A Pandemic and Our Changing World

“We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is that things won’t go back to normal after a few weeks, or even a few months. Some things never will.”                                                    Gideon Lichfield, Technology Review, Mar.17, 2020.

One thing we cannot say at this point about the new world of worldwide pandemic we are entering is that once it is over we will return to normal. One reason is that “we” who say that today will not be the “we” who exit the other side of this crisis. We can’t help but think that now but it good to be alerted that it will not likely be the case then. And who can tell what “we” then will think of as normal or the desirability of returning to the normal we were into until a few weeks ago?

You see, things like this pandemic are a wilderness time for us. Nothing we have or know or have experienced will suffice to get us through, if get through it we do. The people we have been are not adequate for this challenge. The pandemic of COVID-19 is not a technical challenge a bit of industry and ingenuity, and elbow grease will get us through. Rather, it’s what Ron Heifetz and others call an adaptive challenge. That’s a situation we have not faced before or know how to deal with. Out scientists and technological wizards will be of limited help here, far from the saviors we too often imagine them to be. Their help will be premised on communal exercises of intuition and imagination cobbling from the embers of the old world a-dying and insights into the new one aborning a sense of the kind of world fit for human habitation in a post or even permanent pandemic age.

I’m not a prophet nor the son of a prophet. But I do offer one word I think worth considering. The counter-intuitive phenomenon of social distancing, I suggest, is both a divine judgment on us and a mercy to us (both the church and the larger society in the West).

-judgment: almost everything in the Western world pushes us to distance our selves from each other. Our “epidemic of loneliness” is well-known and highly publicized. Though we bustle down city streets jostling one another while at the same time locked away in our digital world oblivious to each other. We have been socialized into a world of “social distancing” that diminish and even demeans our fundamental humanity. In every way but the physical we have chosen social distancing as our way of life. The pandemic, by forcing us to physically distance ourselves, provides a vivid, even prophetic, picture, a reality check (as it were), of the tenor and quality of our life as a people. As unnatural as it feels to physically isolate ourselves, it is equally unnatural to isolate ourselves as we have done in the rest of our lives.

-mercy: God’s judgment is restorative. Its purpose is to winnow away what does not and will not ever suffice so as to give space for new life-giving growth to occur. It’s impossible to see at this point the shape of that new growth as we’ve just begun to process the judgment and its losses. But my guess is that at some point we will turn toward the new and discover forms of connection that enable us to survive and even thrive even under judgment. This discipline will prepare us for reconnection in healthy communal ways when (and if) such opportunities open up for us again. As Christians we must hold open this possibility even if we cannot assert its certainty. If the church grasps this judgment-cum-mercy it might be a leavening agent in the larger post-pandemic world in positive ways.

These, at any rate, are some thoughts today on what it is we are going through, for whatever they’re worth.