseeable but not in this way. Hence my permanent maxim "Always expect the unexpected"... I consider myself one of those people, however, who had foreseen the chain of catastrophes that could arise both from the over-reliance on technology and from those caused by the degradation of the biosphere, but I had never foreseen a viral catastrophe”. (E. Morin. p. 1)

The problem is that we cannot do without securities.

This is our challenge; discover or create securities that don’t become absolute, as happened with Western culture from the 60’s when it rejected the absolute of the God of religions because it prevented the development and freedom of man, and created the gods of pleasure, of consuming and possessing, power and knowledge…

2. 2. THIS WORLD BELONGS TO EVERYONE AND IS FOR EVERYONE. WE ARE ALL THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT.

It is a truth we knew intellectually, but COVID has made us feel it very clearly:

COVID hit rich and poor alike, intellectuals and the uneducated; upper class people and street dwellers; settlers of a lost village in Africa and rulers of the great European powers.  But the most significant thing is that COVID-19 showed us that being equal doesn’t take away our differences because they come from the uniqueness of each one of us. So even though we are all the same, we are not all beaten in the same way. It’s as if we said that it respects individual differences!

This awareness that this world belongs to everyone and for everyone has been demonstrated very concretely by the extraordinary solidarity that has been aroused in all social groups and among all nations, seeking to favour the poorest.

But this is where I see the greatest challenge: that we must build that equality and unity not from above but from below. It is not enough that we seek to favour the poorest, but that we do our actions from the poorest and weakest. This is the ambiguity of solidarity: that we continue to treat the poorest and weakest as the object of our solidarity and not as the subject of a solidarity that seeks to make us all feel equal. That we understand that what we have to distribute is not our wealth but the poverty of the poor. The world will not be for everyone as long as we don’t see the poverty of others as something that is ours, something that we have to share.

3. THE FIRST AND FUNDAMENTAL VALUE THAT WE HAVE TO DEFEND AND GROW IS HUMAN LIFE.

What Covid-19 has perhaps revealed most strongly is that our world cared for other values ​​such as power, having and knowing more than for human life itself. This was valued, above all, precisely because of these values. In fact, very few countries were prepared to face the health crisis that the pandemic immediately produced. The budget of most countries has given more importance to other aspects of human life than to human life itself. This appears in what we have called the consumer society.

Two situations produced by COVID show us this, perhaps tragically.

The first is the fall of the United States. For more than half a century it dominated almost the whole world as it wanted. And from one day to another all this power was as nothing. The images of all the warlike power of missiles, aircraft carriers, military bases, all paralyzed by the contagion of COVID, the highest number of deaths, the highest number of unemployed (18 million +) and the image of large cities of the world exposed, showing that the values ​​they represented didn’t withstand the force of a microscopic virus.

The second  situation is perhaps the value that a number of gestures and attitudes that we hadn’t appreciated, suddenly became critical: the small family gestures, the service that many people provide us: refuse collectors, personnel of all sorts of services , the work of all those in the health services, workers in the transport industry, those in charge of our security everywhere, etc., etc., the criteria for assigning value through salaries came into focus: for example, how much does a doctor or a care worker earn and how much a hedge fund manager, etc.  All this is the most concrete example of showing us that the value we give to people doesn’t come from the life-giving service they provide but from the salary with which we recognize their work.

The challenge then is how to make human life and its sustenance really the value we seek through all our projects and personal choices and as a society and State.

4. NATURE, THE PLANET, IS OUR COMMON HOME THAT WE HAVE TO CARE FOR AND PUT AT THE SERVICE OF THE HUMAN LIFE OF EVERYONE.

For some years now, ECOLOGY had emerged as having the utmost importance in the way we are "treating" our planet.  Scientists have made very tragic predictions, such as that if we continue to treat nature as we are doing, in 30 years the planet could be damaged beyond repair, in the sense that we are using more resources than the planet can provide from renewable resources. Not to mention those that are not renewable.

Then COVID came and brought all this into sharp focus.  In a few weeks we saw and appreciated how the air, water, birds, animals, plants, mountains, outdoor space – are critical to our well-being and survival here and now and that the destruction was real, but that we are experiencing a time when there is a possibility that we could reorient our attitude towards our common home.

That it was not just a matter of passing laws or decrees but of changing our view of the planet. As a journalist wrote commenting on some timid ecological measures  “let’s understand at least that we were not the ones who made the planet but that we are its guests; that we have this common house to beautify it, not to destroy it;  our task is to make the natural world that had been lent us (different from that has been sold or given us) a more pleasant and habitable world for all; natural wealth doesn’t belong to anyone, not even the State but to everyone and should serve us so that we are all more human".

That is why our challenge is first of all to change our outlook and to build on a personal, individual and social level, practices and laws that respect and recognize the value of our common home.

6. THE ESSENCE OF OUR BEING AS A HUMAN AND WHAT GIVES US AUTHENTIC HAPPINESS IS RELATIONSHIP WITH OTHERS. OUR ESSENCE AS A HUMAN BEING IS NOT BEING RATIONAL (ARISTOTLE) BUT BEING RELATIONAL (E. LEVINÁS)

This is the most important contribution and the one that ultimately gives value to all other contributions. And this is the value (despite all the criticisms that can be made) of the quarantine/lockdown that was the first measure proposed by WHO to respond to the COVID Pandemic.

The most typical thing about this pandemic, as was said above, is its contagion capacity and how in a few hours or even minutes an entire gathering of thousands of people can be infected. From the beginning we discovered that the health of the other was more important than our own health. That, if the other was okay, we could feel safe. It has been repeated ad nauseam that respecting what we began to call “the protocols” was not only for our own good, but also for others, starting with those who are closest to us.  In anthropological terms, we have discovered in a "brutal" way that we cannot be ourselves without others. And then during the experience of ‘lockdown’, we were able to understand that our happiness was precisely in living in harmony with others, in good relationship with others. And this made us realize something that the greatest Western thinkers had been repeating to us since the 60s: that the essence of being human was not in our capacity to reason but in relationship.

But paradoxically the same lockdown made us discover, perhaps also very brutally, what had also been said to us since the 1960s, that "every relationship is conflictive”.  Hence the increase in domestic violence.

The first, the positive, was expressed very poetically by the Mexican Nobel Prize in Literature: “To be an I / I have to be another / To leave me looking for myself in the other / the other who is not if I don’t exist / the others who give me full existence".  (Octavio Paz)

The second, the negative, was also expressed very graphically by two great French writers: "Hell is other people" (J.P. Sartre) and "Hell is not being able to love" (G. Bernanos)

Lockdown has allowed us to discover then that it’s not knowledge, power, having, that makes us people, but loving, and that it’s precisely only by loving others that we become people; and that only by loving others are we ourselves. Thanks to the lockdown we have come to understand that love for others is what makes us be ourselves. And that is where the conflict arises.

What then is the challenge posed by COVID: learning to relate to others, learning to love, learning to live in community, bearing in mind that this learning isn’t like intellectual learning: it has other rules and generates other attitudes.

Finally, bear in mind that these challenges that COVID has left us, are UTOPIAN. It’s impossible to arrive at a time when they are fully achieved - but they are a guide to promote practice.  Eduardo Galeano said that “utopia was like the horizon: when you arrived, you were already far away. And they said to him: then what is it for? Well, to force us to walk” he answered.

III READING OF FAITH OF THIS REALITY.

We are now going to do a reading of faith on everything that we have reflected on. But first we have to explain what we mean by reading of faith. Let's look at this this way:

1. What is the reading of faith
2. Conditions needed to carry it out.

III. How to do the faith reading of what we saw in parts I and II.

1. What does it consist of:

A reading of faith is a reading that we do from faith. This means that it is necessary to first make a reading, done with the intellectual elements and ideological criteria that secular culture gives us.  The Christian faith doesn’t intervene at all at that stage. Then we add to that initial reading the meaning that our Christian faith offers us. We do the reading of faith when we give "a meaning to the meaning" that we have made with our criteria.

1. Terms of the reading:
2. The sense that we make of reality arises from the Person of Jesus. For this reason we must distinguish three types of faith: a) human faith is the acceptance of doctrines/propositions based on the authority of the person proposing them ; b) religious faith goes along the same lines: it’s the acceptance of doctrines based on the authority of God and c) Christian faith is the opposite: it’s the acceptance and encounter with the person of Jesus and from there we accept doctrines. Everything about Jesus is offered, because I cannot impose a relationship with a person; and what Jesus offers us is meaning that we can then express in doctrines and norms.
3. To make a reading in the light of the Christian faith it’s absolutely necessary to know the Person of Jesus as the Key to understand reality; and the person of Jesus as a person is only known in prayer and the Gospel.
4. We find Jesus in life, in reality: "The Word - The Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (Jn 1, 14). "The Word became flesh so that the flesh became Word" (G. Gutierrez). And if we want to find the Person of Jesus, it’s logical, we have to know the Person of Jesus.

III. How to do the faith reading of what we saw in part I and II. That is to say: what does Jesus offer first to the reality of death that COVID has produced and after, to the five teachings or convictions that have been left us as consequences.

1. FACING THIS REALITY OF DEATH, CHAOS, SUFFERING, UNCERTAINTY, JESUS ​​OFFERS US HIS LIVING PRESENCE, BRINGING PEACE, WARMTH AND HOPE.

And for this we need to take as meant for us too, the words of Jesus to the disciples before he surrendered to his Passion: "In the world you will have to suffer a lot, but have courage: I have conquered the world" (Jn 16,33). And before withdrawing bodily from them: "I will be with you always until the end of the world" (Mt 28, 20) and the experience that Paul tells us when after some revelations he writes: "…. to stop me from getting too proud I was given a thorn of the flesh, an angel of Satan to beat me and stop me from getting too proud… three times I begged the Lord to take it away from me. But he has said My grace is enough for you: my power is at its best in weakness’ (2 Cor 12,7-9).

This has two very fundamental consequences for us; one:  to be able to look at death without being overwhelmed by panic and anguish. To look at death like a Spanish priest who wrote weeks before he died: “dying is only dying / dying is over / dying is a fugitive bonfire / is crossing through a door half open / and finding what was so much sought after” (J. L. Martín Descalzo).  And the other: to discover in pain and suffering the Presence of Jesus: "Jesus didn’t come to explain pain or to suppress it, but to fill it with his Presence" (Paul Claudel)

2. FACING THIS EXPERIENCE THAT WE ARE ALL THE SAME BUT DIFFERENT, JESUS ​​OFFERS US THE KINGDOM OF GOD AS HIS PROJECT FOR SOCIETY.

What COVID is saying very strongly to us is the need to organize the world in a different way.

This is precisely the Kingdom of God: the realization of God's project for humanity: a project of universal friendship, “where authentically human values ​​are lived, without violence or dictatorships and built from the poorest, the most vulnerable” (Jon Nephew).

This implies two things: one, that we humanize the Kingdom, that is, that we see that Jesus' proposals are for this world, for this moment, for now. And the other, that holiness is not an other- worldly state, but is to be lived in everyday life. As the Pope wrote so wonderfully in his encyclical on holiness. “The world needs saints, men and women of the everyday. Not super- heroes” (Gaudete et exultate).

3. JESUS ​​GIVES LIFE A SUPERIOR VALUE: MAKES IT DIVINE. HE SHOWED US WHAT LIFE IS.

When Jesus speaks of life, he speaks and values ​​this earthly life and that is why he cannot bear the fact that there are those who lack food, that the poorest are trampled on. He chose to be born in the place where only the poorest of his time could be born and died in the worst way a person could die at any time. In other words, the life that Jesus chose was a poor life. And it’s to this poor life that he gave the highest value: he made it divine.

Normally we give this option of Jesus for the poor life, an ethical or ideological meaning: "he became poor out of humility or out of solidarity with the poor".  No.  Actually, Jesus gave it an anthropological value: Jesus discovers universal life in the life of a poor person.   It is the explanation that Charles de Foucauld gave to Jesus' option to be born and die poor. He said: “Jesus was born as the poorest because everyone could find him there: he was born in a manger and the shepherds, the poorest people of their time, were the first to go to see him; but there were also the Magi. If he had been born in a palace, the magicians could have entered, but not the shepherds. And he died on a cross, in the worst place where a person could die suffering the worst situation, so that every person could receive in the most painful and degrading situation, a consoling and liberating word”.

Jesus then showed us with his life, his actions and his death that if we want a world for all, where life is considered as the supreme good to which all other values ​​must be subordinated, it must be built not only in favor of the poorest, but from the poorest.

4. JESUS ​​SHOWED US A CONTEMPLATIVE LOOK ON NATURE.

A theological and pastoral vision of the relationship between the world and nature was expressed a few years ago in a beautiful and profound way by Pope Francis in the encyclical Laudato Si.

Placing ourselves now in the way that Jesus revealed to us by his Word and his way of seeing nature, we can summarize in four proposals that give “a meaning to the meaning” of our reflections.

Jesus tells us then:

-Learn from nature: “look at the birds in the air... look at the lilies of the field...” (Mt 6, 26-28) Don’t position yourself as owners, as masters but as disciples. Exchange your mercantile gaze for a gratuitously contemplative gaze.

-Follow the rhythm of nature. "A man sowed the seed and then went to sleep ... the seed produced the ear and then the grain" accept that life is developing slowly, that we have to believe in the action of God that today is making wheat grow in the middle of so much weeds, in the midst of all that we are living in chaotic and destructive times.

-Trust, that there is Someone who takes care of everyone, who is more interested in us than ourselves, like the shepherd who cares about the lost sheep, who takes care of his sheep and knows them by name, or the woman who is looking for her precious coin (Lc 15, 4.ss).

- Stay united with me if you want to produce much fruit, like the branch that draws the sap from the trunk and finds its vitality there. (Jn 15, 1) The key to the effectiveness of everything we do to get out of this situation is not only in the seriousness and responsibility that we are giving to the fight against COVID, but also in the inner strength of a God the Father who is fighting with us and assures us of the effectiveness of our efforts.

5. TO FIND IN A PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE PERSON OF JESUS ​​THE HUMANIZING AND LIBERATING SENSE OF WHAT WE HAVE LIVED IN LOCKDOWN.

This experience has been unique for everyone around the world. No one had ever had to live this situation. And yet everyone, everywhere, has been left with the two lessons that we saw above: that our happiness is in the interpersonal relationship with the other and that this relationship is always conflictive.

It is extremely significant that of all the reflections on the consequences of COVID, the media have focused on helping to live that unique experience of "staying at home." The sign "Stay Home" appears everywhere. There are many programs that have been offered to help us to use the time to stay united and face the difficulties and conflicts that this confinement has brought.

Well, to read and live this experience in a humanizing and liberating way, Jesus offers us three contributions that in no way  want to supplant, or contradict the reflections that are being given to us in the ‘secular’ world, but rather offer a "sense of deeper meaning", as we have repeated several times.

The first: Jesus offers a personal relationship with Him that can be the foundation of every relationship we have with others. This relationship with the person of Jesus, like any personal relationship, is realized in love, but it has two characteristics that we have forgotten in our Christian practice: the first is that it’s absolutely free: we have not earned it nor do we have to do anything to conquer it. That is why it’s not mediated by ethics. Our bad behavior hurts us but Jesus will always continue to love us in the same way.  It was what Jesus said to the disciples: “It was not you who chose Me. It was I who chose you”. (Jn 15, 16) It is not conditional on the quality of our behavior. And secondly: it’s the only personal relationship that is not conflictive: the relationship with Jesus "no one or nothing can separate me from the love that Jesus gives me" (Rom. 8, 36). That is why it is humanizing, personalizing and liberating.

The second: this relationship with the Person of Jesus, has to be lived in our relationship with others. This is clear throughout the whole Gospel, but especially in the First Letter of John: “He who says he loves God and doesn’t love his brother or sister is a liar…  he who loves God has to love his brother and sister and vice versa. Whoever loves his brother and sister shows that he loves God”. (1 Jn. Passim) But how to do that if, as we have said many times, every interpersonal relationship is conflicted? It is very simple, although it is difficult for us to understand because it is a new language: the relationship with Jesus that isn’t conflictual is lived within relationships with others that are always conflicted. The conflict is simply part of our relationship with Jesus, but it doesn’t prevent it. That is why the relationship with Jesus is liberating.

The third: this relationship with the Person of Jesus must be attended to every day.  It cannot be taken for granted. But that’s true with all our personal relationships: we cannot take them for granted and assume they will blossom. This is what a Belgian psychologist wrote in popular language: "A groom cannot say to the bride on their wedding day: I love you forever and let's not talk about it anymore". (A. Vergote) Every day he has to renew love. The same thing happens with the relationship with Jesus: you have to renew it every day.

CONCLUSION.

Hopefully these reflections can help us to look at what we are experiencing in a different way: not as a misfortune, but as “a festival of uncertainties” (E. Morin), as a moment of grace, a Kairos ; an opportunity to remake our personal lives and our world, as a unique opportunity to re-set the trajectory of our world.

May our cry be the one that Paul puts at the end of his first Letter to the Corinthians:

MARANATHA. COME LORD JESUS.