COMMENT: Grace and Peace Can Transform our Fear

These days, as COVID-19 is robbing people of their livelihoods, threatening to crowd out everything else in our minds and imaginations, and facing even our closest friends with the direst consequences, I am brought back with a start to the basics. Who are we? Where do we stand? What do we stand for?

We humans were not born yesterday, after all. We can reach for a CD and be transported into the Russian Orthodox world, be swept along by Bach’s surging hilaritas and enjoy the quiet cadences of Arvo Pärt. And that’s just music! I’ve been dipping again into a marvellous compendium of Scottish religious poetry. What incredible resources we have at our fingertips these days. It's called our heritage. We need to wriggle out of our presentism, our obsession with the latest news, and remember what manner of beings we are.

An old friend, Professor Joan Taylor, sent me her reflections on the healing work of Jesus in the light of the pandemic. What do we really know about immune systems, she asks, or about the relationship between human touch and healing? She notes Jesus’s intimate closeness to the natural world, the sparrows, the lilies in the field and his impatience with greed. Pope Francis draws similar connections between our abuse of creation and COVID-19.

No, we humans were not born yesterday. It’s even possible that we’re learning something about the limits to our imagined omniscience, our control over everything. In the 14th century the Black Death, mors nigra, tore through Europe. As with the Witch Craze the mortality it caused is sometimes ridiculously inflated, but in many cities half the population died and whole villages were wiped out.

The awful statistics we read about today’s fatalities in China, Italy, Spain, the UK and the USA are as nothing compared with the dimensions of disaster in the Black Death. Multiply our figures a hundredfold and we will get the picture. We are rightly appalled by today’s mass graves in New York. But they are as nothing compared to the disposal of mountains of corpses outside the city walls during the Black Death. Even at that time there was some awareness of the need to limit infection by isolating the sick and the dying and keeping the dead at a safe distance. We can shudder at what that meant in practice.

At that time people knew nothing about bacteria. Attempts were made to dispel the miasma of foul air, which was thought to spread the infection, by lighting fires and smoking it out. Strange conjunctions of the planets were blamed for the disaster. Contemporary paintings feature fiery arrows descending from heaven. It was reported (fake news!) that crosses fell from the skies and that if they caught in people’s clothes — that was it. Fever broke out in those affected, their flesh went black and their bodies were covered with terrible boils and pustules. Death, and the fear of death, was all pervasive. Terror gripped whole territories.

As today, the poor, crowded into alleys (like today’s shanty towns) suffered most. The rich could flee the city. Chroniclers would sometimes report: "No great dying except for the poor." All this raised urgent moral and religious questions. Was flight permissible? Yes, was the usual answer — except for priests and pastors. And civic leaders were expected to sit it out, sweat it out. "Indeed, our leaders must lovingly face the danger for the sake of the common good.” Often they risked their lives for the sake of others, like today’s nurses and doctors. Riding out the fear.

People asked how God was involved in the plague. Was the plague — like the other apocalyptic riders, famine, war and death — sent by God as a punishment for their sins? And armies of flagellants crisscrossed the land, slashing their backs with whips to placate their angry God. 

We hear isolated voices today making similar cries, blaming gays or ethnic minorities for the virus, reminiscent of the pogroms against the Jews in the wake of the Black Death. Was God the author of the tragedy? 

Joan Taylor reminded me that Jesus understood illness as the work of Satan not of God. Jesus did not blame natural catastrophes on God. The Kingdom of God was one of healing and peace. Fear and blame had no place in it.

COVID-19 can overwhelm us. I often feel that way. Unless we’re wilfully blind we can’t ignore the demented leaders, the febrility of democracy and the tidal wave of suffering. So my hunch is that we need to stay close to the basics, to the human, to the world around us. Nothing cheers me up as much as the tiny, rose-breasted swallows which effortlessly soar around my fourth-floor flat.

Touching personal letters from the past, like this mother writing to her little daughter Apollonia who had lain sick with the plague in a distant town for many months, remind us that we need to transcend the politics. 

“Grace and peace be with you, my dear daughter, I am delighted that your illness has taken a turn for the better, as I hope to God. For Hans Karl told me that your infection has disappeared and the spots and pustules have vanished.” 

It is hard to imagine what lies behind such agonised letters.

We’re in it for the long haul, it seems. The plague kept flaring up again and again in Europe for centuries. So we need to take a long, long breath, what the Germans call: den langen Atem. And let’s pray, hoping against hope, that out of this calamity a new gentleness to our neighbour, to refugees and to our fragile world may emerge among us. 

Peter Matheson is a Church Historian and Emeritus Professor, Knox College in Dunedin. 

Tui Motu Magazine. Issue 248 May 2020