Quick Announcement: On Sunday from 1:00-2:00pm, our Parish Counselor Gretchen Carrillo will be offering an online Zoom Resilience Workshop for those who are feeling stressed out by the Corona Virus. Click here in order to request the Zoom information.
I want to share some personal views about our moment, by thinking about tragedy. We often use that term as a description of something very unfortunate or a situation that has gone very badly. However, the classic use of “tragedy” has a particular meaning to it. Reinhold Niebuhr described it with regard to the irony of ancient Greek tragedies, where over and over we see “the hero’s deeper involvement in his own fate through his very efforts to extricate himself from it.”[1] A biblical example would be Jesus’ prayer in the garden of Gethsemane. Jesus begins that prayer by asking God to take “the cup” - the impending rejection, betrayal, and crucifixion - away from him. Jesus ultimately relents to say, “Nevertheless, not my will but yours.” Karl Barth describes the tragedy of that prayer as Jesus knowing that in order for God’s will to be done, Jesus’ enemies had to succeed.
On the whole, we Americans don’t do tragedy well. The plot to almost all of the hero movies, comic books, cartoons, novels, and stories that I consumed as a child was the same: The hero would be minding his (yes, his) own business just trying to be a good person. The villain would ceaselessly bully the hero, or the folks whom the hero defends, with what seemed to be an insurmountable advantage. There would be that poignant moment when the hero would reach the end of his (yes, his) patience and call on his courage/six-shooter/super power/can of spinach and finally “make it right.” It was like getting a Ph.D. in what Walter Wink called “the myth of redemptive violence.”[2] I not only consumed it as entertainment, it became the lens through which I saw the world, history, and even the Scriptures. Of course, I saw Jesus agonizing in the garden, but the church taught me to treat Gethsemane and Calvary as that moment when the hero Jesus is down, leading to the inevitable climax of Jesus coming back on a white horse, full of righteous violence, and taking no prisoners in the end. Instead of seeing the cross as central to the Scripture’s message of “redemptive suffering,” I was taught to see it as a passing moment in a story of redemptive violence. The classic use of “tragedy” has very little room to mean anything when we are conditioned to think that the hero inevitably will join the battle and inevitably emerge victorious.
By relegating “tragedy” to a passing moment in the inevitable flow toward redemptive violence, we have left ourselves ill-equipped for facing something like a pandemic. Not only did we, early on, start drawing on the analogy of “war” to shape our language and our mentality toward the virus, we are so impatient to get to the victory parade on the other side that we are not able to hold the moment at hand. Here is a simplified look at our tragedy: Prolonging the “shutdown” really does pose an economic disaster for many folks. While we might dismiss the people who insist that they have to “get their hair done,” it is less easy to dismiss the effects of the shutdown on the hairdresser, the table server, the janitorial service, and the production line worker. The shutdown has real serious economic effects that fall disproportionately on the service industry, those who are already living on the edges of the economy. At the same time, our service industries often expose workers to precisely the kinds of conditions that optimize infection. The best means of weakening the effects of a novel virus is not to charge forward and hope for a quick fix that works like magic, but to practice separation, isolation, flattening the curve, and keeping it that way. It is a classic tragedy: Opening the economy prematurely will have devastating, deadly effects on our health; prolonging the shutdown may have devastating effects on the economy and will certainly punish the poorest the most severely.
I should be clear in what I believe: We have not reached the point to where we can end the shutdown; we must only begin opening businesses when we can do so in a smart, gradual, and safe manner; and I am not willing to accept the inevitability of “collateral damage” as a way of referring to those who suffer the worst effects of the virus. Tragedy does not mean moral equivalency. It means that doing what one must has devastating consequences.
My training taught me to either scream and holler at rallies or ridicule those who scream and holler at rallies on social media. The gospel is calling me to a better use of my energies: Nod my head with understanding toward those who are anxious about the economy, affirming their anxiety while resisting their solutions; look for ways to attend to the needs of those most affected by the shutdown instead of simply making sure that ‘me and mine’ are protected; err on the side of caution, because the virus I contract may have its worst effects on others and not me; and do everything within the power of my voice and vote to live toward a more just and sustainable society in the future. I feel like tragic faithfulness has this kind of shape, particularly in our current moment.
Mark of St. Mark
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