I don’t know what it was about last week. It was a hard week to post anything on this blog. It was not so much about the stay at home order by Governor Walz. Ruthie and I, with all our injuries have had a lot of practice staying at home, and not by choice. Ruthie is up to close to a year and half of staying at home due to the injuries she received after having been run over by a pickup truck. I have been at home for over 9 months from the time I fell down the steps at Suel Printing company, with surgeries spaced over three months.
Covid-19 has turned into a 21 century version of the Black Plague that decimated all of Europe in the Middle Ages. As the Black Plague turned Europe inside out, so has Covid-19 done the same to our modern society with all its sophistication and technology.
I spent a part of last week calling and talking with those isolated by this worldwide illness. You can almost smell the fear of people in the air. We all like to be in control. We all like to think that we control our own destiny. It is something in which we take great pride, isn’t it? Covid-19 has revealed what an incredible myth, what an incredible hoax this kind of thinking truly is. It is very humbling and frightening to know that something so microscopic as a virus can bring down someone in the peak of health.
Before our retirement, Ruthie and I spent our careers ministering to many who were sick and many who were dying. Ruthie’s ministry was as a nurse to the elderly and chronically ill in nursing homes. My ministry was in a parish setting. We are not strangers to death. I have personally danced rather closely with death on four different occasions in my life. We reflected about how nature has a way of culling old life so as to allow new life to happen. Prairie fires and forest fires occur naturally in nature, the blackened plant life absorbed into the soil, fertilizing it, and out of its dead ash new vibrant life sprouts. Over and over again, the Phoenix rises from its ashes to live again.
What makes humanity think that the same cannot occur to us? Plagues have historically visited and devastated human populations. The Bubonic Plague (aka Black Death), Typhoid, Smallpox, Yellow Fever, Cholera, Measles, Spanish Flu, Encephalitis, London Flu, Ebola, HIV/AIDS, Polio to name just a few. This has been a recurring, tragic part of human life.
The other thing Ruthie and I have talked about is the extraordinary courage of nurses, nurses aides, doctors, EMT’s, law enforcement. So often we lay the mantle of bravery and courage upon soldiers who storm beachheads under extreme fire from enemy weapons fired from secured and fortified positions. Our medical personnel can be numbered among our heralded heroes and heroines as they minister to those critically afflicted and those dying from this invisible enemy.
So often during times like these, churches are filled with people seeking solace and some sort of certainty. The churches were filled following 9/11. Denominations that previously had damned one another as heretics gathered together for mutual prayer. Somehow, something as tragic as terroristic attacks opened our eyes, minds, and hearts to the fact that we all worship the same God. We found mutual comfort in our gathering to pray.
It is paradoxical that the mutuality for which we long in our worship communities is being denied us. What a cruel trick it is that in gathering together to pray, we might actually be condemning ourselves to death. It redefines the meaning of the word church. The word Church no longer is isolated to just a church building. The word Church goes beyond a mere building. In our forced isolation, we, as families, are rediscovering the ancient tradition of the home church. That wonderful anchoress of Middle Age Norwich, Julian, wrote that God is closer to us than our souls. God is not confined only to a church building, but rather God is more attached to us than our very soul.
As Julian looked out of the window of her little cell attached to St Julian’s Church in Norwich, England, she looked out on a city ravaged by war and disease. Rather than be overwhelmed by the horror that lay outside her cell, she was at peace. Christ appeared to her in a mystic vision and told her, “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all matter of things shall be well.” As we look out the windows of our homes upon our world so broken by the Covid-19 virus, let the reassurance spoken to Julian by Christ resonate in our ears. “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all matter of things shall be well.”
