Lessons from COVID-19 Part 4

The Silence of COVID-19

By Dr. Doug Kayler and ChristianWeek | April 11, 2020

“For a body which consists of several parts, each of which is beautiful, is itself far more beautiful than any of its individual parts separately, by whose well-ordered union the whole is completed even though these parts are separately beautiful” The Confessions of St. Augustine, Bk 13, Chap 28 On the topic of the Creation

Augustine was discussing the complexity of creation we referred to last time. On each day of creation, God proclaimed His work as good, On the sixth day, which included the creation of male and female, God proclaimed it as very good. Augustine sees God saying that the totality of creation is better than the good individual parts.

Now, during COVID-19, the usual complex workings of political systems, production and distribution, jobs and the economy, and human interactions have been silenced to a large degree by a single virus strain. Aside from vital services, much of society is on pause.

As a line of unrestrained cancer cells destroys the complex interdependent body organ systems of a human being, so the dysfunction in our complex international system breaks down the smooth structure of the whole.

Signs of this include climate change, wealth and health inequity, perpetual tension among nations, religions and races, and host-harming response to a viral pandemic.

On Good Friday when Jesus was crucified the created order was disrupted acutely. “From the sixth hour to the ninth hour darkness came over all the land.. The earth shook and the rocks split. The tombs broke open and the bodies of many...were raised to life.”(Matt 27, 45,51-52) This was followed by the desolation, despair, quiet, and uncertainty of Holy Saturday, preceding the joy and rebirth of Easter Sunday.

Even as we emerge from the imposed quiet of COVID-19, both old and new challenges will be there. So what will our collective rebirth look like after COVID-19? We don’t know for sure, but Jesus warned that “in this world you will have trouble.” (John 16,33),

This brings us to the second word of CAS, which is adaptive, or the ability to learn new ways to do things. The quality of being adaptive is seen in viruses, and also in the interdependence relationship between viruses and humans. Involvement of viruses in human genetics through interactions with our DNA, directs functional changes and adaptation through genetic modification of human beings.

As limited forest fires enable new growth through “creative destruction,” and like the fact that we are adapting to new distribution models like Amazon that replace shopping malls with a model requiring less extraction of earth’s resources. Creative destruction may transform a world powered by fossil fuel energy to one based on solar energy.

While we will probably not follow ancient civilizations' tendency to worship the sun as a God, we will still refer to ourselves as “sun-worshippers” when we vacation in the tropics. We may get in touch with our ancestors through adapting to solar power use directly.

This adaptation reduces the global warming process where plants absorb the sun’s energy , are then converted to hydrocarbons, which eons later are extracted and converted to fossil fuel energy for use by machines,

Next time we will look at adaptability for individual humans, in viewing each of us as a system within a larger system, again as part of God’s grand design, and continued work in and through creation.