Where do we go from here? First in an occasional series
I mention this because I took the time to watch the Easter service conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby yesterday. I then read the write-up on BBC News, which had this quote:
In a video from his flat in central London Archbishop Welby called for "a resurrection of our common life".It's hard to believe, but we are not at the end of this pandemic. We are not at the beginning of the end. We are not even at the end of the beginning. We are, quite simply, adrift at sea, willing the wind to catch our slack sails and blow us back to shore. Anyone who says I'll be taking in baseball games at Dodger Stadium by July is a fool and a liar. The world has come to a halt, and it can't be restarted with the flip of a switch.
"After so much suffering, so much heroism from key workers and the NHS, we cannot be content to go back to what was before as if all is normal," he said in the sermon recorded on his iPad.
"There needs to be a resurrection of our common life."
But that's no reason to not start thinking about what the After Time will be like. Which is why Archbishop Welby's words struck me when I first heard them.
Many among us want to go back to what it was like before, as the Archbishop acknowledges. But that is untenable.
Coronavirus is not 9/11. Coronavirus is not the Great Recession. This plague has done what those events couldn't do: it has stopped everything. And it has done so at a time when the world has never been so interconnected, so subject to instant communication. We've mourned at the tens of thousands of deaths in Italy, Spain, Britain. We've seen those deaths, and then watched our own mortality rate in the US surpass them. We've seen some governments respond forcefully, and some governments do everything wrong. In the US, federalism has never been more stark, as states have basically been cut adrift by the central government, a government incapable and unwilling to display leadership, instead working to assuage the feelings of the narcissist occupying the West Wing.
We have suffered death and illness. We have also seen heroism on a daily basis, as we depend on people who had not signed up to be front-line workers, like grocery store clerks, be the glue which has prevented a complete societal breakdown. The Black Death marked the break between the medieval and the modern eras. But that break took decades, if not centuries, to effectuate, with the slow pace of communication. Every night on our televisions or computers or phones we see both heroism and devilry. We cannot honor the lives of the heroes, alive and dead, by just going back to what we were doing. It's unimaginable, although that's what many of the great and good wish for.
The irony of our hyper-connected world is that we're more isolated than ever. We isolate from each other, we isolate from our common humanity. We've been self-isolating spiritually for years. And I truly feared that everything would fall apart as the plague battered us. But, as I wrote, heroes have come forth. They always do. Ordinary men and women who don't think they're being heroic. They're just doing what they think is right. They don't have a choice; they have to pay bills, they can't hunker down at home. Even so, they're heroes.
On this blog, we'll be writing more about what we think should come in the After Time. But Archbishop Welby is right. We can't go back to what was before as if all was normal. The two million dead around the world deserve a better memorial. The heroes among us deserve a better memorial. And you and I, yes, we deserve a better memorial.