Fr Ronald Rolheiser
In 1985, Nobel Prize winning author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published a novel entitled, Love in the Time of Cholera. It tells a colourful story of how life can still be generative, despite an epidemic.
Well what’s besetting our world right now is not cholera but the Coronavirus, Covid-19. Nothing in my lifetime has ever affected the whole world as radically as this virus.
Whole countries have shut down, virtually all schools and colleges have sent their students home and are offering classes online, we’re discouraged from going out of our houses and from inviting others into them, and we’ve been asked not to touch each other and to practice ‘social distancing’.
Ordinary, normal, time has stopped. We’re in a season that no generation, perhaps since the flu of 1918, has had to undergo. Furthermore, we don’t foresee an end soon to this situation. No one, neither our government leaders nor our doctors, have an exit strategy. No one knows when this will end or how. Hence, like the inhabitants on Noah’s arc, we’re locked in and don’t know when the flood waters will recede and let us return to our normal lives.
Uncertainty
How should we live in this extraordinary time? Well, I had a private tutorial on this some nine years ago. In the summer of 2011, I was diagnosed with colon cancer, underwent surgery for a resection, and then was subjected to 24 weeks of chemotherapy. Facing the uncertainty of what the chemotherapy would be doing to my body I was understandably scared. Moreover, 24 weeks is basically half a year and contemplating the length of time that I would be undergoing this ‘abnormal’ season in my life, I was also impatient. I wanted this over with, quickly. So I faced it like I face most setbacks in my life, stoically, with the attitude: “I’ll get through this! I’ll endure it!”
I keep what might euphemistically be termed a journal, though it’s really more a daybook that simply chronicles what I do each day and who and what enters my life on a given day. Well, when I stoically began my first chemotherapy session I began checking off days in my journal: day one, followed the next day by: day two. I had done the math and knew that it would take 168 days to get through the 12 chemo sessions, spaced two weeks apart.
I began to welcome each day for its freshness, its richness, for what it brought into my life”
It went on like this for the first 70 days or so, with me checking off a number each day, holding my life and my breath, everything on hold until I could finally write, day 168.
Then one day, about half way through the 24 weeks, I had an awakening. I don’t know what specifically triggered it, a grace from above, a gesture of friendship from someone, the feel of the sun on my body, the wonderful feel of a cold drink, perhaps all of these things, but I woke up, I woke up to the fact that I was putting my life on hold, that I wasn’t really living but only enduring each day in order check it off and eventually reach that magical 168th day when I could start living again.
I realised that I was wasting a season of my life.
Moreover, I realised that what I was living through was sometimes rich precisely because of the impact of chemotherapy in my life. That realisation remains one of the special graces in my life. My spirits lifted radically even as the chemotherapy continued to do the same brutal things to my body.
I began to welcome each day for its freshness, its richness, for what it brought into my life. I look back on that now and see those three last months (before day 168) as one of richest seasons of my life. I made some lifelong friends, I learned some lessons in patience that I still try to cling to, and, not least, I learned some long-overdue lessons in gratitude and appreciation, in not taking life, health, friendship and work for granted.
It was a special joy to return to a normal life after those 168 days of conscripted ‘sabbatical’; but those ‘sabbatical’ days were special too, albeit in a very different way.
The coronavirus has put as all, in effect, on a conscripted sabbatical and it’s subjecting those who have contracted it to their own type of chemotherapy. And the danger is that we will put our lives on hold as we go through this extraordinary time and will just endure rather than let ourselves be graced by what lies within this uninvited season.
I can truly say that I have a great grief and that I am a happy man.’ Words to ponder…”
Yes, there will be frustration and pain in living this through, but that’s not incompatible with happiness. Paul Tournier, after he’d lost his wife, did some deep grieving but then integrated that grief into a new life in a way that allowed him to write: “I can truly say that I have a great grief and that I am a happy man.” Words to ponder as we struggle with this coronavirus.