Breda O'Brien
The View
A thoughtful friend of mine asked me whether this pandemic had been sent for a reason. Was it, she wondered, some kind of message from God that we were getting things badly wrong and needed to change our ways? Did we need to return to basics, like loving others and praying?
I see the same kind of question, although it is more often an assertion, from environmentalists. This pandemic is Mother Earth shouting at us that enough is enough. We are encroaching more and more on the planet, coming into intrusive, unnecessary contact with species we should not be in contact with at all. No wonder diseases are leaping from the animal world to the human.
To me, there are problems with both approaches, though I understand my sensitive friend’s question. I believe that God does not ‘send’ us tragic, unnecessary deaths. At best, He permits them because, in order for us to have the ability to make free choices, we have to also have the freedom to make bad choices.
Now, if it is established that Covid-19 emerged from China’s so-called wet markets where exotic animals are slaughtered next to the fruit and vegetables, did God send that? Or did he, instead, permit it to happen so that human beings could also use their free will to freely choose him? A world where that could never happen would also be a world where people were puppets without any real personal freedom.
It may be a cliché but I love this saying: God writes straight with crooked lines. God draws good out of every circumstance if we co-operate with his grace.
But for someone with a parent in a nursing home whom they cannot visit, this will be scant comfort. (I know of several nursing homes where there already have been deaths which the GP attributes to Covid-19. However, due to the slowness of testing, these cases have not yet been included in the official figures.)
Loneliness
The prospect of someone dying alone is terrifying for families and an explanation that God did not cause this but simply permits it will bring very little comfort. They are facing the prospect of a mother or father dying with no family member to hold their hand as they slip away.
God does not just permit. We believe that the son of God experienced desertion and excruciating loneliness in the Garden of Gethsemane. He prayed the ancient words of Psalm 22 on the cross: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
Good Friday tells us of a God who does not stand outside our humanity but enters into it fully to the point of experiencing torture and a cruel form of capital punishment. God enters into our suffering and experiences it with us. He is not a detached deity. He suffers alongside us. His love enters into everything we face.
In relation to whether this pandemic is the revenge of Mother Earth, I hate the way we exploit and abuse the planet, usually at the cost of the poorest peoples. But while it may be useful to personify Earth for poetic or other reasons, Earth is not a sentient being planning revenge.
In fact, pandemics were a regular fact of life long before industrialisation. St Catherine of Siena and members of her Mantellate (laywomen akin to what we would now call a Third Order) nursed victims of the Black Death in Siena in 1374. It struck with terrifying speed. People infected on the street sometimes died before reaching their homes.
Sometimes families fled, leaving the decaying bodies behind in their houses. Catherine through her prayers to God effected some miraculous healings, including that of Raymond of Capua, later Master General of the Dominican Order. However, most of her work was dirty, tiring nursing or baking bread for the starving poor.
Doing God’s will in a pandemic involves social distancing, for sure, but never distancing ourselves from feeling compassion for others”
Estimates of deaths from the Black Death range from 25 to 50 million. Long before that, there was the plague of Justinian in 542, which killed up to 10,000 people a day in Constantinople and took over a century and a half to subside completely.
Pope Francis’ concern for the environment is a shining example, but he looks on the earth as God’s creation. When we mistreat creation, it is the little ones, the poor, who suffer most. So it is in this pandemic; we understandably worry about intensive care facilities in Ireland, but in parts of the developing world there is neither water nor soap available for simple handwashing.
Doing God’s will in a pandemic involves social distancing, for sure, but never distancing ourselves from feeling compassion for others.
Unlike St Catherine, most of us will not be called to nurse, but we are all called, according to our means and abilities, to reach out and help others.