Unless you’re on the front lines fighting the spread of COVID-19 coronavirus, you’ve likely been able to step back a bit and observe a dramatic shift in our culture in terms of priorities. This is a positive side effect of being forced to slow down and remain within our homes or neighborhoods for the collective good. I came across this tweet thread that pointed out some of these changes well.
We’ve also been chanting the virtue of self-expression. So let’s be honest: several days into lockdown, is self-expression still the highest good? Do the people we live with long that we’d express ourselves *more*?
— Sam Allberry (@SamAllberry) March 27, 2020
While I don’t necessarily subscribe to the theological belief that the ripple effects of COVID-19 are God “giving us exactly what we’ve been wanting”—I don’t think God’s omniscient sovereignty is a reflex to the whims of man—we do reap what we sow or experience consequences.
Just as an alcoholic may hit rock bottom, look around, and wonder what has become of his life because of his choices, so too are we as a culture watching as the bottom of our healthcare industries, economies, sanity, and safety nets are dropping out from beneath us and wondering why or how we could have cared about so many other things before this happened. These range from the minute and petty to the seemingly controversial and mind-bending.
Remember when we cared about going to the office to garner face time approval with the boss?
Remember when we told women to go to work and assumed schools would raise her kids?
Remember when we told kids the most important thing was their self esteem? How they identify? What bathroom they used?
Remember when thought we needed the latest iPhone, a new car, or a fabulous trip to Europe?
Remember when all our kids wanted to do was play video games and you just wanted to “Netflix and chill?”
All of these things have been, in some way to some people, opportunities for self-gratification, achievement, improvement, and that most elusive thing—joy.
For many of us these mile markers on the goalpost of the marathon of life were the things that kept us alive, excited, motivated, politically-active, opinionated, even happy or exceptional. Still, in a matter of weeks the entire world’s population has been reduced to the simplest of wants, needs, and even, yes joys: toilet paper, food, medical care. Life.
The goal is obvious and simple yet looming and treacherous: Make it through the summer without losing a loved one to a brutal unknown enemy that is no respecter of class, age, race, sex, religion, occupation and knocks some people flat on their back for weeks or even to their death and others barely suffer a cough.
Life has been whittled down to its simplest form: work from home, care for the kids at home, get groceries and stay at home—with an occasional loop around the block for fresh air and sunshine. In this there is beauty and yet also provides a thwap on the head for perspective that could change us all forever and perhaps really should.
If God, as C.S.Lewis famously said, “whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains,” then COVID-19 is the megaphone of pain, rousing us from a deaf world of individualism, materialism, and the pursuit of the virtual, among other things.
Perhaps in forcing us to hole up in our homes for the collective good, we need to learn the lesson that we have valued the individual—particularly the self-absorbed, whiny, entitled, politically-correct individual—too much and we should learn to reach across to our neighbors more.
Perhaps in forcing us to face our fear of death, of the eternal world that lay beyond this one, material goods will lose the shine that beckons us to strive for them to the detriment of time with our loved ones.
Perhaps in forcing us to be with our families, sometimes the people who for many can be the hardest to love, we will rediscover delight in evening baths, morning snuggles, cooking for loved ones, and eschew the pursuit of 2-D world that leaves us wanting, addicted, starting into the abyss.
If you have lost a loved one to COVID-19 you are mourning, no doubt. If you haven’t, you’re likely still struggling with a form of grief, loss, or losing the way of life you might have loved. But maybe after a few weeks of isolation you’ve looked around your life and asked yourself: why did I value that? What would have become of my life if I continued that way?
The first part of that C.S. Lewis quote is one most people leave out, and that is “Pain insists on being attended to.” This new way of life is certainly painful for many, mentally, emotionally, physically, even spiritually. If it is, then we must ask: What is it teaching us?
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