By Archbishop Donald Bolen
Christ is Risen!
As we continue to celebrate the Resurrection, I would like to use these weekly reflections to ponder how resurrection faith shapes the way we live through this period of the COVID-19 pandemic. Today I offer a brief reflection on numbers, and how our faith shapes the way we think about numbers pertaining to the pandemic.
Numbers are telling us much about how we are doing in keeping the pandemic under control. Each mid-afternoon in Saskatchewan we can listen for the previous day’s numbers: how many new cases, how many recoveries, and in 4 cases, how many have died. We hear projections too about numbers, and we need help interpreting the numbers.
Further, we can search the internet to look at numbers for each continent and country, each state and province. We can follow the rise in daily numbers of those who have contracted the virus, those who have died, those who are in critical condition, those who are recovered. As this message is being recorded, the numbers of people who have contracted the virus is now over 2 million worldwide, the number of those who have died is nearing 130,000.
What do we do with numbers of that size? The writer Annie Dillard wrote a reflection years ago about how our minds try to deal with such numbers. When an estimated 138,000 people were killed by a cyclone in Bangladesh in April 1991, Dillard said she mentioned to her 7 year old that it was hard to imagine 138,000 people drowning, and the child responded no, it’s lots and lots of dots in blue water. Our thoughts, if not as naive, are often as messy.
As we read statistics about the COVID crisis, we can rightly see good news on a given day when there are a thousand less new cases in New York or Italy or Spain than the day before. It is good when the numbers are going down. But it’s easy to forget that each new case is a human life….
Years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Auschwitz, the concentration camp where an estimated 1.1 million people were murdered. Almost a million of them were Jewish. When you visit there, you can walk down long hallways with seemingly endless rows of photographs of the prisoners of Auschwitz. There are also enormous display cases with glasses, with suitcases, with shoes. But above all it was the faces which moved me past trying to think about the number of deaths as a single unit, and brought it home.
Every photo was a window to a life as real as mine, with a life’s story to tell: a family; an education; fears and joys; the wonder of being alive; beauty; bewilderment; love; wounds; passions; all that makes us human, and unique, and beloved. The statistics can’t carry the full density of the tragedy, and the overwhelming loss.
How does our paschal faith help us to carry all of that? And now add into our reflection happier numbers that we ponder this season of Easter. In the early church, as news of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus began to spread, we hear echoes of both large numbers and of individual encounters. In the first chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, we hear how on one day 3,000 people received the good news and were baptized. But we also hear about individual encounters like that with the man lame from birth who every day asked for alms at the Beautiful Gate of the Temple. Peter said to him, “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.”
Let us take consolation in this: when 2,000 years ago God bent towards the human race in mercy, it wasn’t with a document accessible to all, or with a proclamation that reached all persons of all times in a uniform way. Rather, it was by the Word taking flesh in one human person. When God shows us the radical depths of love in Jesus’s life and in his dying, his forgiving of each person who denied and abandoned and crucified him, and in his resurrection, God was embracing the human race in its totality and embracing each one of us, known and called by name. The paschal mystery is a proclamation that each life is sacred, every life matters. God wills to embrace every human being with tender mercies.
The big numbers we have looked at, that we deal with each day, tell a large story. They matter. But the 2 million people who have contracted the virus, the 130,000 who have died, the half million who have now recovered, they all hold within them stories of real people’s lives, each one precious in the eyes of God. As we live through this pandemic, we do well to attend to the big numbers, to look at the graphs, and to do our part within society to make a difference. We can rightly see that as a part of the larger calling to work for the common good, and for societal change. But it’s vital not to lose sight of the individual persons around us, because it is hard to love and serve humanity in the abstract. So while you can’t reach out to every person in the country, you can give Martha – who can’t leave her home – a needed phone call, or assist Ted with groceries, and say a prayer for the people in Quebec and New York.
Perseverence, friends. Christ is Risen, and calls us to live out of his resurrection with compassion, hope and joy.
