We live our human existence, amid experiences both good and
evil, on personal, family, social, national, and international
levels. Today, all of humanity faces an experience of evil: the pandemic
caused by the exponential contagion of the Covid-19 coronavirus, which causes
us to change and call into question everything: our way of life, our
ways of interacting at the family and social levels, our
institutions, and social structures. This experience of evil reveals
all our weaknesses and frailties, in addition to the deficiencies of our
social organizations, especially those in the health sector. Therefore, we live
through these hours of confusion, anxiety, anguish, suffering, pain, and
mourning across the globe.
To prevent and stop, as much as possible, the advance of this
pandemic, human communities around the world have agreed on days and weeks
of confinement, social isolation, and quarantine that has confined everyone in
our homes.
The newscasts are saturated, every minute, with the counts of the
infected and the dead, with the dire consequences we face in every
area—especially the economic and labor areas—of our social coexistence that
emerge wherever the pandemic goes, with headlines about initiatives that appear
here and there to mitigate the suffering of so many, and with
calls to all of us to save what we have built as a society.
For those of us who are alive here and now, at this moment in
human history, this is an unprecedented situation—as novel as this
heretofore unknown virus is in the world of medicine. All of us—each in
his or her respective environment and lifestyle—are learning, as each hour
passes, how to face this common enemy and how to survive….
But, in these hours that are difficult for everyone, not
everything is bad, nor is everything negative,
nor is everything lost. There are lessons to be learned
from this evil experience on a global scale.
In the first place, this unusual experience of evil, which touches
the most intimate and profound part of our being because it affects our health
and, with it, our possibility of continuing to live or die, is an opportunity
to recognize, on one hand, our utter weakness, our lack of self-sufficiency
and, in religious terms, our “creatureness” and total dependence on a higher
being we call God and Creator. But also, this is an opportunity to
recognize our interdependence on all other human beings and how strong,
essential, and extraordinarily solidary we are in good times, but also in evil
times. In a word, we are beings who are "dependent" on God and
on one another.
Secondly, social isolation, already declared in most
countries, is a precious opportunity to enter into ourselves, to find ourselves
again, to travel to the depths of our inner selves, and discover the truth on
which we base our personal stories and the values or anti-values that support the fabric of
our lives. This confinement to our homes is a unique opportunity—away from
outward appearances, visual impressions, ostentation, and the daily bustle—to
return to silence, to reflection, to meditation, to prayer. The obligatory
quarantine that we are all living is, also, a unique opportunity to return to
ourselves and to come together with our loved ones, with our close friends,
with our family.
The enormous ease and speed with which the virus is transmitted
and infects, also teaches us the shared responsibility that we all have in the
construction or destruction of our life on earth. And if
the common good, the general consensus, the best
interests for everyone calls for surviving this pandemic, then we will all
have to banish from each one of ourselves selfishness and all the negativity
that it entails and bring forth the best of ourselves and the best of our human
values to rebuild the world and our human coexistence with
interactions, spaces, social methods, and institutional forms that are more
just, more solidary, more equitable, more fraternal, more compassionate, and
more merciful. In other words, this experience of evil that touches and
affects us all so deeply, is an opportunity for hope that,
from now on, we will all be different and build a different
and better world.
During these days, Christians will celebrate Easter, the greatest
religious celebration of our liturgical year while Jews will celebrate
Passover. While Passover, in the Jewish theological system, recalls and
commemorates the "passage" of the Old Testament people from
slavery to freedom by crossing the Red Sea, Easter, in the Christian
theological system, recalls and commemorates the "passage" from death
to life through the triumph of the life’s work of Jesus of Nazareth—after his
death on the cross—when he was confessed as Living and Resurrected in
the community by the first Christians and by all his disciples up through
today.
Everything that happens to us can be lived as a curse or as a
blessing. I invite you to live this experience of evil, this pandemic, this
social isolation, this suffering for loved ones who are sick or deceased as a
moment of blessing, as an "Easter," as an experience of "passage"
from death to life in our shared search for a more humane,
more caring, more fraternal world.
Happy Easter 2020!
