A Coronavirus Gathering | 1. Lament & Hope
In the strange weeks since postponement of our last Gathering, living in the shadow of pandemic, our focus on lament rises on a wave of dread. Facing a best-case scenario of hundreds of thousands dead, a sputtering global economy, and the existential threat of life without toilet paper, lament foments despair.
The biblical word means “a passionate expression of grief or sorrow.” Synonyms include: strike, smite, cry-out, cut-off, and mourn.
My favorite, though, incites us to howl.
Just like Liam Neeson.
In times of crisis, we all look for God to do something. Quarantined in the rising blue of Carolina spring, I invite us to howl together. To give raw voice to our suffering, loss and fear. To cry out to God to rescue us.
Covid-19 strips bare our illusion of control and reminds us, as C.S. Lewis did 70 years ago, of a more grave reality:
Do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the [name any catastrophe] was invented. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
In a minor key, The Psalmist sings —
Man is like a breath;
his days are like a passing shadow.
For humanity bent in a broken world, the certainty of death is preceded by the promise of suffering. Ever since Abel’s spilt blood cried from the dust, we have endured the wounds of loss, pain, tyranny, abuse, poverty, disease, and all the idols that fail us.
One of my favorite authors, Annie Dillard, writes concisely —
No one gets out without getting chewed on.
A virus is “simply a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein,” says one pandemic expert.
Bad-Ass Bad-News is the Coronavirus.
After Covid-19 infects a person, the victim often remains symptom-free for two weeks, spreading cluessely a virus that replicates by sinking its teeth into your lungs and sucking out the RNA. Early tests indicate those who have suffered through it, and won, may not be immune — or at least not for long.
In my opinion, this kind of an enemy deserves a better name, one more in keeping with its inner beast.
Coronavirus makes me think of drinking a cold one on an aqua-blue beach.
Covid-19 sounds like a name big pharm rolls out for a billion-dollar drug treating rheumatoid arthritis or atrophic gastritis. Can you see the television ad with me? A little girl in a white dress, from a safe distance of six feet, blows a kiss to her grandfather while a yellow logo appears in blue sky.
With Covid-19, you gotta love your chances.
No matter how you name it, the virus asks us to navigate unprecedented territory — world on hold, global economy on razor’s edge, and fear going more viral than the outbreak.
Lament, a foreign tongue in our culture, suddenly seems an appropriate response.
Like Mundo Cani, the depressed dog in The Book of the Dun Cow, we howl into the apocalyptic night --
Marooned … Marooned … Marooned ….
•
At the same time we howl, we also help each other see a deeper good.
The Gathering community teaches me the art of encouragement In my own battle with depression,. Again and again, you have shown me what lies at the heart of the word — to build courage into another.
As the deadly virus continues to spread globally, courage is what we most need. Facing together persecution and death, huddled in homes, the Apostle Paul challenged the early Christians —
Encourage one another daily, as long as it is called ‘Today,’ so that none of you may be hardened by sin's deceitfulness.
In a time of pandemic, as a community of believers, we face a great temptation to fall into despair, retreat in fear, or simply resign in isolation. The real power of lament screams our despair and whispers hope at the same time.
Listen to Samwise the Servant’s encouragement to Frodo, a hobbit, a halfling, overwhelmed by Sauron’s enemies and the burden of bearing the One Ring. In this time of peril arise opportunities to encourage — to see the deeper good in the greater story.
In a time of crisis, we best encourage one another by holding onto a deeper goodness, the reality of a supernatural Kingdom. In God’s Grandeur, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins writes:
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.