The eCrozier

You may not like who you’re about to become. – David Brooks

David Brooks wrote an insightful piece in the New York Times recently entitled, “Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too.” He recalls the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic and how it created in many people a desire to look only after themselves and what was theirs and ignored their neighbors’ plight. He pointed out that when the pandemic was over, “people didn’t talk about it. There were very few books or plays written about it. Roughly 675,000 Americans lost their lives to the flu, compared with 53,000 in battle in World War I, and yet it left almost no conscious cultural mark. Perhaps it’s because people didn’t like who they had become. It was a shameful memory and therefore suppressed.”

Brooks continues: “Frank Snowden, the Yale historian who wrote Epidemics and Society, argues that pandemics hold up a mirror to society and force us to ask basic questions: What is possible imminent death trying to tell us? Where is God in all this? What’s our responsibility to one another?” In this current crisis those indeed are the questions people are asking. We’re all fearful. I have no doubt it’ll bring out the best and worst in us as human beings. Crises tend to do that, whether we want them to or not.

Right now, I’m no braver than the next person. Recently, all I’ve wanted to do is put on a HAZMAT suit and wait for this to be over. Yet, I’m very aware of my scared, inner child and know how selfish I’m capable of being, especially when it comes to protecting myself and those I love. We’re all tempted, if only in our thoughts, to be Social Darwinists during this time, trying to be “fitter” than the next person so we might survive (even if they don’t). While I’m washing my hands and practicing “social distancing” during this time, might I also be mindful of my fears, set them at least temporarily aside, and practice compassion for my neighbor who is just as afraid?

There’s no way to ensure that we won’t become what we don’t like, especially if we don’t keep ourselves mindful of such a danger. That’s why we must pay attention to our fears and the reactivity inside ourselves. In the fear that pervaded after September 11, 2001, we became overly vengeful. Many Arab-Americans were treated shamefully and discriminated against without warrant. At the time, I was Rector of St. Philip’s in Durham, North Carolina and heard the ugliest words come out of some of my parishioners’ mouths. One wanted to “bomb the hell out of the Arab world and let God sort them out.”

We don’t want to contract a “moral disease” that might eventually be worse than this virus, where we lose our capacity for neighbor-love as we give into our fears. I get it. We’re all scared. It’s probably good to acknowledge that. But we shouldn’t become victims of our own worse impulses. Because on the cross Jesus became the victim on our behalf, we’re liberated from being victims of our sin. He took all our shame on his shoulders. We’re free to love our neighbor even in these trying times. Let’s do that and we’ll like what we’ll become.

+Scott