COVID19: STRANGE CONTRADICTION

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Early this morning I was reading a chapter in Street Wisdom, my book about intimacy and mastery. Since I find that many of the meditations in my books still speak to my heart and challenge me, I wasn't totally surprised when I came across the following paragraphs this morning. But I was surprised, I confess, at how timely they seem, which is why I'm sharing them with you.

There are times when life naturally challenges me to pull up stakes and leave the comfortable

security of what I know in favor of something new and strange, whether that's going off to the first day of kindergarten or college, or moving to a different job in another city.

Sometimes the call to change is subtle, maybe just a nagging sense that something is missing in my life, or a remark that a friend made that leaves me unsettled deep inside. Sometimes a tragic upheaval leaves me no choice -- the death of a family member, the loss of a job, or a medical emergency lands me in the middle of some strange new wilderness (92).

Thanks to the pandemic, those words have so much more force today than they did when I wrote them in 2002. Luckily I didn't stop the reflection at that point, but continued:

For a Christian, getting uprooted is far more than just one of life's normal inconveniences -- it's a special opportunity for intimacy with God. It's the Lord calling me to let go of whatever I may be hanging on to, to say good-bye to familiar territory, and to move on in hope into the wilderness. As the Israelites found out, though, the wilderness can be terrifying. Life is precarious there, and you have to depend on God for everything: Water, food, protection from enemies, and guidance in the trackless waste.

In the spiritual life such an uprooting is called a conversion experience. Something so forceful and unexpected happens to me that my usual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting are completely turned around. Moses meets God in the Burning bush (Exodus 3:10), and Saul is struck blind after encountering the risen Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-19), and neither man is ever again what he was before. They have been called into a totally new and unfamiliar place. For a Christian the experience of loss and upheaval is an invitation to enter more deeply into the paschal mystery -- it is Christ's call to closer intimacy with him (92-93). 

A STRANGE CONTRADICTION

It's a strange contradiction that the deadly covid-19 has forced us to stay confined to our homes and not venture outside just at the moment when the Lord is probably calling each of us to pull up stakes and set off, like Abraham, to a land that God will show us but which we don't know at all. "And God said to Abraham, "Leave your father's house and go to a land that I will show you (Genesis 12:1)."  

Try thinking of the experiences of the pandemic as calls from the Lord to leave the things that you're so familiar with and over which you have a lot of control, to let go of them and depend more and more on God.