New Year's resolutions in a time of pandemic

Our publishing date for this issue of The Catholic Commentator is New Year’s Day.  Traditionally we are supposed to greet the day prepared with resolutions to make the coming year better than the last.  If resolutions were wishes, resolution number one for nearly everyone would probably be, “May I never see another year like 2020.”  However,  the coronavirus pandemic will last in our nation well into 2021 until somewhere between 70% and 90% of our population is vaccinated.  And then, what will we do?  What will the recovery look like?  What will it become in our medical community, our business community, our work force community, our church community and our core community, the family? 

I have no crystal ball, and I am neither politician nor economist.  Heck, I don’t even have a wife, children and grandchildren, but as a priest I am as curious as anyone about what this experience of a pandemic will mean for our future, especially for our church community for which I have some responsibility.  And that means that hopes and wishes must become resolutions that lead to some kind of action.  I have read as much as I could about the pandemic and our faith life together and have been impressed by two experts whose direction I found helpful. 

The first is Walter Brueggemann, one of the great Biblical scholars writing today.  He is not afraid to ask the question, “What is God calling us to do in times of great catastrophes like this pandemic?  Brueggemann’s response is found in a new book, “Virus as a Summons to Faith: Biblical Reflections in a Time of Pandemic.”  
 
Brueggemann uses the example of King David in the Old Testament Book of Samuel to explain how the ancient Jews thought of catastrophe and their relationship to God.  Put simply, they understood that when they were faithful to God, they ate well, were safe in their cities and countryside and also safe from plague.  When they were unfaithful, they usually faced three evils or curses which were always possible given their geographic locale and the time in which they lived.  These were famine, attack by their pagan neighbors and plague. 

In this particular story King David has been blessed after years of war and hardship by hard won peace and prosperity.  But King David does not trust that God will continue to bless him.  He would rather be completely dominant over his neighboring kingdoms.  So he calls for a census so that he may be able to conscript more soldiers and raise more taxes to pay them. 

God is not pleased.  He wants King David and his people to trust God to keep his promises.  So, through his prophet, Gad, God tells King David that he will suffer but he may pick his poison.  It can be famine, war or plague.  King David surprisingly chooses plague.  Famine could happen naturally in Palestine where there was a lot of arid land subject to long draught and hungry locusts.  His people could suffer for a long time, especially the poor in the countryside. 

King David was the greatest general of his day.  He knew the kind of war that would be waged, sparing neither women nor children.  Also, what crops there were would be confiscated for the enemy soldiers.  People of his day often connected disease with a direct act of God.  They knew nothing about viruses.  So King David bet on God’s mercy and forgiveness.  God would not let his people suffer overlong.  King David wrote “... your kindness O Lord, endures forever; forsake not the work of your hands” (Ps 138:8).  King David trusted that he would find mercy in God,  not in human hands.  And he knew that he must ask for it in prayer. 
Lesson number one:  Catastrophes will happen. They are built into nature or often brought about by human evil.  God will help us, but he wants us to pray, to ask, to work with him using the skills we have learned through science and experience.

There are other times when God did not wait for the Jews to sin before allowing evil to befall them.  He created violence to save them.  This is the great lesson of the book of Exodus.  God works through Moses and Aaron to obtain freedom from slavery for his people.  Pharaoh doesn’t comply.  So God sends plaques of frogs and locusts, causes the death of the Egyptian first-born and finally drowns Pharaoh’s army.  Certainly the author of Exodus, which is a divinely inspired book, is not saying that any of this happened naturally.  But the end of all this violence leaves the Jews in the desert of Arabia preparing to  receive the Holy Land as God’s gift and become a nation.  From there will come the Messiah, God’s true son, and his disciples who will spread his church throughout the world. 

Lesson two:  God works to bring good out of evil, even out of humanity’s history of violence.   I can’t help thinking of our modern example of World War II where God seems to have used Walter Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt, General Dwight Eisenhower and General Douglas McArthur and their fighting men and women to end the horror of Nazism and Japanese militarism.  God then saved not only the Jews but much of humanity itself.

Finally, there are some catastrophes that are beyond our understanding but not our faith.  Accidents, storms, fires, earthquakes, cancer and other diseases like COVID-19 cut short lives that had so much promise and were so dear to us.  We are left asking why, and we know there is no answer short of reunion in heaven. 

God, however, let his own son suffer such a death and then raised him to show us that death is not the end of us.  He also inspired an unknown author in the Old Testament to describe the faith of Job. 

Job would not reject God despite his great losses.  Instead he proclaimed: “I know that my Redeemer lives ... And from my flesh I shall see God; my inmost being is consumed with longing” (Jb: 19:25-27).

Lesson three:  When catastrophe strikes and we are overcome with no answer to our why, look at a crucifix.  One day in heaven, God will answer our longing.

Bruggemann’s insights into Scripture strengthen our faith for the new year in the midst of the pandemic.  The second author I have read during this time is Pope Francis.  He has published a little book entitled “Life after the Pandemic.”  His resolutions are more concrete.  I will talk about them in my next column. 

FATHER CARVILLE is a retired priest in the Diocese of Baton Rouge and writes on current topics for The Catholic Commentator. He can be reached at johnny [email protected].