Rod Dreher's Blog, page 158

Pandemic Diaries 15

From Fort Mill, South Carolina:

We have been on lockdown for two full weeks now. I am entering my third week working remotely from home; grateful that I am working and especially grateful that, for now, still earning an income. Being furloughed is a remote possibility. I get up each morning at my usual time; wash, shave, brush what little hair I have left, and get in clean business-casual attire – including socks as if I was actually going to the office. I begin my work around 8 am and conclude at 4 pm.

My wife celebrated her 65th birthday this weekend as did a 7-year-old granddaughter. My wife makes a birthday cake for each of our grandchildren, but this time, we simply delivered the cake and her present off at their home, sang a quick happy birthday in the front yard with her standing in the doorway and left. My daughter has four children under seven. The five-year-old son is a leukemia survivor and the youngest two are twins age 2. There is heightened concern with COVID-19 since his immune system after his bone marrow transplant is younger than his twin siblings. Mom and dad are being extremely careful.

On the other end of the spectrum is my wife’s 92-year-old mother who is amazing for her age with most of her mental acuity still in place. She has emphysema and other breathing conditions. COVID-19 would probably kill her if she caught the virus. My wife stays in daily contact but no visitation. People in our neighborhood are out and about but we equally keep our distance. I feel for mothers who are dealing with young children out of school. We try to walk a couple miles each day and will sometimes visit a park and circle the lake for a change of scenery.

This weekend we experienced our first on-line worship service. We had copies of the order of worship printed to follow. We are active members of a confessional, protestant church in the Reformed tradition, so our liturgy went from the call to worship to the benediction. We sang psalms and hymns, confessed our sins and our faith, and our pastor preached his sermon. It was all very seamless, but it doesn’t feel right with no physical, bodily connection. Virtual worship is too ephemeral. I hope it never catches on.

Earlier this year, I set myself to learn and memorize selections of the Heidelberg Catechism. I will often repeat the ones I have memorized when I wake and before I sleep in order to keep them fresh in my mind. Here is one I treasure:

Question 27. What dost thou mean by the providence of God?

Answer: The almighty and everywhere present power of God; whereby, as it were by his hand, he upholds and governs heaven, earth, and all creatures; so that herbs and grass, rain and drought, fruitful and barren years, meat and drink, health and sickness, riches and poverty, yea, and all things come, not by chance, but be his fatherly hand.

Question 28. What advantage is it to us to know that by his providence does still uphold all things?

Answer: That we may be patient in adversity; thankful in prosperity; and that in all things, which may hereafter befall us, we place our firm trust in our faithful God and Father, that nothing shall separate us from his love; since all creatures are so in his hand, that without his will they cannot so much as move.

That truth has provided me with a vital perspective and succor during the coronavirus pandemic.

In our county, citizens are urged to use good judgement when congregating at a place where three or more are present. Law enforcement is erring on the side of liberty rather than control. Most folks as I observe, if not all, seem to be heeding public health warnings.

I am reading more. I should finish reading Michael Brendan Dougherty’s My Father Left Me Ireland tonight or tomorrow. Not watching TV news or fixating upon the stock market. I’m listening to more music and exploring unfamiliar works such as Oliver Messiaen’s “From the Canyons to the Stars.” My morning journal entries are longer and more thoughtful, at least in my eyes. My wife is binge watching “Larkrise to Candleford.”

All is not dire and bleak. Still, what I have noticed in conversations and observations is that people are seemingly more in tune with their mortality. COVID 19 has forced us to consider the reality of our own death. That is actually a good thing. While there is a high probability that most of us will survive this pandemic, one never really knows. Unlike some who think this may bring revival of some sort, I am not so confident. At my stage in life and at this unique period in our history, I appreciate more and more what the Preacher in Ecclesiastes imparted:

It is better to go to a house of mourning

than to go to a house of feasting,

for death is the destiny of everyone;

the living should take this to heart.

Frustration is better than laughter,

because a sad face is good for the heart.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,

but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.

From Grand Rapids, Michigan, a reader passes along a letter he sent to a friend; it sums up his family’s state of mind:

Dear [Name] –

Hi! I hope this finds you well. How are you doing these days? We’re fine here. Covid stuff is pretty weird & disorienting, but nothing terrible, thus far. [Wife, son, and daughter] have been working from home for the past couple weeks. And, since I can be a bum from anywhere, we’re all together these days.

It’s going OK having everyone crammed in here, but we are all feeling a bit of a strain, I believe. A slight bit too much togetherness already. I’ve noticed a definite uptick in dirty dishes I have to do with everyone here all the time, and we seem to be running the dishwasher pretty much every day, or every other day at most. I have done so many dishes over the past 25 years that, at times, I could just about puke, but I realize that it’s my job, since I’m not working. I’ve got to keep that in mind.

We did stock up a bit on groceries a few weeks ago, before the panic buying began. Pessimist that I am, I had a feeling that this whole virus thing could get pretty bad, and so bought a bit more than needed each time I shopped recently. It’s not much, but a little extra. I’ve also been grabbing newspapers when I can, for when that’s needed as Emergency Buttwipe one of these days. Pretty soon, we’ll be seeing the Charmin bears enthusiastically rubbing their cheeks on the NYT. Personally, I like USA Today for its Quilty Softness (TM), and look for the Wall Street Journal to stock us up on Extra Strong. As a miserly precautionary move, I suggested to Kathy last week that she wrap her used pads in newspaper, rather than TP, which she, humoring me, did. Seems to have worked out OK, aside from the Depression Era (and depress-ing!) stack of newspapers next to the toilets.

I truly think this whole thing could really get pretty bad. IMO, the economy has been little more than a house of cards for quite a while – DEFINITELY since 2008. I believe concrete reality in commercial life has long since been replaced by hollow financial bullshit wizardry, and that most of the world’s supposed wealth exists on paper only. We’ve gone off the rails since leaving the gold standard under Nixon. The whole world is maxed-out on debt, and government borrowing (printing money) has just been kicking the can down the road for a decade. It’s not sustainable, and ripe for collapse. Globalism / offshoring-of-manufacturing is clearly turning out to have been a huge mistake, and diversity wokeness & the Tesla / electric-cars / rocket-vacations-to-Mars / climate change stuff have just been silly distractions from the laws of reality. Possibly deliberate distractions.

My conspiracy-minded side (well – more than just a “side” – probably about ¾ of me, to be precise) thinks that this virus, while real, could easily be used as a tempting excuse, by the elites & Masters of the Universe, to get all us proles used to, and meekly submitting to, a much lower standard of living, now that they’ve already skimmed off & squirreled away most of the world’s wealth for themselves. The rest of us can have a worldwide cage match over the scraps, and give our betters, in their fortified bunkers, great reality-TV entertainment in the process. They’ll place lively bets on who will eat whom.

[Daughter] is having a tough time getting back to school after their medically-extended spring break, and the switch to all-online classes. Math especially. They’re doing logarithms now, and she’s having trouble with it. Despite [wife’s] massive math awesome-osity, she & [daughter] don’t connect well, teaching-wise. So her attempts at tutoring her haven’t worked out thus far, and [daughter] has spent more than a little time lately crying in frustration & despair. She seems pretty aware that her future, in general, may be screwed. Pessimist, like her dad. And she doesn’t really believe in God these days, and therefore, lacks even that solace.

This whole thing could be an enormous change for our kids’ generation. Life could end up very different for them. I feel pretty sorry for them. We Gen X’ers haven’t had it as good as our parents did, and our Millennial kids don’t have it as good as we did. Possibly even much less-good after the dust settles on this current mess.

Goooooiiinnnng dowwwnnnnn!

[Wife] just Fitbit-marched here into the family room on break from work (she & [son] are set up at the dining room table for work), and I quickly closed this window to hide all the negative crap I’m writing to you so she doesn’t read it over my shoulder while marching in place, getting her steps. She’d get on me about it.

[Wife and son] have started having problems with our internet choking up here today. I’m kicked off for the work day. I would imagine that probably a lot of households are having that problem, now that so many are working from home. I’m just glad they’ve still got jobs! I hope your jobs are holding out OK.

I happened to see a couple comments in a coronavirus blog I’ve been following (a suitably-pessimistic one, you’ll be happy to know) in which the commenters praised your governor in OH, and the chief medical officer there, for doing a great job in relation to the crisis. That was nice to hear. Whitmer has done a good job here, too, IMO.

[Wife’s] starting to get a bit depressed about this whole thing. Especially when she goes out & sees the spectral empty world now. It’s not bad, but I can tell she’s on edge. I’ve been remarking repeatedly to the kids (probably too much, knowing me) that this whole thing is completely unprecedented in our lifetimes, and a historic event that we’re living (well – hopefully living) through.

Well – I should close for now. I hope you guys are doing OK. I’m concerned about [your husband], as I’d guess he’s pretty high-risk during this time.

Thanks for your recent letter. It’s always great to receive them. I’m sorry that mine are so few & far between.

Love,

[Name]

From Smyrna, Georgia:

We’ve been staying socially isolated at home in Smyrna, GA for about two weeks now. Working from home and directing two elementary age kids in remote learning has been an adjustment. The dedication and love from our kids’ teachers and school administrators has been outstanding. All things considered, we are doing well.

I’m writing to share how the pandemic has made a situation that would be sad more difficult… grieving as community with social distancing. My kids’ small Episcopal Day School, St. Benedict’s, has experienced some non-COVID-19 related deaths over the last week. The father of one of my daughters’ 4th grade friends died of a sudden heart attack last weekend and was found by his kids. Though we weren’t close, I considered him one of my ‘Dad Friends’; the second I’ve lost this school year. My daughter has sent her friend a card and other classmates have reach out using email, video chats, and letters.

Over the weekend, another of my daughter’s friends had a loss, her 7th grade brother suddenly died after coming in from playing outside. The family is Muslim and the gravesite is several counties away at a cemetery for their faith, but I know several folks are going to drive and sit in their cars outside the service to support this family.

I just got off of a Zoom call for parents to discuss how to navigate this situation and support these families during social isolation. It’s very hard when the natural instinct is to embrace those that are grieving and lift up families in prayer as a community, but we are still lifting them up through our virtual community. I expect that they will be mentioned during the school’s weekly chapel service (now on YouTube).

We are working through what it means to be a community during social distancing. We want the human touch even if we can’t have the human touch that we all want to give these families at this time.

Anyway, maybe this is therapy for me, but I wanted to share how a close knit school community is navigating our grief during this time of pandemic.

Thank you for the solidarity conservatism that you bring to the table. I’m afraid things (economically, culturally, etc.) during and after this pandemic will get worse before they get better. I don’t know if our community will survive it, but I know as Christians that we have to hold up our communities in prayer to him, even (and maybe especially) non-believers in our midst. I hope that they will know that we are Christians by our love.

This Lent is too Lenty for me, but there have been worse ones for the Church. I hope as Christians that this tribulation can make us stronger in faith.

From Boston:

Massachusetts is 2+ weeks into the social distancing protocols. People are getting used to it, and learning how to work around the challenges. My daughter started taking her college classes via video today, and my son had three hours of remote learning high school classes. Several of my wife’s friend’s texted her and they then used video chats to virtually meet.

Although not a problem for my family, April 1st is going to be tough for some people as bills come due, and many people haven’t worked in some time.

Up until three days ago it looked like social distancing wasn’t yielding results. But I’ve noticed an emerging trend in the numbers that seems promising. While the total numbers of cases is still growing, but the rate of increase is falling. On the 3/25 it was +59% new cases, but on the 26th to 28th it fell to ~+33% new cases, and 29th to today it was +16% new cases.

This deceleration of new cases looks like the inflection point in the logistic curve, and after infection the curve flattens out considerably. So in a few more days Massachusetts might see a radical decrease in new cases. It would be an achievement is if the state could eliminate community transmission within the state.

What worries me is that we’re so close to New York City, which is a large reservoir for the virus, and people coming into the state could easily undo the progress.

From suburban Atlanta:

I’ve been following you for several years now and very much appreciate the front-line Pandemic Diaries series, as well as your other posts. Sometimes, through your followers, you have been able to provide information not available anywhere else – such as the fascinating coverage you provided from your readers who had family in China at the time of the initial outbreak.

By way of background, I’m a 50-ish attorney and convert to Catholicism living in an Atlanta suburb, with a cradle Catholic husband and 2 teenage daughters. I converted to Catholicism from Judaism in 2006, which is a whole ‘nother story, as one might say. I’m lucky enough to work in a large, but newfangled “virtual” law firm without physical offices, so we haven’t had to adjust our operations at all in light of shelter-at-home edicts. Work is busier than ever, helping clients comply with rapidly-changing regulatory waivers re data security and starting work on applications for SBA loans for small clients. I am extremely grateful to all those medical workers on the front lines, each of whom is truly doing God’s work at this time. I’m only doing my small part to keep commerce flowing and protect my clients.

Since I’m hardly on the front lines of the pandemic, I don’t have a contribution as informative as some of your readers’ submissions. But I thought two aspects of my experience were interesting enough to write about.

First, my family had pre-paid (without travel insurance) for a trip to Israel over our Spring Break, which was March 6-15 this year. As of March 6, Israel had just 2 days earlier imposed a 14 day quarantine on all travelers arriving from the EU. As you will see below, I am far more of a worrier than my husband, and I was *extremely* concerned that Israel would impose this same restriction on US travelers just as we arrived, which would mean turning right back around. Nonetheless, I didn’t want to throw my body on the tracks and cause a major rift with my husband, so off we went through NYC to Tel Aviv. Israel actually imposed the restriction on US travelers while we were there, having quarantined a number of Americans in Bethlehem after an outbreak there. Amazingly for us, the trip went off without a hitch – in fact, we had many of the historical sites, shops and museums all to ourselves. The tourist industry was already in dire straits, and we did what we could to help while we were there. The only site closed due to coronavirus for us was the supposed site of Jesus’ baptism where the River Jordan meets the Dead Sea, but that visit was still fantastic, as even outside the closed gates we could still see Jericho in the distance and contemplate the probably-unchanged scenery. The whole trip was life-changing for my family, but that too is another story.

While we were there, I became aware via Facebook that my good friend’s niece was there on a college-sponsored trip with several fellow students. She went home, but I struck up a correspondence with one of her friends via Instagram. This woman is now in her 19th day of quarantine – still in Israel! – having tested positive for the virus no less than 5 times. She still says she doesn’t know when she will be allowed to go home. She is not being treated with any drugs and thankfully is not having problems breathing. For me, this is really notable, as 19 days is quite a lot, and here you have Israel’s Teva pharmaceutical company shipping hydroxycholoroquine to the US, while this woman isn’t receiving it in Israel.

Our flight home on 3/15 was routed through Amsterdam, and before we left, Trump cut off travel between the Schengen zone and the US, and Delta announced massive cuts to its flights. Again, I was certain we’d be in for a travel disaster, but as it turned out, we were on the second-to-last Delta flight out of Amsterdam, at least for the foreseeable future. Despite the reports of bedlam in international airports from US residents returning home from abroad that weekend, on Sunday the 15th, we were quickly processed into the US in Atlanta. The CDC boarded our flight, took (but did not read) our questionnaires about where we’d been, did only random tests of temperature (of the 4 of us, only my husband was tested), and handed us papers intended for people returning from China outlining a suggested 14-day quarantine. We just finished that period yesterday without any symptoms. Again, more gratitude to God from all of us.

So, we are sheltering in place under non-mandatory government edicts from our locality (we are outside the City of Atlanta), and we have ample supplies. This brings me to my second tale, which is shorter than the first. When 9/11 happened, I had just had my first baby and was suffering from post-partum depression even before the Twin Towers fell. I became obsessed with the news coverage and was convinced that the next wave of terror – perhaps anthrax, dumped on us from the sky! – was just around the corner. I became a dedicated prepper, acquiring medical supplies, non-perishable food and other items that would have value for trade even if all of society fell apart at the seams. My husband put up with this quite peaceably, but never admired it. I always felt that he thought I was crazy but harmless, which was sad for me. These days, I am happy to say, he has acquired a new respect for my efforts, to say the least. Meanwhile, I’ve given all but a very few of the dozens of N95 masks I bought back in 2001 to local hospitals. Let me also note: I’ve read the stories about people (including DOCTORS) who are acquiring hydroxychloroquine and other items in short supply “just in case.” Yes, I’m a prepper who believes in protecting my family, but this kind of action is beneath contempt. Here’s hoping that pharmacies rapidly block these purchases through close scrutiny, and that the wrong-doers’ names are exposed (yes, unlikely) when all this is over so that they can be excluded from polite society.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Please keep up the good work, and blessings to you and yours.

The post Pandemic Diaries 15 appeared first on The American Conservative.

China’s Assault On The World

It is staggering to see that this is still happening in China … but it’s still happening in China. Excerpt:

Terrified dogs and cats crammed into rusty cages. Bats and scorpions offered for sale as traditional medicine. Rabbits and ducks slaughtered and skinned side by side on a stone floor covered with blood, filth, and animal remains.

Those were the deeply troubling scenes yesterday as China celebrated its ‘victory’ over the coronavirus by reopening squalid meat markets of the type that started the pandemic three months ago, with no apparent attempt to raise hygiene standards to prevent a future outbreak.

As the pandemic that began in Wuhan forced countries worldwide to go into lockdown, a Mail on Sunday correspondent yesterday watched as thousands of customers flocked to a sprawling indoor market in Guilin, south-west China.

Here cages of different species were piled on top of each other. In another meat market in Dongguan, southern China, another correspondent photographed a medicine seller returning to business on Thursday with a billboard advertising bats – thought to be the cause of the initial Wuhan outbreak – along with scorpions and other creatures.

Check out the article — it has photos.

Meanwhile, TAC’s Barbara Boland has a great piece explaining how the Chinese Communist Party is running a disinformation campaign to cover up its crimes. Nobody can possibly believe China’s own official reporting on the virus’s devastation within that nation.

And here, VICE details the lies on top of lies that the Chinese government has told to cover up its responsibility for this virus that has crippled the world. Among the things the Communist Party is doing:

Silence dissenting voices: The outbreak in Wuhan was first noticed by doctors working on the front lines. They tried to raise the alarm by sharing messages with friends on WeChat, messages that were shared on social media and went viral. But the police detained the doctors — some of whom subsequently died of coronavirus — and told them to stay quiet.

Block information: Once Hubei province had been put into lockdown, the Chinese government didn’t want any negative information getting out. To do this, it employed a range of tactics. One was making citizen journalists disappear after they began publishing videos from inside Wuhan exposing the sheer scale of the crisis. It also ramped up its censorship of social media platforms significantly, meaning even the slightest reference to coronavirus or the government’s response was erased.

Spin up state-run media: As stories of overwhelmed hospitals and mounting death tolls spread around the world, Beijing spun up its massive media operations into full battle mode, with both its Chinese-language and English-language outlets running positive stories about the heroic work being done to counter the outbreak. The campaign included posts on social media, news reports, and articles written by state media journalists but quietly published in other outlets. Beijing is also leveraging deep media ties across Africa to promote its own agenda.

Spread disinformation: Earlier this month, Hua Chunying a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, posted a video on Twitter that showed Italians on lockdown clapping in unison and shouting “Thank you, China” as appreciation for the aid Beijing sent to the country. The only problem is that the video was fake, and the applause was in fact for the heroic work being done by Italian medical workers.

There’s more — read it all.

You might have seen the gutless World Health Organization official who refused to answer a Taiwanese journalist’s question. The WHO is in China’s back pocket:

WHO shilling for #China continues. Time to clean house at that organization, which is failing the world before our eyes https://t.co/Ot6ulegO0P

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) March 28, 2020

Take a look at this 13-minute report from 60 Minutes Australia, which details how decisions made by the Chinese government (including silencing whistleblowers) are responsible for this global pandemic and economic collapse. The Chinese people were the first victims of their government; now, the entire world is suffering like never before in history, because of Beijing’s communist leadership:

The St. Louis branch of the Federal Reserve released an estimate today saying that the US unemployment rate could reach over 32 percent. Think of the Chinese Communist Party when you’re standing on the unemployment line. When this crisis finally passes, the United States must do some very hard decoupling from China. Bring all those manufacturing jobs back to America. We will have millions of unemployed people who will be happy to have good jobs again.

The entire world should understand that all this death, all this suffering, is primarily the fault of the Chinese government. Not the Chinese people — the Chinese Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping. It’s not scapegoating if the alleged malefactor really is guilty.

The post China’s Assault On The World appeared first on The American Conservative.

Coronavirus & The Hidden Life

Word from Dom Benedict Nivakoff, the prior of the Benedictine monastery in Norcia:

Dear family and friends,

St. Benedict exhorts us: “Keep death daily before your eyes.” In this prompting taken from the fourth chapter of our patron’s Rule, we are reminded that God is the ultimate master of our lives, even if His presence is not always evident. In a fatherly way, St. Benedict also calls us to weep for our sins in fear of the coming Judgment. The reality of death and judgment reminds us to trust in the mercy and justice of God alone, whereas being forgetful of death can lead us to rely on ourselves and the world’s solutions to our problems.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, life for the monks in Norcia (all healthy as of March 30) continues much as normal, with a few exceptions. Every morning, during the solemn high Conventual Mass, we have added prayers against pestilence. In the afternoon, we process through the property with relics of the True Cross, praying for liberation from “plagues, famines and wars,” as did the ancients, who knew these tribulations often arise together. Particularly in our prayers are the many doctors and nurses who are sacrificing much — and risking much — to keep others alive and return them to health. Our region of Umbria’s population is geographically dispersed, so the cases of coronavirus around us are fewer than in the far north. We know that this could quickly change.

A striking change for us has been the complete absence of visitors to the chapel. Although Norcia is off the beaten path, we are blessed to be able to often share our life — the chanted Office and Holy Mass — with visitors. The measures adopted by the Italian government have meant that most Italians now live in an imposed cloister in their homes and our friends abroad cannot travel. Hiddenness from the world takes on an almost sacramental symbolism during this extraordinary crisis.

For centuries, it was not possible to see up-close the mysteries of the altar. In certain periods, curtains were drawn at the most important moments of the Mass. Still today, the solemn prayers of consecration are said in the lowest of tones – a whisper – as the drama of the liturgy unfolds. The hiddenness intrinsic to the Mass (with an iconostasis in the Byzantine rite) was common to all in some form for many hundreds of years; it summoned an atmosphere of mystery. In our age, which demands to see in order to believe, God is offering us a chance to rediscover mystery – the mystery of the Mass’s unseen efficacy (2 Cor 4:18). We must rely on an invisible medicine for our ultimate salvation in the face of this invisible threat.

One of the monastery’s greatest blessings in recent years has been the new monastic life born in trial. Many of the monks were clothed and made professions in the period after the 2016 earthquakes. Now, new monks persevere amid the pandemic. For example, on the Feast of the Annunciation, a young novice made his simple vows. Though no lay faithful attended, a full array of monks, angels and saints were there to watch. A spring snowfall brought a further sense of the unexpected to the event, making the feast’s momentous Gospel all the more prescient: “no word shall be impossible with God.”

It becomes clearer every day that we will all be suffering with the physical, economic, psychological and spiritual consequences of the coronavirus for some time. We should be willing to learn the lessons God wants to teach us. A great temptation is to demand that God return what we have lost. In the field of tragedy, God sows seeds of new life. We all must water them with our prayers (both seen and unseen), our sacrifices and, perhaps, even our lives. But death does not have the last word.

Please keep up with the monks of Norcia via their website — and if you can be generous to them, please do. I remind you of the kind of witness they are to the world, by quoting the last words of The Benedict Option:

Who knows what God, in turn, will do with our faithfulness? It is not for us to say. Our command is, in the words of the Christian poet W.H. Auden, to “stagger onward rejoicing.”

The Benedictine monks of Norcia have become a sign to the world in ways I did not anticipate when I began writing this book. In August 2016, a devastating earthquake shook their region. When the quake hit in the middle of the night, the monks were awake to pray Matins, and fled the monastery for the safety of the open-air piazza. Father Cassian later reflected that the earthquake symbolized the crumbling of the West’s Christian culture, but that there was a second, hopeful symbol that night.

“The second symbol is the gathering of the people around the statue of St. Benedict in the piazza in order to pray,” he wrote to supporters. “That is the only way to rebuild.”

The tremors left the basilica church too structurally unstable for worship, and most of the monastery uninhabitable. The brothers evacuated the town and moved to their land up the mountainside, just outside of the Norcia walls. They pitched tents in the ruins of an older monastery, and continued their prayer life, interrupted only by visits to the town to minister to its people.

The monks received distinguished visitors in their exile, including Italy’s prime minister Matteo Renzi, and Cardinal Robert Sarah, who heads the Vatican’s liturgical office. Cardinal Sarah blessed the monks’ temporary quarters, celebrated mass with them, then told them that their tent monastery “reminds me of Bethlehem, where it all began.”

“I am certain that the future of the Church is in the monasteries,” said the cardinal, “because where prayer is, there is the future.”

Five days later, more earthquakes shook Norcia. The cross atop the basilica’s façade toppled to the ground. And then, early in the morning of Sunday October 30, the strongest earthquake to hit Italy in thirty years struck, its epicenter just north of the town. The 14th century Basilica of St. Benedict, the patron saint of Europe, fell violently to the ground. Only its façade remained. Not a single church in Norcia remained standing.

With dust still rising from the rubble, Father Basil knelt on the stones of the piazza, facing the ruined basilica, and accompanied by nuns and a few elderly Norcini, including one in a wheelchair, prayed. Later, amateur video posted to YouTube showed Father Basil, Father Benedict, and Father Martin running through the streets of the rubble-strewn town, looking for the dying who needed last rites. By the grace of God, there were none.

Back in America, Father Richard Cipolla, a Catholic priest in Connecticut and an old friend of Father Benedict’s, e-mailed the subprior when he heard the news of the latest quake.

“Is there damage? What is going on?” Father Cipolla wrote.

“Yes, damage much worse,” Father Benedict replied. “But we are OK. Much to tell you but just pray. I am well and God continues to purify us and bring very good things.”

The next morning, as the sun rose over Norcia, Father Benedict sent a message to the monastery’s friends all over the world. He said that no Norcini lost their lives in the quake because they had heeded the warnings from the earlier tremors, and left town.

“[God] spent two months preparing us for the complete destruction of our patron’s church so that when it finally happened we would watch it, in horror but in safety, from atop the town,” the priest-monk wrote.

Father Benedict added, “These are mysteries which will take years – not days or months – to understand.”

Surely that is true. But notice this: the earth moved, and the Basilica of St. Benedict, which had stood firm for many centuries, tumbled to the ground. Only the façade, the mere semblance of a church, remains. Because the monks headed for the hills after the August earthquake, they survived. God preserved them in the holy poverty of their canvas-covered Bethlehem, where they continued to live the Rule in the ancient way, including chanting the Old Mass. Now they can begin the rebuilding amid the ruins, their resilient Benedictine faith teaching them to receive this catastrophe as a call to deeper holiness and sacrifice. God willing, new life will one day spring forth from the rubble.

“We pray and watch from the mountainside, thinking of the long three years Saint Benedict spent in the cave before God decided to call him out to become a light to the world,” wrote Father Benedict. “Fiat. Fiat”.

Let it be. Let it be.

He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

These are Christians who know how to remain steady in catastrophe. We have so much to learn from them. One practical lesson is the importance of maintaining regular prayer during this time of confinement. I’ve written in this space about how surprised I was to discover how much the online Divine Liturgy meant to me. Online worship can never be an adequate substitute for corporal worship, especially not in sacramental, liturgical churches. On the first Sunday my parish had livestreamed liturgy, I didn’t even plan on joining my wife and kids on the couch to watch it. What was the point?

But standing in the kitchen pouring coffee, listening to those familiar words, and chants, I felt something move inside me. I realized in a new way how much of my own inner life is constructed by the words of the Divine Liturgy — and just hearing it made my bones vibrate harmoniously, so to speak. I sat down on the couch and prayed along with the priest coming to us over the video link. And I was grateful. At least we have this.

Going back to Dom Benedict’s missive, I am struck by this line:

Hiddenness from the world takes on an almost sacramental symbolism during this extraordinary crisis.

That’s a powerful word. As I sit here writing this, at my kitchen table, I look out the window and everything looks normal, even serene, in my neighborhood. But I know that that is an illusion. This virus is moving among us, striking people down with incredible cruelty, and infecting others who have no idea that they are sick. Wyoming Doc wrote to me this morning:

I have been doing this for 30 years. I have seen lots of things happen. I have held people’s hands through some of the most terrible moments. I have NEVER seen anything affect the human body like this virus is able to do. These patients are in horrific agony. To the one, they feel like they are drowning. I have never seen an upper/lower respiratory virus attack the heart like this one does. And the pain that is caused is like nothing I have ever seen before from an infectious disease.

He is seeing this, because he is in the hospital, on the front lines. Me, I’m doing like most of you: sitting at home, inside an artificial peace. What we who are not on the economic front lines can’t see — yet, anyway — is the horrific pain the virus is inflicting on people economically. But we will. None of us will escape it.

For now, it is still relatively hidden. As Ross Douthat said:

The strangest thing about this crisis is what you might call the not-yet/but-already experience – where things that haven’t yet happened (symptoms, hospitalizations) are nonetheless settled facts, and we measure the way telescopes catch light from the past, from a dead star.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) March 30, 2020

As Dom Benedict said, we are all now having to hide from the world, in our domestic cloisters, for the sake of saving lives. We can’t become too comfortable with that — I mean, we can never allow ourselves to believe that online church is anything but the barest facsimile of real church. If church was nothing more than the conveying of information, then one would be as good as another. But even in Protestant low-church traditions, which downplay sacraments and liturgy, the way of conveying that information is inextricably part of the information. The medium really is a big part of the message. The message you hear in the solitude of your home is not the same message you hear standing in the flesh with the worshiping body of believers.

Nevertheless, I strongly endorse Dom Benedict’s exhortation for us to meditate on what God is trying to teach us with this period of hiddenness. What does it mean to discover — or to re-discover — mystery? In my case, I had become too accustomed to taking the Divine Liturgy for granted, but more than that, as I explained above, I discovered how liturgy had become sedimented into my bones, and how I carried it within me.

This is just the beginning, though. Rather than be resentful over what this virus has taken from me and my church family, I am trying to stare more deeply into the loss, to find its meaning, and to find redemption in it. To paraphrase Dom Benedict from the earthquake aftermath, these mysteries will take a long time to understand; our right attitude is to “pray and watch from the mountainside” — that is, to keep up our spiritual disciplines (or take new ones on) and remain open to the Holy Spirit to guide us through the valley of the shadow of death.

Remember Dom Benedict’s words:

A great temptation is to demand that God return what we have lost. In the field of tragedy, God sows seeds of new life.

The monks of Norcia lost their basilica, and lost their monastery. They lost practically everything, in a few moments of shaking. They moved out to a property they owned on the mountainside overlooking Norcia, and started from scratch. But as Dom Benedict told me later, there was a hidden blessing in it. Their previous monastery was right in the center of town, on the piazza. They received lots of visitors. The noise of being in the center of things made the contemplative life more difficult. They did not realize how much they needed greater silence until the earthquake took their home and their church from them. God did not restore what they once had; rather, He gave them what they really needed. If they longed for a return to the old church, the old monastery, the old style of life in the town, they would still be in despair. They discovered, though, that they already had the things that were most important to them: their faith, the mass, the brotherhood, and the Rule.

It’s going to be like that with most of us too, one way or another. This is going to hurt. But if we allow it to be for our own purification, for tearing us down so it can build us up in faith, hope, and love, then it will have been a severe mercy.

One thing this crisis is making clear too is the lack of a hidden spiritual life in many of us. I am discovering how much I had come to treat the Sunday liturgy like a crutch, and allowed my daily spiritual life to fall slack. It’s not that I had ceased to pray, but that without realizing what was happening, I had allowed myself to get lazy, and to depend more than I should on the outward exercise of Sunday worship, instead of also cultivating daily prayer as I ought to have been doing.

One more thing on the hidden life. As you know, A Hidden Life is the name of Terrence Malick’s most recent film, based on the life of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian Catholic farmer martyred by the Nazis for refusing to swear allegiance to Hitler, considered by him to be an Antichrist. I just checked, and it’s for rent for $5.99 on Amazon streaming. Now would be a great time to watch it with your family. Alan Jacobs wrote a beautiful essay about the film, focusing on how it demands patience. Excerpts:

Now that I have defined the words “martyr” and “passion,” I will define one more word. In the New Testament the word “mystery” refers to an event, or a reality, of overwhelming significance, but a significance that is either unstatable in words or altogether unknown. Thus St. Paul speaks of “the mystery of iniquity”—what in our more prosaic and insensible times we tend to call “the problem of evil.” In Paul’s view, to call iniquity a “problem” is to trivialize it beyond recognition. For one who believes not only in God but in the goodness and graciousness of God, iniquity is the profoundest of mysteries. One scarcely dares to speak of it at all, and nothing is more desperately to be avoided, on this subject, than glibness.

The story of Franz Jägerstätter, as told by Terrence Malick, is a Passion narrative; a narrative of a witness; a mystery.

More:

There’s a good reason, then, why a scene early in the movie presents us with a lengthy meditation by an artist who is restoring the paintings on the walls of a local church. The temptation, he says, is to comfort—to give the people “a comfortable Christ.” Will he ever have the courage to show the people “the true Christ”? He thinks he might. Someday. I see this as a question Terrence Malick puts to himself: Can he, dare he, show us the Passion of a poor Christian who has taken up his cross and followed Jesus into the valley of the shadow of death? Can his imagination stretch from the staggering beauty of the Alpine valley where Franz and his wife Fani had hoped they would be high enough, distant enough, to be safe, to the horrors of Tegel prison and then the guillotine? Can he show us? Perhaps. Can he make us understand? No.

Read it all. 

When Dom Benedict says that the hiddenness that is so emblematic of this virus, and the crisis it has brought about, can teach us to rediscover mystery, I think that this is what he means. We will not be able to understand why God has allowed this to happen. But it has happened, and God remains God. We must learn to seek God in the quietness of our own homes on Sunday mornings, and in the solitude of our hearts. When the preachers of the Word fall silent on Sundays, we must listen for His voice spoken in less obvious places, especially in the courageous, compassionate deeds of doctors, nurses, and medical workers. Don’t expect understanding. Who could possibly understand why a good God allows a disease like this to run rampant around the world. Theologians have their theodicies (explanations for why an all-powerful, all-good God permits evil and suffering), but who is really convinced by dry arguments, even if they are true? This is where faith comes in.

I’m thinking of Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Russian Orthodox Christian sent to the gulag by the Soviets in the 1970s, because of his faith. He suffered terrible tortures and deprivations there, but continued his evangelization among the inmates. One night, he suffered despair, overcome by his pain and brokenness. Why, he wondered, did God let this happen to him? That night, God sent him the first of a number of visions, which revealed to the agonized prisoner that because he (Ogorodnikov) was there in prison, telling death-row inmates about Jesus, some of those men — those who responded to the call of conversion — went to their deaths as believers, and were now with Christ in paradise. Those revelations made Ogorodnikov understand the hidden workings of the Spirit, through his suffering in his body.

You might ask: couldn’t God have done this some other way? Why did He have to put Ogorodnikov in prison to suffer for the sake of those death-row inmates? Well, you might as well ask why God had to take the form of a man, and suffer and die for the sake of all of us. It’s a mystery that we can explore, but can’t fully understand. We come to know that mystery not by sorting it out logically, but by taking it into our hearts, and living it, knowing by faith that God is present, God is with us, and will never abandon us.

God has been made manifest to us in church on Sundays for all of our lives — in the proclamation of His word, in the presence of the gathered communion of believers, and, for many of us, in the Eucharist. Now that has been taken from us for an indefinite period. Do we believe that God has also been taken from us? That His word has been stolen from us? That the communion with others in the Church has ceased to exist? Of course not! These things are hidden now. We are in the desert. God is there too. “Let us open our eyes to the light that comes from God,” says St. Benedict, in the prologue to his Rule. The light is hidden now within darkness, and absence. This is a mystery.

I can’t tell you anything more about it. But I can show you this passage from Terrence Malick’s film To The Wonder. The voice you hear is Javier Bardem’s; he plays Father Quintana, a priest who is having a deep crisis of faith, and is searching for the presence of God … and finding Him in the faces of the poor and suffering people he serves.

 

The post Coronavirus & The Hidden Life appeared first on The American Conservative.

Christians Who Make Christians Look Bad

It is not news that most Christians in this country are doing the right thing and staying home from services during this extraordinary period of crisis. They are doing that not because they want to miss church, but out of love for their neighbor — which requires this sacrifice to slow the spread of this deadly virus.

But not every Christian church is doing this. Some arrogant megachurches are still holding services, in defiance of the authorities, common sense, and Christian charity. What about the people who are going to get sick because these people are continuing to crowd together? They don’t care. What about the fact that the economic paralysis that is crushing the livelihoods of tens of millions will carry on longer because of gatherings like this persisting? They don’t care.

I know, I know: there are all kinds of people defying stay-at-home orders, not just conservative Christians. But “whatabout” won’t cut it. I’m not a megachurch person, and as an Eastern Orthodox Christian, am about the farthest thing from a Pentecostal you can be in American Christianity. But these are, in some sense, my people. And they’re hurting their neighbor, making all of us Christians look bad, and laying the groundwork for anti-Christian scapegoating.

One of these offender churches is right here in my own city, Life Tabernacle, a Pentecostal megachurch. The Los Angeles Times was at their service on Sunday. The reporter was one of 1,265 people in that church for the service. Excerpts:

He told the group that at least four church members had lost their jobs after employers saw photographs online of them attending services, including one of the singers with him on the altar.

“This is the America we’re living in now, where people are being persecuted for their faith,” Spell said as he took the singer’s hand.

The pastor argued the governor should deem churches essential, as he has some retailers and clinics.

Wall Street, he noted, “is still open.”

“Yes, it is!” a woman cried from the audience.

“If you’re going to persecute our church for staying open, don’t go to Walmart, don’t go to Planned Parenthood, don’t go to the liquor store because you’re a hypocrite,” said Spell, who was greeted with applause.

His sermon veered between American history and brimstone, from Patrick Henry to Satan. At one point, while praying over a woman, both spoke in tongues.

“I’m not so afraid of dying of a disease as I am of living in fear of a virus!” Spell then shouted, wiping his brow and stripping off his jacket.

The crowd stood and applauded.

“A God that brought America a virus can bring America through a virus,” he intoned, and a congregant responded, “Hallelujah!”

More:

“I’d rather die than kill the church,” Spell repeated, framing the pandemic as a test of faith. “If you can’t stand up to COVID, don’t expect to stand up to a man called the Antichrist.”

Woody Jenkins, a longtime player in Louisiana Republican politics and the chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 Louisiana campaign, is livestreaming the Life Tabernacle’s services over the site of Central City News, the community newspaper he owns. He told the LAT, about the restrictions:

“Are we really alive if we’re living like this?” he said after the service.

Read it all.

The pride, the arrogance of these people — it is infuriating! These are the kind of Christians who will make people hate Christians because they are putting the lives and the livelihoods of all of us in danger so they can speak in tongues together on Sunday, and then claim they are being unfairly persecuted.

Last week, The New York Times op-ed page caused my blood pressure to go through the roof with this headline over an op-ed piece:

It was a terrible headline, one primed to stoke anti-Christian bigotry. Would they have ever headlined an op-ed about the haredim of Brooklyn’s role spreading the virus (which is significant) with, “The Road to Coronavirus Hell Was Paved by Jews”? Of course not. Would they ever headline an op-ed about how defiant San Francisco gays who refused to close the bathhouses in the early days of the HIV epidemic, “The Road to AIDS Hell Was Paved by Homosexuals”? Not in a million years. But they have no problem scapegoating Evangelicals.

The problem is, the op-ed was not as bigoted as that headline. In fact, the writer, Katherine Stewart, makes some credible points. For example:

This denial of science and critical thinking among religious ultraconservatives now haunts the American response to the coronavirus crisis. On March 15, Guillermo Maldonado, who calls himself an “apostle” and hosted Mr. Trump earlier this year at a campaign event at his Miami megachurch, urged his congregants to show up for worship services in person. “Do you believe God would bring his people to his house to be contagious with the virus? Of course not,” he said.

Rodney Howard-Browne of The River at Tampa Bay Church in Florida mocked people concerned about the disease as “pansies” and insisted he would only shutter the doors to his packed church “when the rapture is taking place.” In a sermon that was live-streamed on Facebook, Tony Spell, a pastor in Louisiana, said, “We’re also going to pass out anointed handkerchiefs to people who may have a fear, who may have a sickness and we believe that when those anointed handkerchiefs go, that healing virtue is going to go on them as well.”

By the way, did you see what Jerry Falwell Jr.’s decision to bring back 1,900 students from around the country to Liberty University is doing to that college’s relationship with its community, Lynchburg, Virginia? At least 12 Liberty students are now sick with symptoms consistent with coronavirus. Excerpts:

The city of Lynchburg is furious.

“We had a firestorm of our own citizens who said, ‘What’s going on?’” said Treney Tweedy, the mayor.

Some Liberty officials accuse alarmed outsiders of playing politics. Ms. Tweedy has called Mr. Falwell “reckless.” And within the school, there are signs of panic.

“I’m not allowed to talk to you because I’m an employee here,” one student on campus wrote in an email. But, he pleaded, “we need help to go home.”

Junior is blaming anti-Christian bigotry:

“We think it’s irresponsible for so many universities to just say ‘closed, you can’t come back,’ push the problem off on other communities and sit there in their ivory towers,” Mr. Falwell said on Wednesday on a radio show hosted by Todd Starnes, a far-right conspiracy theorist.

“We’re conservative, we’re Christian, and therefore we’re being attacked,” he said.

Michael Gillette, a former mayor of Lynchburg and a bioethicist now working with its hospitals on rationing scarce ventilators, disagrees.

“To argue that criticism of Liberty is based on political bias is unfounded and unreasonable,” he said. “Liberty just did not take this threat as seriously as others have.”

Of course it didn’t. Had Junior done the responsible thing, he would have had to refund a portion of those students’ room and board. More:

Mr. Falwell and his administration have worked to tamp down dissent. After a Liberty undergraduate, Calum Best, wrote on his personal Facebook page that students should receive refunds, he said Liberty’s spokesman, Scott Lamb, called his cellphone to berate him. Asked about the call, Mr. Lamb said he was simply objecting to an error in the post, and Mr. Best was “spinning.”

After Marybeth Davis Baggett, a professor, wrote an open letter asking the university’s board of trustees to close the campus, Mr. Falwell mocked her on Twitter as “the ‘Baggett’ lady.”

Jeff Brittain, a Liberty parent, wrote on Twitter: “I’m as right wing as they get, bud. But as a parent of three of your students, I think this is crazy, irresponsible and seems like a money grab.” Mr. Falwell replied, calling him a “dummy.”

Read it all. This is contemptible, un-Christlike behavior. In the times of the early church, when a plague struck the Roman Empire, non-Christians — which is to say, the overwhelming majority of the Empire’s citizens — threw the sick out, and fled. But the believers distinguished themselves another way:

If the non-Christian response to the plague was characterized by self-protection, self-preservation, and avoiding the sick at all costs, the Christian response was the opposite. According to Dionysius, the plague served as a “schooling and testing” for Christians. In a detailed description of how Christians responded to the plague in Alexandria, he writes of how “the best” among them honorably served the sick until they themselves caught the disease and died:

Most of our brother-Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of the danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbours and cheerfully accepting their pains.

Similarly, in Pontius’s biography of Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, he writes of how the bishop reminded believers to serve not only fellow Christians but also non-Christians during the plague:

There is nothing remarkable in cherishing merely our own people with the due attentions of love, but that one might become perfect who should do something more than heathen men or publicans, one who, overcoming evil with good, and practicing a merciful kindness like that of God, should love his enemies as well. . . . Thus the good was done to all men, not merely to the household of faith.

The impact of this service was twofold: (1) Christian sacrifice for their fellow believers stunned the unbelieving world as they witnessed communal love like they’d never seen (John 13:35), and (2) Christian sacrifice for non-Christians resulted in the early church experiencing exponential growth as non-Christian survivors, who benefited from the care of their Christian neighbors, converted to the faith en masse.

What will the impact of the behavior of the Falwells, the Rev. Spells, and the others be in this post-Christian culture, where the main narratives are laid down by a media and an academic elite that despise Christians? Bill de Blasio, the Mayor of New York, gave a clue last week when he said the city may move to shut down defiant churches and synagogues “permanently.”That would be unconstitutional, no doubt, so I’m not too worried about that. But that’s not the point. Mayor de Blasio has handled the pandemic crisis badly, and he is eager to look for scapegoats. It is wrong to blame all Christians for the actions of these few, but if Dr. Anthony Fauci is right, and between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans die in this first wave of the pandemic, there are going to be millions of angry people, looking to take it out on somebody. And there will be far more people who have been made paupers by this pandemic, who will be susceptible to media messages faulting these right-wing Christians.

Liberty University degrees won’t mean anything after this, because people will associate them with Falwell Junior, the Evangelical who dragged all those kids back from around America after spring break, and brought coronavirus to Lynchburg. Every conservative Christian in the country might be under suspicion, even though only a relative handful of churches behaved this way in the crisis.

I want to encourage you Christian readers who are part of great majority of churches that are doing as we have been asked to do, and staying home to pray, to reach out to your local media — not to chastise them for reporting on these bad actors, but rather to tell them the stories of what we are doing, and why we are doing it. In the second half of my “Selfish Revelers” post on Sunday, I talked about this unwanted confinement at home on Sundays, away from my church, has created in me greater love for and appreciation of my church, and the gift of freedom of religion in America. I wrote about how some of the great uncanonized saints of the 20th century communist persecutions talked about how much they grew spiritually in their confinement, which included torture. None of us are being tortured, for pity’s sake; we’re simply being asked to stay at home for a while, and pray there. None of us want to do that, but we’re doing it, and trying to find what God is saying to us through this time of trial. Under communism in some countries, many, many believers did not go to church services, because they were afraid of being arrested, or losing their jobs if their faces were seen at church. Some had to fear having their children taken away from them. So they had to continue their spiritual lives at home. For all we know, God may be allowing this time in temporary exile from our churches to prepare us for something much darker ahead. Or maybe not. The point is, this is what we have to do out of love for each other and the community, including love for the doctors, nurses, and hospital personnel who are on the front lines trying to save lives, and who have a moral right to expect us to do our parts.

We should be thinking of ways we can serve others, especially the sick and their families, even though we are confined to our homes. Stop pitying ourselves! Focus instead on how God might be blessing us through this trial, and how we might pass that blessing on to others.

And find some way to tell the media about it. Don’t let the Tony Spells and the Jerry Juniors be the public face of Christianity in the time of plague. The way all of us behave now is the way we will be remembered. Right now, there are people who were never part of a church, but who now, faced with this unprecedented crisis, feel the need to know God. There are a lot of people who have fallen away from the church, but who want to find a way back. One of them, a young woman in Texas, wrote a moving letter to me published in Pandemic Diaries 13. As a teenager, she left the fundamentalist church of her childhood because she was sick over how politicized it had become. She lost her faith. But now, under the stresses of this global catastrophe, she wants God back, if she can find Him. Why not a liberal church? She says, “I just don’t buy that these people actually believe in what they’re preaching. I don’t want to go to a Bible class where we talk about racial justice, and if everyone truly believed in the meaning of communion, shouldn’t we be far more reverent than passing notes and whispering and falling asleep?”

What would we Christians have to do during this plague to have the same kind of impact on the post-Christian world that the early church had on the pre-Christian world during its plague? Let’s get creative. We know what we must not do: what these full-of-themselves megachurch pastors are doing, or the arrogant defiance of a Jerry Falwell, Jr. But what can we do? What kind of outreach to show the world that we are not all like that, despite what the have read or heard in the media.

My bottom line is that I don’t just want to criticize these bad Christian actors, but I want to find some way to shine a traditional Christian light through the darkness — especially to those who don’t have a church home, and may have been badly burned by church in the past. I want to ask of myself, and you to ask of yourself, what kind of service can we offer the wider community, given the boundaries within which we must operate, that is in the same spirit as the early church during the plagues back then? None of us can stop the Tony Spells and the Jerry Juniors, but we can do our best to make sure they aren’t the leading public image of Christianity in this crisis.

I’m going to think about it creatively this week, and welcome hearing from you readers with ideas (write me at rod — at –amconmag — dot — com). There are no doubt plenty of people stuck in their homes who would have found it too intimidating to come to church to check it out, but who might be intrigued by what they see and hear online. If nothing else, they will know that the kinds of Christians who make the news in a negative way don’t speak for all of us, and in fact only speak for a relative few of us.

I remember in the time after 9/11, a lot of American Muslims got very defensive about criticism from the outside. Who can blame them? They were frightened. I understood that, but I also had a fair amount of bad-faith encounters with Muslim leaders who covered up for bad things going on within their mosques and communities by playing the bigotry card, and trying to intimidate people into not asking hard questions about what they believe. They convinced nobody, other than journalists, most of whom were prepared to behave as useful idiots, avoiding asking hard questions because they wanted to protect those communities from creeps who would do them harm. Well, if scapegoating Christians after the pandemic becomes a thing, Christians can’t count on having a sympathetic media telling our stories. We’re going to have to do that ourselves, somehow. Most of us do not have anything to hide, but in this media-driven environment, we have to try hard, and creatively, to show and tell the world who we are — and who we are not.

UPDATE: Is this megachurch virus defiance mostly a Pentecostal thing? News from Illinois:

Several members of an Illinois Pentecostal church are either at the hospital or in home quarantine after at least 43 congregants fell ill following a revival service two Sundays ago, and at least 10 of them have tested positive for the new coronavirus.

In a Facebook post Wednesday night, Layna LoCascio, wife of pastor Anthony LoCascio who leads The Life Church of Glenview, said at least 43 of the approximately 80 people who attended a March 15 service at their church have fallen ill and everyone who has been tested for the new coronavirus has come back positive for the virus which has already killed more than 1,470 and infected more than 97,000 people nationwide.

From the Evangelical side — and please note that Evangelicals are not the same thing as Pentecostals — I see that Richard Land, the very conservative Southern Baptist leader, is urging Christians to stay home during this crisis. Excerpt:

Given the long history of persecution and harassment by various civil authorities, Baptists and others in the “free church” tradition (as opposed to historically state supported churches such as Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism) cherish their “soul freedom” to follow their consciences, not government mandates.

The question is, does that paradigm apply in this particular instance? I think not. The state is not singling out churches and telling them and them alone to cease assembling for worship. They are banning all gatherings.

Second, the reason for banning assemblies is not ideological or theological, but is simply seeking to protect all citizens from serious physical harm. No freedom in human society is “absolute.”  In spite of freedom of speech, it is against the law to yell “fire” in a crowded theater unless there is indeed a fire. Why? It is to protect innocent people from being trampled in a panic.

UPDATE.2: If you look at video from Pastor Spell’s church, you will see that it is very much a mixed-race congregation. I would be surprised if the black worshippers there were Trump voters. Life Tabernacle does not fit easily into a hate-white-conservative-Christians narrative.

UPDATE.3: Good:

A controversial Florida pastor who refused to stop holding packed church services, in violation of coronavirus restrictions, was arrested Monday by a local sheriff who said the preacher was putting his followers’ lives at risk.

Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne was booked on misdemeanor charges of unlawful assembly and violation of public health rules after flouting social distancing orders at The River at Tampa Bay church.

Howard-Browne—an ally of President Donald Trump—has been an outspoken opponent of social distancing requirements, claiming his church has machines that can stop the coronavirus and vowing to personally cure the state of Florida himself.

“His reckless disregard for human life put hundreds of people in his congregation at risk, and thousands of residents who may interact with them this week, in danger,” Hillsborough County Sheriff Chad Chronister said at the press conference.

As religious liberty advocate and litigator David French put it:

There’s an old saying that bad facts make bad law.

A decade of bad court appointments can be less dangerous to religious liberty than the reckless, dangerous defiance of performative pastors. https://t.co/jsKBwwWmfa

— David French (@DavidAFrench) March 30, 2020

UPDATE.4: Reader Glen Davis comments:

Rod, I’m ordained with the Assemblies of God. We’re the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world (although only the second-largest in the USA, the Church of God in Christ is larger than us domestically). I don’t think Pentecostal churches are any more likely to be open than others. I know for a fact that the official guidance we’ve received from our leadership at all level is to obey the public health edicts. To paraphrase one of my superiors, “This is no different from obeying the building codes when constructing a sanctuary.”

My first thought was that things might be different within the unaffiliated charismatic movement, but Paul Djupe (a political scientist at Denison University) posted some research about congregational closures at https://religioninpublic.blog/2020/03/30/would-they-rather-be-dead-right-support-for-congregations-staying-open/ – among other things, he and his fellow researchers found, “As has been reported expertly elsewhere, 12 percent of our sample reports that their congregations are still open for in-person worship. There is almost no variation by religious tradition and larger congregations are more likely to be closed.” (emphasis added)

Later in the article he mentions that evangelicals, and especially people who believe in the prosperity gospel (I am not sure how they measured for that) would be more likely to resist coercive government efforts. But as it is right now, there appears to be a nearly 90% compliance rate across denominations and theological traditions.

Got that, people? Almost nine out of 10 churches have closed. Those that have not are a small minority. A significant minority, it is true, but a small minority. By all means criticize them, as I have done, but do not scapegoat all Christians, or even all conservative Christians.

The post Christians Who Make Christians Look Bad appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pandemic Diaries 14

From Warsaw, Poland:

I’m a 22 year old Catholic, and a history student at the University of Warsaw.

As far as I remember, the first time I heard of the coronavirus was in December. I did not use to pay closer attention to such news. A disease somewhere in China was too abstract and remote for me. I am not particularly interested in Far East affairs and I did not have even a slightest suspicion that the epidemic would eventually turn into a truly global phenomenon. I thought that such things cannot happen. Not in 21st century, not in Europe (even though I do not trust our public healthcare system very much). In this case I was absolutely unconscious, yet very zealous, confessor of the “end-of-history” myth, which, in the most of other cases, I strongly oppose.

Three months later, the virus vehemently entered Poland. The first case of coronavirus infection was reported on March 4th. But even before, the atmosphere in the society was quite nervous. The institutions reacted quickly. On March 10th the University of Warsaw was shut down, a few days later a wider, but not as radical as in Italy, lockdown was imposed by the government. Nowadays, most of shops (except those providing items of everyday need and medicines) are not working. People cannot leave their homes without necessity and they cannot gather outside in groups bigger than 2 people. Some of the lectures at the University are organised online, the other are to be held after situation comes back to normal (what de facto means that in this year I will have shorter, or no at all, vacation).

The socioeconomical situation is extremely fragile. Whoever can works from home, some have to go to work as if nothing was happening (e.g. postmen, public transport drivers, grocery stores salespersons). Many others do not work at all, and since labour law in Poland is very leaky and does not protect many employees at all, this means that numerous people suddenly lost their jobs and all income. The government decided to not to give strong support to the employees, so even more people will fall in appalling socioeconomical conditions. Seven in ten employers in Poland are planning to introduce further, massive layoffs. Many workers’ rights have been suspended (e.g. employers are now allowed reduce salaries and extend working day to 12 hours without even consulting employees). Young people, such as me, who are particularly vulnerable economically (this is the time we are entering the labour market) are seriously afraid if we are coming back to massive unemployment and ruthless capitalism in the 19th century style. Due to this social tensions are rising to even higher level.

Because of society’s discipline, the virus spreads definitely slower than it did in other countries. Nevertheless, every day the police finds a few people who disobey quarantine. One of my friends who lives in Cracow was probably infected in such a way. One of her neighbours recently came back from abroad but lived as if nothing was happening – went shopping and met with friends. Yesterday it came out that he is infected, so the whole building is under quarantine now.

All this makes me feel really anxious about the future. Initially, I was even excited in a peculiar way. As a historian, I thought that this epidemic is probably the first major event in my fully conscious life that schoolchildren will learn about in the future; that the history is happening here and now (sounds silly, but that is how it was). I have never felt any kind of panic. To be honest, even today I am not sure whether I am just a good, calm and obedient, citizen or rather my mind simply has not processed all these facts. But now such calmness is slowly running away. Nevertheless, I try to keep my spirit up.

There are, however, some positives in such situation. My grandma lives 2 kilometres from me, which makes doing shopping for her a nice stroll and a good legal excuse to leave a flat once in a few days. I do not visit her not to endanger her health – I simply leave what I bought in front of her door (such unusual, contactless ritual always leaves me disturbed). My physical condition has, although, become so poor that even such short walks really exhaust me. I also spend more time with my mom, for what I had not had much time before. Online meetings with friends manage to somehow substitute the real ones. And another thing – more sleep! There is not much to do at home except work, TV or reading, so 9 hours a day became a standard. And last but not least – prayer. It is really weird to attend Mass via Internet, but it is still better than nothing. I try to maintain my form with spiritual communion, rosary and breviary. Such modest things give me hope that we will eventually get through it! So help us God!

From Leeds, UK:

Thanks to your warnings (and Mike Cernovich) we stocked up a few weeks before anyone else. Again, with your warnings I managed to persuade a few family members and friends to stock up on medicines too.

We’ve been on full lockdown for two weeks now and I’m kind of enjoying it(!) Partly and selfishly because no one in our social circle has the virus. But also the focus on family and local community is a joy. We stuck notes through every house on the street and now have a flourishing WhatsApp group. Neighbours are buying shopping for each other and sharing alcohol. It’s fantastic to see.

Usually, I work in the head office of a large national supermarket but due to high demand I’m doing 3 days a week on the shop floor. It exposes me to greater risk but it’s needs doing and I couldn’t in clear conscience refuse. It’s amazing

seeing the food supply chain in action, meeting huge increases in demand and quickly too.

What pains me most is the lack of humility that leads to repentance. Both in the church and society as a whole there’s so little fear of the God who blows us away like the grass in the fields. He has fired a precisely crafted shot at all the pretensions and stupidity of the age and yet so far we are like rebellious and stubborn Israel of old. How bad will the next wake up call be?

Church online sucks, evangelical church online doubly so (it feels too much like a show at the best of times) and with a 11 month old daughter then any spare time is invested in her. Prayer and Bible reading are squeezed in at the edge of the day. Still, I’m hopeful that God will be at work in this crisis in us as a family and throughout the whole world!

Every blessing, thank you for all your hard work.

From Prince Edward Island, Canada:

I’m in Prince Edward Island, Canada and this is what one local teacher did for her children. She made a snowman representing each of her 24 pupils:

A Prince Edward Island teacher has come up with a unique way to connect with her students.Rhonda Godfrey added some funny sunglasses to the snowmen representing her two educational assistants.

Rhonda Godfrey was out shovelling snow early Friday morning when the idea came to her.

“We were encouraged to reach out and connect with our students and I thought, ‘What better way, I’ll make my snow class’,” she said Friday afternoon.

So, in front of her Beach Grove Road home in Charlottetown are representations of the 22 students and two educational assistants of Grade 5D at Eliot River Elementary School.

“I have missed them,” Godfrey said.

From Auburn, Alabama:

I’ve been reading your column for a few years now— ever since I left my forlorn and short-lived early high school libertarian phase.

I’m from a town, really an incorporated community, outside of Birmingham and attend Auburn University. I’m a Southerner through and through and know nothing else really besides the South. More specifically I know nothing more intimately than Alabama, and I’m content with that. As you may know, Baton Rouge is rather similar to Birmingham culturally speaking. There’s one thing I have never thought about being quite important to the Southern cultural context, and that’s the human touch.

Being deprived of it has been rather depressing. My sister is a pediatric nurse in Birmingham. Things aren’t quite hard here yet on the medical field, and the hospital she works at is actually cutting back on personnel for the moment, so she has had a lot of free time, though not working as much. She got a puppy a few months ago and took it to our grandparents’ property the other day to teach it how to swim in the pond. She’s rightfully paranoid of carrying the virus, so we stood a good ten feet apart while I continued fishing. I hadn’t seen her since New Year’s. Every time we see each other, we hug each other around the neck. Not this time, even after not having seen each other for so long.

Even harder was that my grandparents’ home is just on the hill above the pond. I had been home for about 10 days now, fishing probably 2 or 3 times a day at the pond. Every time I fish or I’m in town I visit with them, but I hadn’t each time. Just yesterday, my father and I started the annual garden in the back pasture behind their house. My grandfather, who just turned 92 a couple of days ago, helped out, but I made sure to keep a garden’s length/width away from him. For context this garden is about a half acre.

Anyways, the hardest thing about this was that in order to greet my 90 year old grandmother, I had to stand awkwardly at the open French doors. I was reluctant, but she persistently insisted that I stand at the doors and talk to her about 15 feet away. She asked her typical pointed questions about my education, how things are at the same university she graduated from some 70 years before, etc. But, completely stripped from me was the years old tradition and ability to walk in unannounced, bellow a hello, allow my grandmother to kiss me on the cheek, and hug my grandfather around the shoulders. It makes me sad because I don’t know how much longer we have with them, even without the virus running amok.

I thank God for the ability to garden, read, write letters, FaceTime, get into the Word, etc.

There’s really no difference between online classes and in-person. Technology makes it easy for professor-student interaction. There are rumors that the University is using this to move in the direction of a permanent more online experience. That will be the end of the University. Schools like Auburn and LSU are fine enough schools, and you’ll get a solid education by attending them. But for a moment, let’s say all schools go online. That will kill or greatly reduce the recruiting abilities of old and storied universities like Auburn and LSU, and I’m not talking athletic recruiting. If a high schooler from say Birmingham has the test scores and capability of attending a school say like Duke or Vanderbilt, why would he choose a school like Auburn or LSU to study online when he can get a superior education studying online at Duke or Vanderbilt? But, I’ll tell you right now why that kid would go to Auburn or LSU over Duke or Vanderbilt as things stand now. Tradition.

His family might have gone to Auburn/LSU, the easy-going traditional campus life might be an attraction, the pageantry and pride of SEC football might be an attraction, his friends might go there, or traditional Greek life may be an attraction for him, in addition to a plethora of similar reasons. All these things which help schools like Auburn or LSU or Alabama or Clemson compete with more elite institutions will evaporate with a shift to online classes. These are things which have been cherished within families and communities all across the South for generations, and they would almost certainly up and vanish if the universities shifted all or a significant part of their curriculum permanently online. When I graduate within the year, I will be the 6th generation of men and women in my family to walk the campus and halls of Auburn. I could very well be the 6th and last to do so through no choice of myself or my future children.

An addendum to the part about rumors circulating. It’s hard to put into words, but if you’ve grown up around a community like Auburn your whole life, it’s rather easy to tell which rumors have credence and which don’t. I fear this one does.

From Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania:

Thanks for all of your reporting on this. I’d taken a Lenten blog time off (which, post pandemic, I’m failing with) but it was checking your blog that alerted me to the coming storm. My germaphobe husband’s reports from NPR didn’t convince me, but your reporting did, so thank you. I hope you and yours are and stay well.

We began our social distancing on 3/13 and have been ordering groceries for pick up or delivery. We even found beer delivery for free from Tired Hands, a local craft brewery. The only time we’ve been out was on 3/17, when my husband ran to 2 stores for children’s Tylenol, since it wasn’t available at the first. (Our 4 yr old has had 3 fevers in her life so we don’t stock medicine…of course the 3rd would come at the start of a pandemic!)

At present, we’re in a good place. My husband works as a special ed coordinator at a Philly charter HS, and he is still busy working from home. The school is trying to assess which kids have access (internet, laptop); they will probably start ordering computers for those who don’t this week. He is also trying to figure out how special ed services can be provided remotely during this time.

I work very part time for a yoga studio that will be closing late April. They are offering classes online and through Zoom, which seem well attended, though of course this small business is struggling more than it was before: workshops and trainings have been cancelled.

People in our neighborhood seem, now, to be social distancing. Initially kids were playing with children from other families. I understand it’s tough: we live in a neighborhood of shared driveways and relatively small yards, and if a parent is trying to work from home it’s much easier to send the kids out of the house. But, obviously, sending the kids out is not the point. In the past week, though, I notice this less. So either people are getting the point…or the kids are just tired of being out.

I miss Mass, which makes Sundays hard. I do pray a nightly Rosary through Zoom with the Philly Office of New Evangelization, which has been such a blessing. (Here’s the link: http://www.phillyevang.org/rosary/) I know my parish is keeping the doors open for prayer and Confessions are happening according to the usual schedule. While I could definitely benefit from the graces of Confession (we’re happy to be together…but this social isolation does bring out my worst qualities!) I worry since Confession will be offered in the usual, intimate setting…though our pastor is trying to establish a driveup option of some sort. I need to pray on this.

My sister, outside of Pitrsburgh, is having a harder time, day to day. Her kids are older (5th grade, 3rd grade, and 5 yrs) and their school (they’re in Fox Chapel SD, a well regarded one) is sending home a lot of work, even for art and music classes. The girls need to do this work on the one functioning laptop in the house, which is my sister’s work computer. My sister is working from home for her job-same hours, reduced pay on a sliding scale based on earnings; she’s not quite sure what her pay will look like-so on top of her work she needs to make her laptop available and oversee the girls’ work…plus make sure the kids don’t kill each other and get fed, dressed, etc. I’m glad teachers will still be paid during this time…but so much of this work seems like an unnecessary burden. The girls had to make up a rap about handwashing and do busy-work crosswords for gym. As I understand it, work not completed now will need to be completed later. We’ve been considering homeschool, and this busy work only seems to confirm our instincts. (Why don’t the teachers tell the kids to take a nature walk 30 minutes a day and/or read a classic book and submit a well-written book report for credit? But maybe this is just me-my sister doesn’t much mind…though she does feel overwhelmed trying to work from home and complete the school assignments.)

We are introverts with young kids, so we do have a lot of family time as a rule…but the extra time has been even better. My husband is enjoying spending more time with our 16 month old, who he doesn’t much see in his usual schedule. We’re planning a garden and (some days) scrubbing down walls. We enjoy eating our meals together. I wonder how my sister and other busy families will resume life after this ends-if they’ll still eagerly sign up for activities 4 nights a week plus weekends. Go figure, we signed our daughter up for her first organized sport this spring! It’s cancelled, and the owner of the business tried to convince us to do the program as a webinar. I feel badly-his business, which was all over the area, is obliterated in the near term…but we signed up our daughter to be with kids, not to learn soccer. As of now we’ve not received a refund. I’m not sure if we’ll let it go and consider it a donation, or if we’ll call to insist. (We also haven’t received access to a webinar.) These activities make money for someone and in this way they’re important…but they do (to this introvert) seem like a swirl of activity for nothing.

I worry how I interact with people during this time, largely those people providing a service. (Again, these interactions have been very few.) I cringed when I saw the woman at WalMart pick up who was handling our green beans (she refunded them because the quality was poor). I felt polluted by the man who delivered the beer: I failed to shut the storm door between us during our brief interaction and kept thinking of the CNN story my husband quoted saying deliverymen are very vulnerable since they see so many people. Granted he was taking precautions, too: he wore gloves layered with hand sanitizer. I didn’t feel polluted or polluting when having a short, socially distant conversation with my 80 year old neighborhood. I notice this attitude toward service people (essential and beloved children of God) where I wish they didn’t exist-I wish they were machines. I recognize and am abiding by the social distancing strategy…but how does treating others “like they have the plague” affect my relationship with them? And my relationship to myself? Perhaps, in the case of my neighbor, I was practicing love of other; the service folks are more exposed and so I shifted to self-preservation/self-love. Was this unmerited?

I’ve also been pondering my idea of God. I don’t like to think I buy into MTD stuff…but maybe I do, after all. When my husband found Tylenol (a need: our daughter’s temp was 102.5) I attributed it to a grace from my daily Rosary. Perhaps it was-Our Lady cares about each of us deeply. But…would she care less if God’s will were for my daughter to be sick? To go to the hospital? Even to die? It’s not pleasant to think of…but God’s will is God’s will: I can’t change it, I can only try to conform my will to it. (Prayer of course helps to conform my will to God’s.)

I worry my parents will contract the virus and die. Any trip to the grocery store (which, thankfully, they are limiting) can mean death…but what I’m trying to remember is: it always could. Until now, death has always felt far away. I’m 41 and, not only are my parents and in laws still alive, I’ve a very active grandfather (97) and a failing but lucid and present grandmother (98). I’ve railed in an intellectual way about the lack of tangible limits in modern life…but now here I am, whining because I cannot find dry chickpeas or old fashioned oats. I expect this system I know nothing about (food production and transport) to just work so, with the swipe of a credit card, I can-from just one single shop-find virtually any food I want. Maybe things will go back to the way they were, after this passes. Maybe not. At some point-in my lifetime or otherwise-the pleasant and abundant life I, at least, knew will change. There will be food shortages. Death will be more real and, on a more regular basis, come for the young as well as the old/those with serious and seemingly uncommon conditions. We will be exposed to the reality of limits in a visceral, everyday way. How can I carry these lessons of limits into my life “after” so as not to be complacent, and how can I grow in love for and trust in a God whose will is love and mercy itself…even if it’s not at all what I want?

From Philadelphia:

We got all dressed up this morning for the live streamed Mass at the Cathedral in Philly which we attended from our basement television area.

It strikes me as such a mercy that all the abuse victims are getting a mandated reprieve from close contact with the institutional church. Might not remote access to Jesus and spiritual communion be just the thing that allows us all the time and space to truly grieve the abuse crisis and pray for an outpouring of healing for the victims?

My husband is mainly working from home. Our children attend Catholic classical schools in the region which have switched pretty seamlessly to remote learning.

I’m grateful for the slower pace of life, the family togetherness. I’ve been doing a lot of cooking to feed the hungry hordes. With the teenagers at home all the time now the consumption rate is higher!

We’ve been playing more cards (Pinochle, Rummy, Memory, Go Fish), reading more books (Frankenstein, Middlemarch, Frog & Toad), having dance parties, cleaning parties, laundry folding parties.

My one daughter is catching up on filling knitting orders for her entrepreneurial side venture. Another daughter is learning additional songs on the piano. The boys have been tending toward all manner of outdoor play and Lego extravaganzas. We are enjoying evening softball in the backyard when the weather permits.

Family morning prayer and evening prayer have become the norm.

This morning pranks began in earnest with a theme of dumping cold water upon unsuspecting heads.

I’ve had good conversations with extended family members since gatherings have been cancelled.

Rod, thank you for your coverage of the pandemic, and for utilizing your blog to serve as a hub for connection and community in the midst of all the uncertainty.

You’re quite welcome. Compiling these Pandemic Diaries at day’s end has become a highlight of this interminable waiting. It does my heart good to hear from all of you.

From Southern California:

Not sure you need anything else to get you angry today, but the post on the Selfish Revelers reminds me, too, of the reports of wealthy NYC residents fleeing to the Hamptons/Eastern LI to avoid the virus, like medieval nobles fleeing to Florence to avoid the Plague.

https://indyeastend.com/news-opinion/covid-19/east-enders-angry-over-influx-of-residents/

(My “favorite” account was of a woman in NYC who tested positive, then took mass transit out to Eastern Long Island to try and get into a hospital there).

https://nypost.com/2020/03/19/we-should-blow-up-the-bridges-coronavirus-leads-to-class-warfare-in-hamptons/

And then there’s this gem justifying her hoarding, while wondering why others go hungry.

https://www.bustle.com/p/in-a-pandemic-how-should-we-be-22620538

I have a friend who lives year-round in a small town near the Hamptons, and he’s seeing some of the panicked hoarding first hand. Emails from big realtors asking if he has any places for “immediate rental, April-Summer”. Stores that are normally stocked for the low shoulder season population are not equipped for the glut of panicked wealthy city residents running in to buy everything that isn’t nailed down.

My wife and I are seeing this on a somewhat less exaggerated scale. We live in a town in Los Angeles County. It’s fairly out of the way from everything, and that’s one of the main reasons we like it. In the past few weeks, we’ve seen people renting moving vans and small trucks, filling them with food, water, soda, and whatever else they can grab from the local Ralph’s and Trader Joe’s. When these shops tried to institute caps on how much one could buy–a day late and a dollar short next to the Japanese, Persian, and Pakistani markets which instituted such rationing earlier and effectively–there were nearly fights. Obese women screamed, “Two loaves of bread per household?! Do you know how big my household is?!” while men stacked three shopping carts back-to-back-to-back and filled each to the brim. It was only this week, when a police car began circling the market that such scenes dissipated.

Unfortunately, some of the byproduct of this hoarding is being seen now; whole pineapples, squashes, and bags of oranges are left out by dumpsters to rot. Being a resident of this small town does not make you immune to panicked hoarding. They bought the produce not knowing what they’d do with it, and now it rots while others do without.

This is not to say that it’s been all grim. We’re experiencing scenes out of the Soviet Union as Ralph’s employees, recognizing my wife as a regular customer and a “local”, will whisper when the egg truck will come in, or will find bread or eggs from the back. Not only is this a sign of true community, but it adds to the surreal nature of these times. “Look, comrade, I organized some eggs and butter for breakfast!”

I hope you’re doing as well as can be expected. In the meantime, we use this Lenten season to fast and pray.

From a Mid-Atlantic pastor:

Here in my community/county we have finally had reports of a Covid-19 infection. Our church has not met in person for three weeks now. If we hadn’t implemented online giving some months back, we might be very nervous. Money is coming in, and hopefully we will survive. Some churches won’t, I fear. Our bills haven’t gone away, nor has the substantial mortgage that we have about a year left to pay on.

It is interesting to see friend’s videos online. Some of the younger guys are tech savvy and look pretty natural in front of their tablet of phones. Someone said the older guys look like hostage videos. I wonder how many preachers are online for the first time ever; the number has to be huge. Most of us aren’t that interesting. The Word is, but we aren’t…… The medium does not lend itself to a lengthy sermon; I’ve cut mine in half, knowing that many won’t watch even something short today.

I have reached out to nearly forty people last week, by phone or text. I have tried to connect with nurses especially. They are anxious, though some seem more than others, and I’m sure this has more to do with temperament than anything else. I have no idea how they feel except what they tell me, such as “It’s been rough,” or I’m anxious.” Or “The stress levels have gone up but we are handling it well enough.”

A long time friend, a one hundred year old lady lives in a personal care home not far from here, quarantined, of course. I don’t know how many residents or staff are there, but we found out a few days ago that twenty residents and several staff members are infected. It seems pathetically ironic that someone could live to be a century old and now face the possibility of death this way. I hope they protect her well enough, but time will tell. So far no one there has died that I know of, but you know they are all high risk.

A number of people I know are laid off, or on reduced hours. Friends who work in the restaurant business are seeing few customers, and fear store closings. It seems strange to see empty parking lots at all the fast food places. Walmart is a different story. They may be slowing down some now, but at first you couldn’t tell any difference, except for the empty shelves where paper goods were stocked.

One lady asked her dad how he was handling the stay at home directive. “Fine,” he said. He had gone to Dunkin Donuts to pick up some to give to friends, then went to a local grocery store and then out to eat at somewhere for breakfast….I assume McDonalds. Apparently none of these people watch television.

I find myself thinking of nurses, prisoners (I have friends who work in a state prison here), and all the people who don’t have work, those in the airline industry (I have some friends who work for Southwest), and grocery clerks and the like. Who would have ever thought that kind of work would be risky?

A neighboring pastor says he is going to hold services Easter Sunday, no matter what. I think he is frightened. Pastors are anxious about whether or not people will come back. I know that this particular church is already poor; the pastor has to work at a local garage to survive. I hope he is not foolish enough to risk exposing people to illness. Some pastors have had gatherings and seen parishioners fall ill. I heard today that some Liberty students may have brought Corona back to campus. Crazy! If Anthony Fauci is right, and we continue to be foolish, surely we will get serious about social distancing at some point. After many more have died.

I am cooped up at home with my wife and an adult son. He is mercurial, unemployed, with a history of drug and alcohol abuse, and plagued with anxiety and self-pity, and has always had a short fuse. I said to my wife recently, this is like the Diary of Anne Frank; a handful of people cloistered against their will, who don’t always like each other much. He has been off weed for three weeks. I don’t know if that has helped or hurt as far as his irritability is concerned. He has filled his mind with constant podcasts by some smart people who are all basically pot heads. And he has a Hugh Hefner view of sexuality, which both of us find repugnant. The least thing can set him off. He has used anger as a weapon for a long time. I threw him out of the house once (for five years), but let him back in to keep him from starving or dying on the streets. His presence raises the tension level at home constantly.

I have a ton of books on my ‘to read’ list, but feel restless and cannot seem to focus. You would think this would be the perfect opportunity, but I just can’t relax and enjoy any of it.

From Houston:

Many years ago, I saw English actor Anthony Quayle do a one-man show called “Readings from the Elizabethans.” One of the readings he performed was a 1593 poem by Thomas Nashe (1567-1601) called “In Time of Pestilence.” Quayle’s rendition was so moving that I never forgot it. During the current epidemic, I tracked the poem down on the Internet to read it again. Since Dr. Fauci says that between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans are likely to die of the coronavirus, it seems particularly pertinent. I’m passing it on to you.

In Time of Pestilence

Adieu, farewell earth’s bliss!

This world uncertain is:

Fond are life’s lustful joys,

Death proves them all but toys.

None from his darts can fly;

I am sick, I must die—

Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade;

All things to end are made;

The plague full swift goes by;

I am sick, I must die—

Lord, have mercy on us!

Beauty is but a flower

Which wrinkles will devour;

Brightness falls from the air;

Queens have died young and fair;

Dust hath closed Helen’s eye;

I am sick, I must die—

Lord, have mercy on us!

Strength stoops unto the grave,

Worms feed on Hector brave;

Swords may not fight with fate;

Earth still holds ope her gate;

Come, come! the bells do cry;

I am sick, I must die—

Lord, have mercy on us!

Wit with his wantonness

Tasteth death’s bitterness;

Hell’s executioner

Hath no ears for to hear

What vain art can reply;

I am sick, I must die—

Lord, have mercy on us!

Haste therefore each degree

To welcome destiny;

Heaven is our heritage,

Earth but a player’s stage.

Mount we unto the sky;

I am sick, I must die—

Lord, have mercy on us!

From Virginia:

Thank you for being a voice in the wilderness. I have been reading your posts on The American Conservative for about two years now. Your book, The Benedict Option, was a driving force in my return to Christianity. A short background, I was been raised in a Pentecostal church. As I got older and studied, much of the theology taught about the rapture, salvation, etc., didn’t make sense. For about a decade, while I was in the Navy, I was avowed atheist. In 2017, I learned some valuable lessons, left the Navy, enrolled in college, and started a long path to Christianity. I am now part of a conservative Lutheran church. So many of your posts, references to early Church Fathers, and balance in approaching Christianity, helped me immensely. So, thank you.

I live in a rural area about 45 minutes west of Richmond, Virginia. My local university was about halfway through Spring Break when I received a message we were transitioning to online classes. Initially, the school was essential personnel only and the library had reduced hours. Everything is now shut down. My local congregation made the decision to cancel services. I regularly receive sermons and encouraging messages from my pastor. Our congregation currently does small communion services – no more than ten people, less than 30 minutes with several services offered on Sunday, and you have to reserve a space. It all seems sterile, but communion is very important to Lutherans. Those who are fearful or think they may be sick or could infect others are highly encouraged to stay home.

Today I had to run out and pick-up bread and paper-towels. I have tried to order curbside, Amazon, or through local businesses. Today I had no choice but to go inside and pick-up bread. I was utterly shocked at the number of elderly out shopping! Not shopping for essentials but for pleasure. I am hearing the same from family members who live in Alabama. People are not taking it seriously. Our rural county has had only one documented case of the virus. Fortunately, we have plenty of land between our homes. Yard work has been helpful in keeping the sanity.

I flew home from a quick trip to California more than two weeks ago. On the flights west I cleaned my seats, tray tables and seatbelts. There were looks of bewilderment. Just a few days later on my flights east, masks, hand sanitizer, and wipes were the norm. By the time I left California, many of the schools were closed for a few weeks. Now they are closed for the rest of the current school year.

I hope this email finds you in good health. This is just a snapshot of my world, just west of Richmond. I enjoy your posts and I am looking forward to reading your upcoming book.

From Sonoma County, California:

I live in Sonoma County, California, an hour north of San Francisco in “Wine Country.”

Sonoma County has faced 3.5 years of crisis since the Tubbs Fire in October 2017 when 5200 houses burned.

We went through the terrible smoke from the Paradise Fire in 2018 and last fall’s P, G & E power outages followed by the Kincade Fire—which forced the evacuation of 50K+ people.

When we were told to “social distance” nearly three weeks ago, and then to “shelter in place” 12 days ago, most of my weary friends had the same reaction: at least they’re not turning off the electricity and there’s no fire. How bad can this get?

We’ve watched media from the East Coast aghast—why aren’t those people staying home?

But we’re also getting outside to walk nearly every day of a beautiful spring. I’ve only driven my car twice in the last three weeks.

As a biographer, I’ve gratefully spent the time organizing my exhaustive research. I should start writing the actual book next week.

My husband has been instrumental in planning his international company’s response to COVID-19. We’ve been discussing this issue, constantly, for four months. The company makes one of the parts for the COVID-19 testing equipment and they are hard at work.

Half our adult kids are working from home while sheltering in place. The high-tech machinist works on a government project and goes in. Our daughter is a Los Angeles EMS training officer. She’s the one we worry about. They expect the “surge” within the next ten days.

Our Lutheran church, which has seen 1/3 of our members move away because of the fires, has jumped onto Zoom and YouTube for services and classes. Sunday School classes went live on Zoom today—and the children SS teachers had more kids in their class than on a normal Sunday. Our food ministry distribution went on as usual last week, with one 33-year-old carrying groceries out to the client’s cars. Otherwise, the church is closed.

When my women’s Bible study last met three weeks ago, I tossed aside the planned study and instead, we examined ten Bible verses about fear.

We were feeling shaky with yet another round of crises hitting us. But after reading and discussing the verses, we finished full of encouragement and hope.

I’ll end with the verse we all identified with: “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” —Psalm 23:4

From Pennsylvania:

I live in Western Pennsylvania and teach at a small Christian liberal arts college up here. My wife and I home school our children and my wife teaches part-time for an online Christian Classical school. She teaches chemistry, and they have live video conference classes (kind of like I am doing now with the Coronavirus).

We are generally fine. We live in a small town. My college sent students home, after a few days of indecision. I’m reasonably technologically adept for a political science professor, so my main complaint is that Microsoft Teams isn’t really designed for an academic setting so I’ve been doing video conferences with Zoom, to the consternation of my IT department. Since we home school, we’re used to our kids being home, though this has meant that normal social outlets like playdates, PE, Awana, and library visits are off limits. My oldest (8) actually cried when she heard the library was closed. Our three are all small, and we’re used to spending lots of time together reading, playing board games, and enjoying each others company. But we also live in what’s practically Siberia to my Louisiana bred self, so the all-day-indoor days are wearing.

One college employee has the virus, and a teacher from Awana (kids Bible verse memory church event) has it — my wife also had possibly the worst case of the flu ever, and she, I, and one of our daughters have had constant headaches since, so it’s actually possible we’ve all had it too. No way to know, according to our doctor, until they start producing the anti-body tests one of your other correspondents talked about.

For the most part, we are trying to live life as best we can normally. My wife stocked up on essentials in advance, so I think we’ve only gone to the store once in the last two weeks – out of toilet paper completely, plus lots of other things – the last time I went was the evening of the day Trump finally called it a national emergency and it looked like a Louisiana store before a Cat-5 hurricane hit. Weird too, the stuff people buy. Literally no cereal at Walmart.

The picture below is from dinner tonight. We’ve bought half a cow from a colleague the last two years -a bio prof that has some family land where they raise about 15 cattle. Best money we’ve ever spent. My wife is a wonderful cook who also likes to experiment – so that’s a loaf of challah, a traditional Jewish bread, that was a home school lesson a few years ago and has become a favorite, plus a flank steak (actually cube round in this case) sauteed with potatoes and wonderful sauce, plus oven baked squash and asparagus. It might be my 6 year old’s favorite meal.

We have a family tradition, it’s not in the picture, but we have a little jelly jar we keep on the table with popsicle sticks and on each stick is a prayer request – family, friends, sick relatives, persecuted Christians, daddy’s students. Every night one of the kids picks one and we pray for them. But lately the kids have all been praying for the virus too. My four year old tonight prayed, “God, we pray for this sickness, we pray that no one else would get it, and that you would help the doctors find a vaccine, and that everyone would stay home until then, and the sickness would go away.” Amen.

Last thought, I was really moved by the Texas woman who wrote in on your March 28th diary. I am sorry to hear of her difficult experiences in her fundamentalist church, and her (from how I read her letter) dissatisfaction with the weak sauce of the more liberal churches she has visited. As an encouragement – there is a vast middle ground in between – even in Protestantism. We attend a conservative ACNA (Anglican) church that is neither fundamentalist nor dismissive of the scripture – but is grace filled and loving. Keep looking. And even though the news focuses on dumb or offensive Christians (like the church in Baton Rouge that won’t close, or whatever stupid thing(s) Liberty is currently doing) there are thousands of wonderful churches in this country that are working daily to meet people where they are with the love of Christ.

Here’s one from Los Angeles I was going to save as a View From Your Table, but it seems just right to close out today’s diaries. The sandwich is a shrimp poboy. The beer? From our friends the Benedictine monks of Norcia! American readers can support the monks by ordering their special beer at this website; I just ordered a case for Pascha — hope it arrives in time!

Los Angeles, California

Please keep your diaries coming, readers. I’m at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com; please put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and don’t forget to tell me from where you are writing.

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The Selfish Revelers

My mom told me this morning about an account given by a neighbor of hers, an ICU nurse who works in a Baton Rouge hospital with her husband, a physician. They have been working incredibly hard caring for Covid patients. The other day, they had some time off, and decided to drive far into the country to sit quietly at a place known for being peaceful. When they arrived, they saw about 100 cars parked there, and the quiet spot overrun by picnickers, as if it were the Fourth of July. This couple, who have been watching people fight for their lives, just drove away, shocked and despairing. The nurse said we will never beat this disease if people keep behaving like that — that is, if they act like the stay-at-home orders are no more meaningful than anti-jaywalking laws.

My mom, who has been housebound for weeks now, said that all of us are going to have to stay cooped up even longer because of these selfish idiots. I told her about a friend in suburban Dallas who said the same thing to me yesterday, regarding all the people around him who are acting like this is a long holiday, an opportunity to have fun with their neighbors. My son just got back from a walk around the neighborhood, and said there are a lot of people at the local park, all hanging out close to each other, as if the coronavirus were a myth.

These are not people who have no choice but to go to work because their businesses are considered essential. You think the nurse and her doctor husband, who have children, want to be in the hospital every day? These partygoers are not even people who are breaking lockdown to go to church. These are people who are having fun. Many of them are spreading the virus unawares. They are hurting all of us. The government is gutting the economy because it’s the only way to lessen the mass death from coronavirus — and these self-centered morons are determined to make the pain worse because they don’t want to be troubled to stay at home for the common good.

A lot of people seem to believe that it’s not fair that the authorities are telling us to stay at home. They want to respond to the virus in a way that suits them. As if the virus cares about accommodating your idea of what’s fair and what’s not fair!

This is not a red state/blue state thing, a conservative/liberal thing, a religious/secular thing. This is all of us. What is it with people, refusing to make even a small sacrifice (staying at home) for the common good? Doctors, nurses, hospital personnel, National Guardsmen, grocery store workers, firefighters, police officers — they’re out there on the front lines for all of us. The very least we can do is show solidarity with them by staying at home. That’s not a big ask. But far too many of us have become the kind of people who can’t be bothered to sacrifice anything.

If this is how we behave at the beginning of this crisis, what are we going to do when we are much poorer? It’s coming, you know. There are no good ways out of this crisis — this public health crisis, and the economic crisis it is causing. There are only less bad ways through it. What these selfish people are doing is prolonging the emergency, increasing the pain, and laying the groundwork for something like martial law. And for what? Because they’re bored at home? Because nobody’s gonna tell them what to do? So much for solidarity.

I’m really mad about this.

UPDATE: I’m thinking about having watched the Divine Liturgy livestreamed from our parish this morning. Our priest’s sermon talked about how important fasting and ascetic sacrifices are to our salvation. He said that he’s heard that some parishes are giving permission to the faithful to give up the Lenten fast during this pandemic crisis. This, said our priest, is the wrong approach. We don’t fast because we’re trying to prove something; we fast because it is spiritually good for us. It teaches us that man does not live by bread alone. God has asked us all this Lent to accept extraordinary sacrifices. This we must do, and understand that it is for our own salvation.

I heard this as I watched the service, with my family, on my wife’s laptop. I can’t get over how much these livestreamed services mean to me — even more, to be honest, than if I were standing there in the church. Why? Because this unasked-for ascetic labor of missing the liturgy has sharpened my desire for the liturgy, and for the Eucharist. What’s the saying? “You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.” Not being able to go to church has made me realize how much it means to me. I am sure I will weep when I can finally cross the threshold into the church again, with all my fellow parishioners.

I was thinking too, after the liturgy, of the things I learned this past year from the examples of the great saints — not yet canonized! — of the communist yoke. Dr. Silvester Krcmery, the Catholic physician and lay leader from Slovakia, wrote in his memoir This Saved Us about how, upon entering prison, he set his mind to accepting every deprivation and every torture the communists would lay upon him as an opportunity for deeper conversion. After his first prison beating, Dr. Krcmery thought this:

Even though this was my first experience with this level of violent physical assault, I actually did not feel anything. Perhaps I was in such a state of shock that I was not fully conscious of the pain.

I considered the whole thing a very valuable ordeal. For hours I repeated, “Lord you didn’t disappoint us. You always promised that you would be with us, that you would never abandon us. What could I now possibly bring you as a sacrifice? nothing hurt me. I really have nothing to offer you as a sacrifice.”

Despite everything, in a sense I cherished those wounds. This was after all the only tangible, although insignificant evidence I had that I had offered Christ something.

After this interrogation I found that I had two broken ribs. I was not allowed to see a doctor but in the course of three or four weeks they healed, apparently without consequences.

He chose to accept everything for the sake of his own spiritual purification: “I’m going through all this so I can help others and the Church.” Later, in 1954, when he was on trial, Dr. Krcmery told the communist judges:

We will not allow ourselves to be led to hate, to rebel or even to complain. There are already hundreds of people who can testify to that. That is where our strength and superiority lie. We know how to return good for evil and we know that all our brothers will work harder and more selflessly than others (just as Christ taught us). After all, we are following an old tradition. The first Christians who were persecuted under the Roman empire, though imprisoned by the hundreds, tortured and crucified, were the most self-sacrificing workers, even after they were imprisoned and sent to hard labour in mines. There is no record that we know of which states that they organized any rebellion.

Such faith!

In this great book, Father George Calciu, a Romanian Orthodox priest, spoke in agonizing detail about the suffering of Christians (and all others) in communist prisons. He did two stints in prison there, and like so many others, was tortured. In an interview towards the end of his life, Father George’s interlocutor mentioned to him that everyone she has ever interviewed testifies, as the priest was doing, to the uncanny “spiritual joy” experienced in captivity. Father George explained:

It is impossible for people outside of prison to understand. We were freed and we were very happy to be free, but we had a kind of nostalgia about the prison. And we could not explain it to others. They said we were crazy. how could you miss prison? Because in prison we had the most spiritual life. We reached levels that we are not able to reach in this world. Isolated, anchored in Jesus Christ, we had joys and illuminations that this world cannot offer us. There are no words to express exactly the feeling we had there.

Elsewhere in the interview, Father George says his prison experience removed the veils from reality:

I was very fortunate in that God opened my spiritual eyes to understand the importance of material things and the importance of spiritual things. What is most important for me is that I understood this fight between good and evil, between God and the enemy of God — the devil. Nothing in this world just happens in a mirror. All of these visible phenomena are only a reflection of what happens on the spiritual level, you know.

It’s true. All these people out and about carousing because they can’t bear to make even the smallest sacrifice for the good of all, their deeds reflect what is happening on a spiritual level.

Christian friends, I am not a proselytizer, but if your church or tradition is not teaching you how to orient yourself towards bearing suffering as Father George and Dr. Krcmery were — or as Father George’s prison comrade, the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand was — then it is all but useless, and will chewed up by the dragon that has us in its jaws. I’m not kidding.

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Cuomo’s St. Crispin’s Day Address

It’s not Shakespeare, but it’s pretty damn good, this speech to the New York National Guard. That’s what leadership sounds like. We need more of it.

UPDATE: What is that other New Yorker, the chief executive of the United States of America, saying to his country this morning? This:

What a disgrace. Just a damn disgrace.

UPDATE.2: Dr. Fauci was on TV this morning warning that we are looking at 100,000 to 200,000 American deaths. Meanwhile, Trump was tweeting about how great his ratings are. This is the defining moment of his presidency, even his life. Character really is destiny.

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Pandemic Diaries 13

Hello all. Today we worked in the yard. My wife Julie and our son Lucas put in a small kitchen garden. Julie find a nest of just-hatched baby birds in a clay pot, under the leaves of a plant. It seemed like a sign of life, of hope. I cleaned out the gutters, moved the leftover firewood from our punk winter, and swept the patio. Matthew, our cyclist son, rode out to the Mississippi River levee, and did 55 miles today. He pedaled home down Government Street, one of the main thoroughfares in Baton Rouge. He said it was absolutely dead — nobody driving or walking, nothing. A ghost town. This lockdown is a cancer that is eating away at the economy of our city. But next week will likely be when our hospitals fill up. There seems no way to avoid the hideous pain headed our way, indeed already here.

After I took a shower and washed the dust and the mold from my hair, I put on fresh clothes and sat out on the clean patio, and drank a glass of cold Albariño wine from Spain, a country in my heart and my prayers.

From Texas:

I’m a woman in my early 30s living in a major urban area in Texas, where my city is under a stay at home order. I’m generally from the type of crowd that would consider it a heinous act to write to you, someone labeled as a transphobic, homophobic misogynist. While I don’t agree with a lot of what you say about gender, I still respect you and believe you’re not any more of a bad person than anyone else. Still, I can’t say that I’m doing this to anyone I know lest I be ostracized and condemned for ‘supporting’ you just by conversing with you. While my husband knows I read your posts regularly, he’s the only one I’m comfortable knowing that — and I’m still hiding that I’m writing to you.

Anyway, life under stay at home orders has given me a lot of time to think about where I am in life, though working from home still takes up most of my time. When I’m not giving myself an ulcer from worrying about the pandemic (I have an MPH, so I’ve been worrying about this possibility for a long, long time) or despairing over the idea that this is going to be the second major economic fallout that has truly effed my generation, I think about what my life is and could be. I suppose that’s human nature, though one that my hyper-educated millennial demographic is known and parodied for.

To cut to the point, the reason I feel compelled to write to you is because now that I’ve had sufficient time to take stock of the decisions I have made up to this point, I realize how much I would love to become a mother — and this somehow feels shameful to me. My entire life I was taught in some subtle and not so subtle ways that one’s life is ruined by having a kid, either because it is too soon to have one or because it will ruin your career when you do. Furthermore, having a child — and heaven forbid staying at home with it — is the antithesis of everything feminism has taught me. Why would I have gone through all of this education to throw it all away by becoming a mother? But to me, having a child only to put it in daycare all day while I work isn’t worth it to me. I am supposed to ‘lean in’ to my career ‘despite’ having a child, but all my best memories from childhood come from the quality of time I was able to spend with my stay at home mom. If I am going to have a child, I want to give it the same opportunities for these beautiful memories that I had.

I notice how it is just my husband and me living through this together, and I think about how lovely it would be to be able to spend this much time with a child. Sure, I’ve read so many ‘parenting through the pandemic is hell’ takes, but it seems like such a, dare I say, blessing to have that reality? I want to have this time to go on long walks with my child, showing him or her the different plants growing in the springtime, or play with my kid with the water hose in the grass, or teach my child how cooking works, or just watch the birds at the feeder in the backyard together. All those types of moments that parents say make the rest of it absolutely worth it. I know I tend to romanticize things and that the reality of parenting is probably far removed from this vision, though I can’t shake that that’s where my true talents would lie. And for that I am ashamed.

I also think about how beautiful life was when I believed in God. I was raised in what I now call a fundamentalist church, but believing made the world a wondrous, beautiful place despite the horrors within it. I stopped believing in high school. There’s a long story there, but I hated the direction that American Christianity was taking, replacing love for our neighbor with zeal for the Iraq War, for instance. I couldn’t believe that my gay friend would burn in hell or that God thought it was sinful for a woman to say a prayer for anyone older than an elementary school kid. Much more to unpack here, but through this trying time and others I have found myself yearning for scripture, trying to believe in Christ again. I’ve tried explaining this to my husband, who has never believed in God and grew up only thinking that church was a place you got donuts on Sunday mornings, and I really can’t. It’s a peace beyond any other, which is probably why I return to it in dark moments — like on the night that Trump won the election, I found myself revisiting the Gospels. I read your words in your posts and I’m able to contextualize them in ways my peers simply cannot. I both empathize with you and envy you and your belief.

I’ve tried going back to church, both in the ‘non-denominational’ church I grew up in but also in other more liberal ones, and there have been so many stumbling blocks. First, dragging along a heathen husband who would much rather spending Sunday mornings watching sports and playing video games makes it very difficult. I’ve gone without him too, but then I just stick out in churches filled with nuclear families and it’s also just incredibly hard as an introvert. I’m also pretty surprised that most churches I’ve visited have mostly only said hi to me on Sundays and not pursued me as if my soul was on the line. I’ve also found that I can’t go back to my childhood church without internally screaming at the fundamentalist take on scripture, but neither can I go to the more liberal churches, those open and affirming congregations. This will probably offend some people and I have no way of explaining why I feel this way, but I just don’t buy that these people actually believe in what they’re preaching. I don’t want to go to a Bible class where we talk about racial justice, and if everyone truly believed in the meaning of communion, shouldn’t we be far more reverent than passing notes and whispering and falling asleep?

So here I am, feeling stuck and with no one to talk to during the quarantine. I can’t tell my friends that I wish I had been able to keep my faith and have been a stay at home mom to 2.5 kids by now. I think about my job and how I am good at it, but how I don’t want to do it forever even though we need the money. Instead, I want to have a family and believe in God and raise a child to be a good person…and somehow this is sacrilege!

Of course the hilarity that I want to have a kid and find a community of believers during a pandemic is not lost on me. I do, however, want to thank you for your post Of Poverty and Crooked Hearts. I understand wholeheartedly your fear of losing it all, and I think that fear is what is making me more and more convinced that what I truly want is a family and God. Family is forever (for better or worse sometimes), and true faith is something poverty and hardship should not be able to steal. And what do I have? A job for now, a house, a car, and a retirement account or at least what’s left of it?

Thank you for all your writing. I wish you and your family the best.

From Michigan:

I live in a small city in West Michigan. People here seem to be doing a good job of self-isolating and social distancing even before Governor Whitmer’s stay-at-home executive order (March 23), although I think it took most people by surprise when the state closed the K–12 schools on March 12. There was a burst of panic shopping and empty shelves that weekend; thanks to you, my family was already prepared. There’s lots of social pressure online to keep people in their homes, plus plenty of encouraging local gestures of goodwill that build solidarity — people are sewing homemade masks for healthcare workers, local distilleries are making hand sanitizer to sell to the community and deliver by the pallet-load to the local hospital free of charge, that sort of thing. My wife and I have reached out to our high-risk neighbors and check in on them regularly.

I work for a Christian college that shifted quickly and efficiently to remote courses, sending most of the students home after Spring Break instead of bringing them back to campus. I’ve been very impressed by the college’s response — not least because they sent out an email several weeks ago (well before the state shut-down) assuring all regularly scheduled employees, whether part- or full-time, that we would continue to receive our full pay and benefits during the pandemic, regardless of our ability to work. I can’t tell you what that’s done for employee morale and the sense of security that’s given us. While Fallwell and Liberty University are making national headlines, it’s helpful to see other Christian colleges (one is tempted to say “real” Christian colleges, but one must resist) doing the right thing.

Contrast my Christian college’s response to a nearby public university where my sister-in-law works. They’ve reduced or eliminated paid hours for all non-essential employees, forcing them to draw down their sick pay or vacation hours if they want to continue getting a paycheck. From what I understand, many of them are at risk of losing their health benefits, too. Coronavirus aside, my brother has type-1 diabetes; losing health insurance right now would be catastrophic for them. Additionally, he’s been symptomatic (body aches, fatigue, slight fever) but hasn’t been able to get tested for coronavirus yet. He’s self-quarantined per doctor’s orders, waiting and nervous because his diabetes is a high-risk comorbidity.

I spoke briefly with a friend who is a health care practitioner at the local hospital about their capacity to deal with an influx of COVID-19 patients. He said the hospital has 10 dedicated ICU rooms, plus a handful of mobile ventilators. He figures they’ll be able to handle 20–30 coronavirus patients at most, with a max of 15 patients on ventilators (including those who need to be on ventilators for reasons unrelated to coronavirus) before they’re overwhelmed — but he expects the major hospitals at a large city nearby to bear the brunt of it in our area.

We’re sitting tight and praying a lot. All this forced togetherness has been good for our family. Hang in there, everyone!

From Atlanta:

I’m in my early 30s, live in suburban Atlanta, and work in the staffing industry. I’m fortunately able to work remotely. When I do venture out, it’s strictly for food or medicine, or to prepare for my upcoming move. With the lighter traffic, warm temperature, and blooming plants it feels like Spring Break or Memorial Day, except with a brooding anxiety. People have been good about social distancing; the biggest “everyday” issue so far is that toilet paper is impossible to find.
My fiancee and I live in an apartment complex and regrettably have no relationships with our neighbors–probably not uncommon for people in our situation (not that there’s a whole lot neighbors could do in a time of social distancing). Fortunately our property management is very community-oriented and has been great about communication and taking precautions. I’d be very interested to learn how people are showing solidarity (or not) in different types of living accommodations.The mayor of Atlanta has shown good leadership, issuing a 2-week shelter-in-place order earlier this week.Of course, this only applies within the Atlanta city limits–the millions of people living in the surrounding metro area live under a variety of orders.Governor Brian Kemp has been less impressive. He has declined to declare a statewide shelter-in-place, arguing that the situation varies across the state and it doesn’t make sense to kneecap the economy in counties without any reported cases. Various state political and medical figures are criticizing him, calling for the whole state to be shut down. I’m sympathetic to his argument but don’t think it’s a wise approach while we still have such limited testing capability.


As I mentioned, I work at a staffing company and am on the front lines of COVID-19’s economic destruction. We’ve sadly had to lay off a number of employees, and our clients have instructed us to terminate the assignments of many of our contractors. Many clients have implemented hiring freezes, although some areas–healthcare for example–are doing pretty well.

I went into HR partly because I know firsthand the pain of being unemployed and wanted to help people find meaningful work. Ending someone’s employment is usually difficult, but when someone loses their job from no fault of their own, on top of having to worry about potentially contracting a nasty, possible fatal disease, it’s especially depressing. Despite the fear, anxiety, and tension, it’s been inspiring to see the support, concern, and solidarity I’ve encountered in my work. I would humbly request you and your readers to include those of us who are trying to find people work and who are in employee-support roles in your prayers.
There’s been a lot of talk about how the COVID-19 pandemic will change things. I’m not very sanguine about deep, fundamental change happening, but it would take something like this pandemic to bring about major change. I do think we’ll see more support for things like better (mandatory?) paid leave, unemployment benefits, some kind of socialized healthcare, better public health operations, and possibly UBI. This will be true especially among my generation (millenials), having been hit with first the Great Recession and now the COVID-19 pandemic.

Speaking of change, if we really want to change our everyday lives, now is an excellent time to start. Now is a time to reflect on what we value–and what we want to value–and to work on ways to put that into practice. Yes, policies from the government or employers could make our lives better, but we shouldn’t wait or depend on politicians, bureaucrats, or CEOs to act–it’s up to us to do it ourselves, and ultimately, bottom-up change will be better than top-down engineering. For my part, I’m grateful for the extra time to be able to journal and perform a “life inventory.”

A final note–I’ve been struggling with spirituality for a long time. I’ve felt drawn to Orthodoxy but it feels like my “religiosity switch” is stuck between On and Off. With this pandemic, I sense a change; I know it’s a cliche that people run to God when they are afraid or are suffering–but this doesn’t feel like frantic fleeing, but more like a new awareness of a supportive presence…it’s difficult to explain, but it’s there.

From Oklahoma:

I am a 63 year old special education teacher (and Orthodox convert) in rural northeastern Oklahoma. I have an autoimmune disease, Sjogren’s Syndrome,  for which I have taken hydroxychloroquine for 20 years. At the beginning of March, I became aware of the research using it and zinc to treat COVID 19. My current prescription wasn’t quite up but I was able to refill it a bit early. I had a feeling there might be a run on it. I was right. A few days later Trump began talking about it.  I called my local pharmacist who informed me that the drug was now unavailable. He orders from 5 different wholesalers and all of them had been cleaned out, presumably by the Feds.

I get the impression that people think this drug is only used to treat malaria, and who has malaria anymore, right?  But millions of patients like me, with a wide variety of autoimmune diseases rely on it. It helps regulate our wacked-out immune systems, reduce inflammation, debilitating fatigue and pain.  We are already at higher risk for COVID 19 because of our pre-existing conditions. Add to that, most of us are also on some kind of immunosuppressive therapy which further heightens the risk.

So why is there such a shortage when it is only available by prescription?  I refer you to two articles recently published by ProPublica. The first is regarding lupus patients that are unable to get the drug (Lupus is only one of many diseases treated with hydroxychloroquine).

https://www.propublica.org/article/lupus-patients-cant-get-crucial-medication-after-president-trump-pushes-unproven-coronavirus-treatment

The second article is a disturbing investigation into the hoarding of hydroxychloroquine by DOCTORS.   https://www.propublica.org/article/doctors-are-hoarding-unproven-coronavirus-medicine-by-writing-prescriptions-for-themselves-and-their-families

Our governor has placed restrictions on dispensing the drug, presumably to prevent this kind of behavior but that doesn’t help very much when the shortage is on a national level.  So for now, I’m reducing my daily dosage by half to try and stretch out my current supply. I am so incredibly frustrated and yes, angry, with the ineptitude of our president and the selfishness of the hoarding physicians who should know better. Let me be clear. I don’t begrudge medical staff on the front lines of this pandemic having access to it if it might help them.  But shouldn’t patients who are already taking it for serious, incurable autoimmune diseases at least go the head of the line for what is left?

I’m betting Donald Trump does.

From Israel:

I’m writing from a small town in Israel, where the rainy season is coming to an end and the sun has started to show its face for summer – not that any of us are outdoors enough to see it. Social-distancing measures have been in place for about two weeks now; those two weeks have felt like decades, but the swift response seems to have kept our coronavirus numbers relatively low, God willing. As of yesterday, we’re in complete lockdown, with all non-essential businesses closed and trips of more than a few minutes’ walk outside the house prohibited.

On a personal level, my husband and I have experienced this time as a kind of complicated gift. We’ve suddenly been forced to reorient our lives around the most basic and fundamental elements of the human condition: our home, our family, our religious life, and our physical health. We both work at home now, and my studies have been moved to Zoom, so our little house has become the exclusive geographical nucleus of our lives. The daycares are all closed, so I’ve become a stay-at-home mom to our 11-month-old by default, and I’ve gotten to see lots of glorious baby moments that I would otherwise have missed. Because so many other things have been stripped away (commuting, social gatherings, errands), we’ve been able to devote more time and effort to prayer, study, reading and writing, and avodah shebalev – the work of the heart, or the elements of religious and spiritual practice that are more difficult to categorize. My husband is learning more Torah than he has since he left yeshiva, and after the first few days of initial shock, I’ve found my anchor in learning as well. 

And now that all of these things have been forcibly highlighted for us, I wonder how we ever lived according to other priorities – bear in mind that it’s only been two weeks. On the one hand, I’m painfully aware that this understanding comes at a high, high cost in human lives and societal stability. On the other hand, I can’t help but hope that humanity in general, and our small family in particular, will build something beautiful in the rubble of this crisis: that the destruction is an opportunity for tikkun, repair, of the things that were already broken in our world.

Our provincial town has mostly been spared so far. There have been a few exceptions, mostly before the social distancing really began, and here I’ll share two of the most instructive. A well-loved and hugely influential rabbi and teacher in our community was diagnosed with coronavirus, but only after several days of teaching at the local high school, leading prayers, and hosting a festive communal meal for Purim (I’ll get to that in a moment). As a result, all of the staff and students of the high school, as well as many of the adults in the community who learn and pray with him, were sent into 14 days of quarantine. Miraculously, he seems to have recovered completely, and only one of his colleagues ended up getting sick. 

There was also a case in a neighboring town where a woman immersed in a mikvah, a ritual bath, and then discovered she had the virus; all the other women who immersed that night were quarantined, and I don’t know whether any of them were infected in the end. (There’s a difficult and interesting conversation about the mikvahs going on at the moment; it’s complex both from the perspective of Jewish law and from an emotional standpoint, as it throws in stark relief many of the questions of self-sacrifice that all religious communities are grappling with right now. But that’s a subject for another post.)

This is to say that Jewish life holds a specific set of pitfalls in a pandemic, one that I suspect has raised Israel’s numbers higher than they otherwise would be. Religious Jewish men, as well as some women, congregate for prayer three times a day. Shabbat, the Sabbath, is a weekly day of total immersion in community – prayer, public Torah reading, lessons and social activities for kids, and huge meals that bring together not only the family but guests from outside the family. Shared learning is commonplace, as are various forms of help to others in the community (checking in on the sick, cooking for new mothers, visiting and comforting mourners in their homes, etc.). And the use of technology is largely forbidden on Shabbat and holidays, which means that virtual connection is often not an option in the moments when we will most need it.

This is especially true of the particular period in which the virus has hit: the weeks between Purim and Pesach (Passover), a stretch of time usually experienced as redemptive. Most Israelis are not religious (your humble narrator isn’t a fair representation), but most take part in at least some religious traditions and customs; while the things I’ve listed above may be less relevant for the non-practicing, almost everyone observes the holidays. And what are the holidays these days? 

On Purim, the chaotic and whimsical celebration of the events recounted in the Book of Esther, Jews dress up in costumes, come together for public readings of Esther, dance together, give one another gifts, open their doors to all comers for celebratory meals, and – in a departure from our usually staid ways, documented as early as the Talmud – get rip-roaring drunk. In times that mandate introversion, it’s a recipe for disaster; it took place in the first days of the pandemic, before people were really starting to take it seriously. 

And then there’s Pesach, which I’ve always believed is the most beautiful holiday of the Jewish calendar: a holiday that celebrates the string of miracles in the Exodus, which we are commanded to experience “as though we ourselves went out of Egypt.” As many of your readers may know, the holiday is marked primarily with a seder, an experiential gathering that combines learning, storytelling, food, song, and prayer. A family seder routinely sets places for as many as 30 people, if we account for all the members of the family, including children, and the handful of other guests. As part of the ritual structure, we pass symbolic food and drink to one another and wash one another’s hands. 

This Pesach, we will have to dramatically change the way we mark this holiday, or we will open ourselves up to serious danger. We will be hosting seder in our house, just the two of us and our baby; I know many single people who will be doing it solo. A communal and national miracle, a communal and national deepening of the connection to God, will have to be experienced alone and in small groups. In a way, we could read it as a shift in the point where we enter the story: we are not walking together between the raised walls of the Red Sea, but rather sitting in our houses with blood smeared on our doorposts, praying that the plague will pass. 

It’s an entirely new paradigm, a sudden jolt from the plural to the singular, that may help to balance us in the long term but which is devastation in the short term.

This brings me to another point which I feel is important to make, and which may resonate with readers of this blog. It has been widely documented, both in English-language and Hebrew-language media (including by you, several posts ago), that Haredi (“ultra-Orthodox”) Jews are not complying with social distancing regulations. Indeed, the results have already been frightening; as an example, the Satmar Rebbe, the head of one of the largest and most famous Hasidic sects, now has coronavirus, which means that many of his Hasidim likely will develop it as well. 

Most of the writers documenting this from the outside characterize it as religious zealotry: a total faith in God and obsession with observance that precludes even the most basic measures of self-preservation. I don’t come from this community – the world in which I live could be described as “modern Orthodox,” and has a relationship to contemporary Western society which is probably similar to that of most Dreher readers – but it’s clear to me that the picture is much more complicated than that.

Here I’ll translate a Facebook post by the popular writer Yehuda Gizbar Fenigstein:

“A few things that need to be said about the Haredi sector (full disclosure: I’m not Haredi, I just grew up in a Haredi neighborhood. Sorry about all the broad generalizations; obviously this isn’t true of everyone. Readers are invited to weigh in)

Their homes aren’t meant to hold everyone. As in, literally, a nuclear family isn’t supposed to be able to fit everyone in the house. That happens only on holidays, and even then there are mattresses spread out on the floor. Usually the sons are in yeshiva, the father works or learns, the daughters are in school (they sleep at home, but don’t study or work there), and so on. These are huge families and relatively small homes, and so there is a certain dependence on public spaces (parks, streets, synagogues) where the kids and the parents spend their time; those are the places where life happens.
The ability to maintain large families is usually based on support from within the community: educational frameworks, children playing together, nearly-free summer camps during breaks from school (ten shekels per day [translator’s note – this is like paying three dollars per day for summer camp]), older girls looking after the younger girls, and the boys operating within their own social sphere. When none of this exists and everyone is stuck at home, it becomes a pressure cooker. Think of your family and the amount of interaction within it, multiply it by three or four, and make the house one square meter smaller. That’s what it looks like.
They don’t have Internet. That is, some do, but fewer than in the general population, and it’s only at work, at the library, maybe for a select few at home – and even that has strict browsing limits. There’s grocery delivery, but not to the same extent. There’s exposure to certain websites, but not to social media (with the exception of online Haredi forums). Unlike us, they aren’t totally immersed enough to know what’s going on all over the world, and not enough to get enough information to realize that people are dying from this whole story. That’s true for many people who aren’t on Twitter, but it’s a thousand times more true for people who don’t have Facebook and barely have WhatsApp with browsing limits. A significant percentage of them just don’t really know what’s going on.
I’m not trying to make excuses for people who go out of their houses. I think that this is a matter of saving lives [translator’s note – the phrase used is pikuach nefesh, the Jewish injunction to save lives that overrides almost every commandment in the Torah], and we need to shut ourselves up in our houses as though there were Cossacks outside. Like everyone else, it drives me crazy when people go out of their houses, and public gatherings (secular and religious alike) seem to me at the moment like lethal dangers which should be prohibited by law. I’m just saying that generally speaking, in extreme situations, people are driven to accuse the other, the outsider, and to forget that other people – whom, fundamentally, we don’t understand at all – are also human beings.”

In other words, it’s convenient and comforting to scapegoat Haredim, but they have good reasons for what looks like irrational behavior from the outside.

I’ll rephrase this in more Dreherian terms for emphasis: this is a radical communitarian society built expressly to enable the mutual service of God, one which relies heavily on religious institutions and shared spaces built by the community, a sort of Benedict Option lived by millions. And precisely the principles which keep it healthy, functional, and even inspiring in ordinary days – fellowship, mutual support, large families, resistance to technology, and of course an overarching religious devotion that steers one’s every decision – are the principles that make it so dangerous in a pandemic. I don’t think it’s entirely fair to castigate the Haredim for not being able to re-engineer their entire society in a matter of days, or for being reluctant to do so. I pray that they will be able to change just enough to survive, and at the same time that they will preserve the many crucial and wonderful things that they have managed to create. 

Ironically, in my own community and probably yours as well, it’s our connection to the modern world – which so often can be fraught, complicated, antagonistic – which has helped us. Our dependence on social media and our alienation from one another may be mousetraps in peacetime, but in plague-time, they may save our lives.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov teaches that God is found even in the “hiddenness within hiddenness,” in the places where we can’t see Him and don’t even sense that He might be concealed. I’ve started to see this teaching in my own relationship to modernity. God is there too, acting through certain facets of the modern world, and this pandemic has only revealed what was already present. 

I hope that this will also be true of the plague as a whole: that even there, God will be found. And I hope that Pesach, a yearly experience of redemption and closeness, will once again redeem us.

(I’m acutely aware that I can’t call myself a spokeswoman either for Jews or for Israelis. I’d be thrilled if other readers from either or both of these categories would chime in, should they happen to exist.)

Thank you, readers. Thank you so much. Keep them coming to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. Please put PANDEMIC DIARIES in the subject line, and don’t forget to say from where you write.

The post Pandemic Diaries 13 appeared first on The American Conservative.

Behind Quarantined Doors

A reader sent this in as a Pandemic Diary. I’m going to take it out of the normal PD rotation because the things she brings up are worth a post of their own. She asks me to hide some personal details so she doesn’t risk losing her job. I’ve done a little bit of editing to make it harder for her to be identified by location:

I wanted to share our “pandemic diary” mostly because I think writing this will be helpful for me to process.

My husband and I live around a major Midwestern city with our 3 kids (ages 6, 5 and 2). We are very fortunate in that we are both “essential” right now. He is a [government job] and I am a nurse. Even more fortunate for us, because of the nature of my role in the hospital, I can work from home.

I work at a big hospital in our city, and part of what I do involves some contract work for the pharmaceutical industry. You and Wyoming Doc were the first ones to alert me to the supply issues. I voiced out loud to my office, the fact that so many of our client’s products are made, at least partly, in China. The first response I got was a scoff that no one was going to catch the coronavirus from medications manufactured in China. Believe it or not, without rolling my eyes, I patiently explained that the sick Chinese workers were not making the medications. THAT was the concern. Eyes widened around the room as the realization set in. I texted my husband that day and told him to buy all the children’s Tylenol and ibuprofen that Kroger had.

Your reporting continues to be a couple steps ahead of everyone else and I thank you for that. Last week I had a call from a large wholesaler requesting a drop ship of some Albuterol inhalers. That evening I checked your blog and saw your title included “Albuterol shortage.” My heart sank into my chest and I cried. Everything suddenly felt so heavy.

My parents are my biggest source of worry right now. Twenty years ago, God told my parents to open a Christian daycare center in our small, rural town. They were obedient and while it has had struggles (my brothers and I jokingly refer to those early years as the “dark ages” of hand me downs and vacation-less summers and store brand everything) they have been blessed. My mother has the strongest faith of anyone I know. Two years ago, they expanded and added a Christian elementary school. They did this at the urging of my brother after he read your book The Benedict Option. They employed sixteen people and enrolled over 50 students until last week when the state closed everything. My mother has cried every day since.

Both of my parents are “boomers” who won’t acknowledge their fragility. My brother has nicknamed this pandemic “the boomer remover.” My father, who is a Marine veteran was diagnosed with bladder cancer five years ago. A direct result of the contaminated water he drank during bootcamp at Parris Island. He has recovered well, after having his bladder removed and several rounds of chemo. He refuses to give up his side hustle as a paramedic and volunteer firefighter and I can’t completely fault him. Most of the other guys are also his age. And in their small town if he doesn’t go, who will? I told him I hope he catches it now before the ventilators are all used up.

I have read they are coaching doctors for when the time comes of choosing who lives and dies. Obviously, it’s a terrible situation to be in. However, I’ll admit that the current utilitarian recommendation of the ventilators going to the youngest upsets me. My father spends his nights “running squad” and has 16 employees and over 50 children depending on his business, plus his own family. I know 30 year olds who don’t even pay their own cell phone bills and mom still does their laundry. Anyway, this is a selfish side rant.

In the small town I grew up in there is a lot of poverty. I find a huge disconnect between my small town and the upper class suburban world in which I work. In my office, most of my coworkers are pharmacists and make roughly three times my salary. I am routinely shocked by how oblivious they are to what is happening in rural and small town America. As a side note, none of them can comprehend WHY anyone voted for Trump ever. They really just don’t get it.

I was in the office the day the schools were ordered closed. One coworker across from me was almost hyperventilating watching the stock markets. “Do you know how much money we just lost?!” she screeched on the phone to her husband. Others were checking their retirement accounts. My heart is heavy for the kids whose only safe place is school. Once this is all said and done, and the schools open back up, there will be children who won’t come back. They will have vanished and no one will have known what happened to them.

The darkness that will be hidden in homes, locked up for quarantine’s sake, makes me nauseous. Fort Worth has already reported a spike in child abuse cases in their ER. Bad dog bites, head trauma, and kids left in closets and thrown against walls by parents who are stressed, have lost jobs, and don’t have a school to send them to. My husband and I adopted our oldest from foster care. I know what those kids go through. My husband volunteered last week to deliver meals to kids. Of course it was to apartment buildings that reeked of weed, and for the sake of kids who had been waiting all day for him to get there to eat. Some of them wouldn’t open the door until they knew for sure he wasn’t a cop. What will happen to those kids when the economy sinks even more?

Anyway, I’ll wrap this up. We have a yard and a trampoline and a membership to Sam’s Club and two paychecks. We are doing significantly better than a lot of people right now. I sometimes worry, selfishly, that I may get pulled back to work the floor. If it wasn’t for my children I would have offered to already but my family comes first. If that happens I will do what I can.

I appreciate this so much. My first thought — my urgent thought — is, “What can we do for those kids?” And then my second thought: probably not a lot. God knows I don’t say that as an excuse, but just as a stone cold look at reality. If these kids are going to school, at least teachers and others there can keep an eye out for evidence of abuse. But if they’re quarantined? If their parents have no work? If their parents, or parent, are of no account? A firefighter friend who serves the inner city once told me that in terms of parental neglect, the world that he works in is like another planet. People from solid middle and working class families, he said, cannot imagine how broken the family systems are there. And this was in normal times!

What is the alternative, though, to leaving those kids in their homes? To open the economy and the schools back up, and spread this virus around more, overwhelming hospitals in more places, and killing a bunch more people — including the caregivers of some of those children?

We have run right into the reality of the limits of what money and technology can do. We are having our noses ground into the reality that life is tragic. I realized as I typed that that I never finished commenting on The Plague here — that I finished the Camus novel last week, but was so caught up in all the other drama that I never wrote about the rest of it here. Now the electronic edition I borrowed from the library has ended, and I can’t get it back. I’m so sorry, readers. I dropped the ball on that one. Anyway, the reason I thought about The Plague is because it’s about one’s moral duty to do what one can to cure, and if one can’t cure, then to abide with the suffering, and accompany them. I’m thinking about how angry my sister’s cancer made all of us around her, how it humiliated us: there was not a damn thing we could do to stop it. Doctors were throwing everything they had at it, but still, it wasn’t enough. In this plague, this cancer, we can’t save all those children locked behind those doors. Maybe we can save some, serve some? What does it mean to bear with those children? I’m asking for ideas in total sincerity, because my heart is breaking here, and the impotence one feels in the face of this pandemic is enraging.

In The Plague, there’s this character, Rambert, a Parisian journalist who spends a lot of his time and energy trying to figure out how to get himself smuggled out of the quarantined city, so he can go back to Paris and the woman he loves. He keeps being frustrated in that. Eventually he learns that his place is there in Oran, helping Dr. Rieux care for the sick and the dying. That there is more meaning in sharing the suffering of others than in escaping pain. That is our guide for this time — but how in the world do we relieve the pain and suffering of those children, and their families?

Seriously, what can we do?  How can we support workers and organizations who are on the front lines trying to help?

(By the way, though I made all my commentary about the child abuse and neglect question, readers should feel free to comment on other things this reader brought up, including the plight of small towns and rural areas, and worry about parents.)

UPDATE: If you haven’t done so already, now would be a very, very good time to buy Chris Arnade’s book Dignity, which is about the lives of the American poor.

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Pandemic Diaries 12

From London:

Hi, I am writing as a university undergraduate studying in London. Students, local or international, have left the campus in the last two weeks. What I saw very often in last week is that vans and trucks are moving student’s belongings out. I live in a flat inside the campus and all my flatmates have been gone. There are also a few cases being recorded in the campus (so far, no one I know has been tested positive)I will be departing tomorrow (I live outside the UK), which is one week earlier than what I have initially planned. Flights have become rare so I am grateful to get on one of them. Who knows whether all flights will be cancelled? Who knows when the lockdown will be over?

This morning, PM Johnson and Health Minister Hannock have been tested positive for COVID-19. I think that the virus is pretty much like the Spanish flu (however the casualties are less catastrophic), which infects indiscriminately: Rich, poor, famous, unknown, young, old, healthy, unhealthy, etc. This makes me more alarmed about my protection. I have two boxes of facial masks and have stayed in my room most of the time. While my family (outside the UK) is very worried, I am still quite confident that I will be safe with my precautions. However, it is easy to panic after watching the news and I struggle to calm myself down.

On Monday I was in a van with the van driver. I told him that I used to believe that it is just flu before things get out of control. The driver replied that people were having usual lives until last week, and they have never seen anything like that in their lifetime. I told him that the West is being too complacent in the past and explained that why Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea are doing relatively better is that they have experienced similar pandemics 20 years ago so they have fresh memories on how to prepare. Politicians and leaders on the right must act now to curb the pandemic or else the right will be in exile for a generation or two since they will be punished for the fiasco they failed to handle.

University teaching has shifted online and it is an appealing experience. I am quite adapted to face-to-face teaching as I am more serious when I am in front of a teacher. This also has something to do with the attitude. People tend to be laxer when learning at home and I found myself more distracted when having online classes. The church is probably the same — an online church service cannot give what a real church service can. I probably need more time to adapt to the changes. Hope not that these changes will be longlasting.

A silver lining of this pandemic brought to the UK is that people have put Brexit debates aside and contribute themselves to the anti-pandemic effort. Last night, millions of Britons cheered for the NHS workers. However, there are still some malicious people who cheered when Johnson announced that he has been tested positive for COVID-19. Some people have lost their sympathy and are unlikely to regain them again.

One thing that makes me particularly concerned is the economic devastations that the pandemic can bring. Studying in university does not mean that I am unaffected by the pandemic. I initially plan to get an internship this summer, but no one will be hiring in the foreseeable future. The longer the pandemic lasts, the longer the economy will recover. Even though the pandemic ends in Europe and North America within months, the economy is globally integrated. Until we are certain that the virus can no longer harm humanity, the economy will still be affected. The prospect of me unable to find a job after graduation become very real (I still have two years of study to go).

Another thing that makes me worried is that the effect of the pandemic to society. The prediction that there will a 30% unemployment rate in the USA is becoming a reality. Imagine the chaos that would bring. I believe that there will be unrests in the future that will make 1968 looks like a child’s play. Both the left and the right will be radically changed in the following years. The world in a few years will be unrecognisable, things unimaginable today may happen in the future. In 1928, Hitler was a nobody in politics and his party only receives a few prevents of the votes, but after a 30% unemployment rate induced by the Great Depression (which is coincidentally the same with the predictions made by economists now), he was the leader of the country. As a person who favours stability, I want to avoid chaotic outcomes, but for me, and probably you, can only accept the fate and seize the time to prepare whatever will happen in the future. I am a Gen Z Christian (from Asia) and this pandemic can be a disaster or a blessing for the church. If we can repent our sins, change our lifestyles to the way that our Lord desires and help the poor and the sick, then we may have changed a lot of people’s mind. As various studies have told young people are not Christians mostly because of that the church has become irrelevant to them. This is the time to make the church relevant again. However, the possibility that Christianity in the world would be dramatically weakened also exist. I agree that the entertainment-based churches in the US will be gone after pandemic hardship that is prolonged for years by economic devastations. I have heard that Bolsonaro, the president supported by many evangelicals in Brazil, is blasted for inadequate action against the pandemic. I think that Brazilain Christians will also be discriminated after the fiasco is over for their support over the president. Churches in South Korea was blamed for spreading the virus (to be fair, the church that spread the virus is heretical). South Korans maintain a very strong shame culture so Christians there will be targeted by the public outrage and shame campaign after all is over. The Benedict Option is needed beyond the West after this crisis.

Just some random thoughts from an ordinary young man. I may write again when I return to my homeland.

From New York:

I’m an American student who just yesterday returned from studying overseas. Travelling right now is like going through ghost towns. Coming into major international airports with nobody at the immigration halls, seeing essentially nobody in baggage claim halls; for someone who travels quite a bit, its like walking through mausoleums to the globalized life. It was really chilling to see so many of the stores in airports closed down, really only leaving the restaurants open, and even then only the ones that prioritized takeout food. Planes were almost entirely empty, the plane from London to Atlanta was almost totally bare, and the one that took me back home to NY was even barer. When we landed in Atlanta, we got a brief visit on the plane from CDC people in PPE and thermometers, but I don’t know if that’s because we were in their backyard or if its now standard procedure anywhere international flights are coming in. In any case, it feels good to be home, even if it’s during a crisis.

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