It is perhaps fitting that we should approach the apex of the coronavirus in the New York metropolitan area during Holy Week, which once again overlaps with Passover.
This year there was no need for Lenten sacrifices. Instead sacrifice has been forced upon us. The coronavirus has been our Lenten journey and now our Calvary. This, too, is our Passover story — which also has a plague episode — our Exodus.
Yet the measure of our suffering is the measure of our resistance to it multiplied by our lack of preparation for it. Someday when we look back at this time, and please God may we live to look back at this time, we will see that while the virus itself may have been inevitable, our handling, or rather mishandling of it, was not. Like the person who in denial of a cancer diagnosis waits to act, then rails at metastasis, we waited too long only to find ourselves wanting — for everything, not the least of which were perhaps our truest values.
Medical tests, hospitals and supplies? They were either limited or unusable.
Rainy day funds and stop-gap measures? They were either nonexistent or, when they were finally offered by the American government, not in the immediate offing. While it’s understandable that poor people live paycheck to paycheck, why is it that people in big corporations, luxury industries and even small business in a $23 trillion economy do not have enough money to float themselves and their workers for two months?
Leadership? The Chinese obfuscated the virulence of the virus by delaying information and manipulating the death toll — a crucial decision whose harm was compounded by President Donald J. Trump’s indecision, stemming from his view of the virus as yet another Democratic opponent raining on his presidential parade. Though Dr. Anthony Fauci is not going to contradict the president — his role on the presidential Coronavirus Task Force is too vital — he acknowledged to Judy Woodruff on the “PBS NewsHour” recently that had the Chinese been upfront sooner, COVID-19 might be a different ballgame in America. And had the federal government chosen to lead from the front, order the necessary equipment and distribute it, states would not be in the heartbreaking predicament of having to vie with one another and foreign countries for vital supplies.
But Trump and the Chinese aren’t the only ones to fail the leadership test. There are Congressmen, governors and world leaders still who refuse to go all in on the virus — because lockdown is hard and costly, because they fear a loss of power, because they, like all of us, fear death and don’t want to think about it.
This then is our material reality. Baut it pales in contrast to our spiritual one, theologians and psychiatrists say.
“The ‘unreality’ of material things is only relative to the greater reality of spiritual things,” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton writes in his book “Thoughts in Solitude.” “We begin our renouncement of creatures by standing back from them and looking at them as they are in themselves. In so doing we penetrate their reality, their actuality, their truth, which cannot be discovered until we get them outside ourselves and stand back so that they are seen in perspective. We cannot see things in perspective until we cease to hug them to our own bosom. When we let go of them ,we begin to appreciate them as they really are. Only then can we begin to see God in them. Not until we find Him in them, can we start on the road of dark contemplation at whose end we shall be able to find them in Him.”
You don’t have to be a believer to understand this. The Jungian psychiatrist Edward F. Edinger — like all good Jungians — viewed the stories of the Bible as yet another set of myths to be plumbed for their archetypes. In his book “Ego and Archetype,” he considers, among other things, the persona of Jesus as an example of psychological integrity — called the individuated ego or integrated self — in which the unconscious, the ego and the higher self form a whole. “Psychic life and well-being are not sustained by material objects,” he writes. “They are necessary but are not vessels of ultimate meaning. The source of psychic sustenance is to be found within.”
But where is our psychic life? Is it in Trump’s push to get everyone back to work? In Sen. Rand Paul withholding his positive coronavirus test from others and continuing to use the closed Senate gym? In Democrats wanting to give Rep. John Lewis a birthday party, even though his health is already compromised by pancreatic cancer? In the spring breakers and Mardi Gras revelers who insisted on partying and are now paying the price? In the New Yorkers and other city dwellers who fled to second homes in other states? In megachurches that continue to hold services?
I ask these questions not so much out of criticism as out of a perfectly human desire to see us all get back to our lives. Spring is my favorite season; April, my favorite month; and Easter, my favorite holiday. I don’t want the virus to rob me of my joy in them. But for too many of us, our joy is bound up in our head-in-the-sands, live-for-the-moment material culture. Had it not been, perhaps we would not only be better prepared, but we wouldn’t still be dithering about what President Barack Obama always called “pulling the Band-Aid off.”
Fauci says the virus will determine the timetable — just as depressions, wars and other illnesses run their courses. Another doctor noted that you can’t go around the coronavirus. You can only go through it. But it is precisely our unwillingness to go through it — to “yield and overcome” in the words of the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu — that is prolonging our agony.
The Israelites, having been freed of the bondage of slavery, were still enslaved to their passions — not trusting God and Moses’ leadership to meet their needs, succumbing to false idols. Their desert was one of their own making.
David Roberts, “The Israelites Leaving Egypt” (circa 1830), oil on canvas. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.
For Merton, the desert is the place where the Israelites wandered but came to know their God, where Jesus was tempted by Satan but overcame temptation, yet where ancient spiritual contemplation has been replaced by the modern testing of nuclear weapons and the contemporary building of cities that represent purposeless sensuality and luxury.
'“The desert is the home of despair,” he writes. “And despair, now, is everywhere. Let us not think that our interior solitude consists in the acceptance of defeat. We cannot escape anything by consenting tacitly to be defeated. Despair is an abyss without bottom. Do not think to close it by consenting to it and trying to forget you have consented. This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. To trample it down under hope in the Cross. To wage war against despair unceasingly. That war is our wilderness. If we wage it courageously, we will find Christ at our side. If we cannot face it, we will never find Him.”
For Edinger, the Cross — “the supreme symbol of Western civilization… irrespective of belief or disbelief” — is the means by which the ego sacrifices itself with support from its higher self to achieve wholeness. Remember the stiff-necked Israelites were nonetheless ultimately reconciled with their God and attained the Promised Land. In Christian belief, Jesus was resurrected three days after his Crucifixion, which is what Christians celebrate on Easter Sunday.
I think Edinger would say that if we can meet this challenge courageously — surrender as Moses and Jesus did to their trials willingly, humbly, aware of our weaknesses but secure in our strengths and compassion — we will find that divine spark in ourselves and in others. If we can’t do that, we will never find it.