As I drafted this column sitting in my North Carolina home on Good Friday 2020, the wealthiest and supposedly the most medically sophisticated country in the world posted the highest rate of COVID-19 statistics on the planet, with 500,000 known infections and almost 20,000 deaths.
That stark reality sent me to a 1952 journal entry in The Sign of Jonas in which Trappist monk Thomas Merton described the prayer that overtook him during his midnight “Firewatch” duty in the belfry of the sleeping Gethsemani monastery in central Kentucky:
“And now my whole being breathes the wind which blows through the belfry, and my hand is on the door through which I see the heavens. The door swings out upon a vast sea of darkness and of prayer. Will it come like this, the moment of my death? Will You open a door upon the great forest and set my feet upon a ladder under the moon, and take me out among the stars?… I lay the clock upon the belfry ledge and pray cross-legged with my back against the tower, and face the same unanswered question.”
Death found Merton suddenly at age 53 on December 10, 1968, not in the ethereal setting of his beloved Gethsemani, but alone in a small cottage at a Red Cross retreat center near Bangkok, Thailand.
COVID-19 2020 transports Merton’s question to each of us: “Will it come like this, the hour of my death,” fevered, gasping and alone? The pandemic remains a global death threat, a silent killer with no immediate cure, wreaking havoc across Planet Earth. Statistics numbering the infected and the dead become obsolete by the end of every newscast.
“Lingering in Gethsemane with Jesus but anticipating resurrection. That is our gospel hope for sheltering in place.”
As we shelter in place, donning masks and gloves when venturing out, many of us facing lost jobs, declining retirement funds and vacant sacred spaces, COVID-19 requires us to confront the possibility of death – not fearfully or obsessively, but with intentionality born of the reality of the present moment, longing for Easter as Gethsemane and Golgotha linger.
What now?
First, this global plague compels acknowledgment of our shared mortality. We know that death can find us anytime, anywhere – in accidents, strokes and heart attacks that can strike without notice or diseases like cancer, Lupus, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS that cruelly consume our lives a little at a time. COVID-19 makes disease and death an immediate planetary possibility. Not an absolute death sentence, the disease spreads readily, often so asymptomatically that persons of a certain age, race or biological deficit can be gone before we know it, perhaps without time to say goodbye.
In an insightful and sobering Religion Dispatches essay entitled “How the COVID-19 Pandemic May Permanently Change Our ‘Good Death’ Narrative,” Cody Sanders, pastor of Old Cambridge Baptist Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writes:
“Thousands are now dying in hospital ICUs around the country without the supportive presence of their loved ones at the bedside. Funerals are being held with fewer than 10 people, or not at all. Funeral directors are unable to provide the comforting space for families to mourn and remember their loved ones. Religious leaders around the world are finding the bodies of the faithful inaccessible for the administration of the rites and rituals that are typically performed at the time of death. A Good Death is unlikely during a pandemic.”
Sanders defines a Good Death as “the way we’d want to die if we had our druthers. Our notions of the Good Death are informed by our cultural landscape and, for many, by our religious imaginaries. Typically, the Good Death is an approximation of the kind of death most people of some racial and economic privilege in the society enjoy.”
COVID-19 threatens that mythic hope. The growing evidence that a disproportionate number of people of color are contracting and dying confirms Sanders’ contention regarding privilege. Legislatures in North Carolina and in other states that have refused to extend Medicaid coverage to some of the neediest among us have compounded the unlikelihood of a Good Death (even Good Healing) for many.
Second, history is our perpetual teacher about human issues, especially the reality, inevitability and unpredictability of death. As a would-be historian, I’ve spent my adult life researching, writing and communicating about dead people; people like and unlike us, famous and infamous, saints and sinners, weak and strong, selfless and manipulative.
They all died – some too soon, some not soon enough. Their histories make death and its rituals a proximate presence, offering formative resources for us when mortality gets personal in our own lives.
In his classic work, Holy Living and Holy Dying (1650-51), Anglican cleric Jeremy Taylor writes:
“Death meets us every where, and is procured by every instrument and in all chances, and enters in at many doors; by violent and secret influence, by the aspect of a star and the stink of a mist, by the emissions of a cloud and the meeting of a vapour, by the fall of a chariot and the stumbling at a stone, by a full meal or an empty stomach, by watching at the wine or by watching at prayers … by every thing in providence and every thing in manners, by everything in nature and everything in chance.”
Taylor concluded: “The chains that confine us to this condition [death] are strong as destiny, and immutable as the eternal laws of God.”
Whatever else it is, COVID-19 puts us on collective notice that death is not somewhere “out there” but “up close,” requiring serious reflection and response.
Third, at their best, faith traditions and their “spiritual wisdom” continue to offer resources for confronting death and responding to its current realities. In his 2012 study, Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters, Jewish philosopher Roger Gottlieb reminds readers that “the spiritual teachings of traditional religions have been clear that, as Solomon tells us (Ecclesiastes 3:2): ‘There is a time to be born, and a time to die.’”
Gottlieb recalls the story of “a famous rabbi [who] taught his followers that repentance … must be done for one day only, the day before one’s death. A ‘confused disciple’ asks, ‘How are we to know which day it will be?’ ‘That,’ the rabbi replies, ‘is the point.’”
Perhaps COVID-19 is a call to collective repentance. If so, we’ll all have to stand in line – six feet apart, of course.
Finally, COVID-19 may require us as Christians to find spiritual sustenance by tarrying awhile with Jesus in Gethsemane. I learned that from my longtime friend and colleague Frank Tupper who died on Feb. 28. In his seminal work, A Scandalous Providence, Tupper writes:
“Sometimes we stand in the aftermath of an irrevocable tragedy already done and at other times in the wake of an inevitable tragedy still ahead. Gethsemane addresses all the tragic events of life. Before and after a great sorrow the affirmation endures: In the givens of a specific historical situation of desperate human need – with the particular limits and transforming possibilities intrinsic within it as well as the transcendent possibilities available only to God beyond it – God always does the most God can do. The problem in much Christian spirituality and Christian theology is the notable absence of a place for the agony of Gethsemane in the life of the Christian and the theological reflection of the church.”
Lingering in Gethsemane with Jesus but anticipating resurrection. That is our gospel hope for sheltering in place.
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