We are choking: the United States of Asphyxiation. Under attack from invisible enemies, the number of succumbing victims is rising. Those not physically stricken are nonetheless affected by anxiety, confusion, and outrage. The covert enemies of coronavirus, racism, hatred, fear, and division are manifest in illness, death, opposition, and uprising.
While threatened by a pandemic of respiratory disease, we continue to lose lives to violence—humans against humans, aggression and decimation in the name of order, all the while concealing fear, mistrust, misjudgment, and hatred.
As if the pandemic’s toll of death, isolation, economic impact, and restrictions weren’t enough, the scourge of racism and violence again thrusts blatantly before our eyes. The latest outrage—the death of George Floyd under a policeman’s knee—incites ire and takes away our collective breath. When I watch the nauseating video replay of Floyd pleading under the cop’s knee, I gasp. I conjure an image of a grandma being smothered with a pillow in a hospital bed.
Our hospitals have been filled with patients stricken with COVID-19, a devastating virus that attacks the lungs and invades the respiratory system. With millions of cases and hundreds of thousands of deaths, we are overwhelmed. It’s difficult even for the asymptomatic to take a deep breath.
There are many ways that the human body can become ill or incapacitated. In order to stay alive, our cells and organs need uninterrupted oxygen supply. Even brief deprivation causes injury or death. Breath is so fundamental. We take it for granted—until it is diminished.
The manifest physical necessity of breath is obvious. There is also a metaphorical and abstract meaning. Think of the phrase, “a breath of fresh air,” indicating refreshment and revitalization. The Sanskrit word prana means breath as a life force.
Now, we are not supposed to breathe on each other. As a caution and prevention against infection, we guard our breath and stay distant. The physical and psychological implications are life-changing.
When I am stifled, I pray.
Masks have become essential. We’re warned to avoid each other, to stay home and confined. Human contact is dangerous: how conflicting this is with what we need as social beings!
Each of us harbors the potential to inflict harm on others. How frightening that deadliness may lurk within us! How threatening the deadliness we see on the news!
I stand on line, wearing my mask, sweating under the hot sun and getting increasingly uncomfortable.
I can’t breathe!
Society wants to cut me off. Selfishly, I feel sorry for my own discomfort. Once inside the store, I stand on the social distancing circle marked on the floor. I wait for the person in front of me to move and vacate his circle. It feels like an adult Simon Says game. Or, I imagine myself taking a lead off first base, waiting to steal second base. I don’t want to get caught. Impatiently, I try to follow the rules. Aha! The next circle is open—I sneak forward.
Besides the droplets of my breath that may unintentionally cause harm, what else may be inside me that diminishes the well-being of others? What if I speak incorrectly—unleash prejudicial or racist attitudes, even unwittingly? Is it the droplets of my breath, the germs on my hands, or the contents of my thoughts that are most potentially dangerous. A mask my divert my breath, but am I asymptomatically conveying racism? Am I harming others with white privilege? What don’t I realize about the insidious biases endemic to our society that include me, even without my voluntary perpetration? What can I do to change it?
When I am perplexed, I pray.
As I approach the customer counter, a temperature gun is aimed at my forehead. Playfully, I hold up my hands. Don’t shoot! In my own mind, I am imaginative, cynical, sarcastic, trying to entertain. After all, this is temperature profiling—judging me by the heat of my skin!
I flash back to a period in my childhood: in grade school, I was forced to stay home for a week when I ran a high temperature. Upward of 103 degrees, my mother was alarmed; but, I felt fine. With youthful hyperactivity, I couldn’t stand to be confined and told to be sedentary. I wasn’t sick. When my fever failed to subside after a week, I was hurried to the doctor. He diagnosed me with “activity fever,” meaning that I tended to run an abnormally high body temperature during and after exercise (a provincial diagnosis). I was so active that I rarely was still.
My mother was relieved, and I was released to go back to school. But, I didn’t forget. When I wanted to stay home from school, I would furtively do jumping jacks in my room to raise my temperature. Then, I’d get back into bed and moan loudly and call my mother. I complained of not feeling well. Of course, my temperature was high, and so I got to stay home from school. My “activity fever” worked for me as a manipulative ploy.
The streets of our cities swell with protesters. Voices strain to be heard, as the population is outraged and enraged over the murder of George Floyd. His is the latest in a string of atrocities. Bodies and souls of police brutality victims add to the deceased from coronavirus and the countless others lost to the ravages of our wanting infection control and poor social justice. Mounting numbers pile evidence upon woes, but cannot describe the heartbreak. Along with the families’ pain, there is collective anguish and fear. Who will be next? This must stop!
Stuck in traffic, I watch the protesters lining the overpass, waving signs I can’t quite read. I am certainly pro-testing: I want COVID-19 testing to be ubiquitous. We must stop this medical pandemic. I am not a marching sign-waver in the streets. But the signs are positive: we as a society are sick.
As for the racial and social injustice pandemic: if only such a vaccine were around the corner. It’s ugly, deadly, historical, and barely visible to most of its perpetrators. I am horrified by what I see on television: the brutal violent videos, unprovoked shootings and police aggression, and the chart numbers on coronavirus. Horrified and helpless, my “opinions” are drowning in a sea of reality.
Coronavirus is not genetic; it is highly transmissible, intentional by microbes, but not among humans. Regarding our other pandemic, I see placards that read, “No one is born a racist.” The implication is sobering. Transmission may be both systemic and intentional. What if that’s only partially true? Skin color is not a crime—that means all skin colors, including mine. So, I am pro-testing for racism. I am probably positive, even though I don’t feel the symptoms. What are the tests, the remedies, the cures? What if I am unintentionally harming others? It takes my breath away.
I am integral in a society that oppresses as it deviously gaslights the blame and allows politics to ironically give oppressors a platform for victimhood. When societal outrage surges, the stark inequities become clear. Most of the time, they recede to confusion and resentment. We are taught to feel sorry for ourselves, reinforced for instincts that come all too naturally. I can find many reasons to feel picked on. Yet, I know nothing of genocide or slavery.
When I am ashamed, I pray.
The protests display unity and chaos. Officers and politicians kneel with marchers in a show of respect and unification. This is encouraging. Meanwhile, the criminal element takes advantage by looting and sowing more discord. Our maniacal president stokes the fury with every word he utters and writes. We are getting wiser in exposing the transparency of tyranny. Now, how to dethrone despots while preserving and respecting our democracy as we reform its shameful oppression and systematic wrongs?
With mixed emotions, I worry about disorder and rebellion. Right on to loud and active freedom of expression. Cheers for the courage of those who step forward. Bravo to the minions who point out the discrepancies in health and health care that disproportionally claim the health and lives of people of color.
But, I’m concerned about the potential backlash for activism. “Law and order” is waiting in the wings to impose force to smother the voices crying out. Other nations have been far more militaristic in suppressing dissent, but it could happen again here. (Remember Ronald Reagan as California’s governor… the Civil Rights police response in the South?)
Some police are kneeling with protesters; others are firing rubber bullets and gases, tasing innocent passersby, and roughing up journalists. In the fray, white people are getting assaulted—imagine!
There’s a saying: when White America catches a cold, Black America gets pneumonia. Let me offer a parallel: when the privileged dissent, it’s a prediction. When the underprivileged dissent, it’s a threat.
I am posing a prediction: we must find a way to avoid egging on authoritarian suppressive responses. America is full of very angry people. When blood boils, skin (of all colors) turns red. And the pressure demands release.
The outrage and injustice are stifling. It’s hard to swallow and harder to breathe when the tear gas spreads.
Where are we headed? I can’t breathe!
But, I can pray.
My pre-existing health conditions do not include respiratory problems. I have allergies and, according to my doctors, asthma, and apnea (I think they are wrong about this because I have none of those symptoms… but, perhaps I am wrong and “latent”). I rarely get colds or flu, but I certainly know the terror of having difficulty breathing. I can hardly imagine the suffering of coronavirus. Nor can I fathom being held in a chokehold by police.
However, I don’t have to imagine periods of breathing peril: I have the memories.
Many years ago, in Hawaii, I ventured into the ocean on a “Snuba” dive. “Snuba” is a recreation that allows underwater swimming and exploration by the use of a breathing line that connects divers with oxygen supply from above. It’s purportedly a safer and milder version of scuba diving. At the behest of my intrepid wife, I joined. I fastened the “vacation ventilator” to my face and plunged downward. The tropical underwater beauty notwithstanding, I chickened out after barely a minute submerged. It was the closest I’ve ever come to a panic attack. I knew that the apparatus in my mouth was the only barrier between living and drowning. I struggled to keep it in my mouth, but I felt it slipping. Terrified, I swam furiously to the surface before my breath ran out. I wanted none of this. I can’t breathe! Deprivation of breath will bring any grown man to tears.
Prayers come quickly when breath is short.
Fast forward to 2018: I awaken from heart surgery on a ventilator. The tube in my mouth is uncomfortable, but I’m more unnerved by the many tubes emerging from my body. Relaxing is the only thing to do, yet it is difficult, despite the weight of medication.
I’d been prepped for this, but nothing really prepares one for the experience. The medical staff was wonderful, ministering to me attentively. I only had to follow the program, hoping my body would cooperate. At least I was awake, but barely. And no one was afraid to come near me.
Eventually, they removed the ventilator, and I could breathe on my own. The surgery went according to plan. No infections or complications. A life undoubtedly saved.
My lungs are clear. I can breathe!
When I am thankful, I pray.
As we struggle through the pandemic restlessness and concomitant social unrest, the limitations of human knowledge and anguish and frustration rush to the foreground. Faith, pride, and patience are severely tested. For those who believe or want to believe in an all-powerful God, the yearning for understanding and relief is exacerbated.
Where is God in all this, and what is he doing?
N.T. Wright is a biblical scholar and former Anglican bishop who published a recent book entitled, God and the Pandemic. It’s an eloquent and insightful missive that attempts to weave biblical passages and the leadership of Jesus into the present coronavirus pandemic with some sensible responses by Christians and the Church. It is excellent and thought-provoking reading for those inclined toward biblical exegesis and interpretations.
The title compelled me, and I found Wright’s insights sincere and useful. I will summarize some of his ideas in an effort to bring theological and practical responses to our current medical and social pandemics.
Wright’s recent publication predates Floyd’s death and its aftermath. His reflections on God and the coronavirus pandemic apply fittingly to racial and social injustice as well.
Wright tackles the age-old questions of why God lets bad things happen and what messages he might be sending through catastrophe. The author rejects the convenient explanation that our present distress is punishment for sin or possibly a sign of the End times approaching.
Instead, Wright reminds us that:
…when the world is going through great convulsions, the followers of Jesus are called to be people of prayer at the place where the world is in pain. (Apostle) Paul puts it like this, in a three-stage movement: first, the groaning of the world; second, the groaning of the Church; third, the groaning of the Spirit – within the Church within the world. This is the ultimate answer, I think, to those who want to say that the present Coronavirus crisis is a clear message from God which we can at once decode, either as a sign of the End, a call to repent, or simply an opportunity for a standard kind of evangelism.
Wright quotes Paul in Romans:
We know that the entire creation is groaning together, and going through labour pains together, up until the present time. Not only so: we too, we who have the first fruits of the Spirit’s life within us, are groaning within ourselves, as we eagerly await our adoption, the redemption of our body. We were saved, you see, in hope . . .
In the same way, too, the Spirit comes alongside and helps us in our weakness. We don’t know what to pray for as we ought to; but that same Spirit pleads on our behalf, with groanings too deep for words. And the Searcher of Hearts knows what the Spirit is thinking, because the Spirit pleads for God’s people according to God’s will.
(Romans 8.22–27)
Wright continues:
Those who have long pondered the story of Jesus will recognize it. We expect God to be, as we might say, “in charge”: taking control, sorting things out, getting things done. But the God we see in Jesus is the God who wept at the tomb of his friend. The God we see in Jesus is the God-the-Spirit who groans without words. The God we see in Jesus is the one who, to demonstrate what his kind of “being in charge” would look like, did the job of a slave and washed his disciples’ feet.
So what are we saying? Not only do we, the followers of Jesus, not have any words to say, any great pronouncements on “what this all means” to trumpet out to the world (the world, of course, isn’t waiting eagerly to hear us anyway); but we, the followers of Jesus, find ourselves caught up in the groaning of creation, and we discover that at the same time God the Spirit is groaning within us. That is our vocation: to be in prayer, perhaps wordless prayer, at the point where the world is in pain. At those very moments when we find ourselves weeping with grief at the death of a friend or family member, or at the impossibility of having a proper funeral, or at the horror of millions of the world’s poorest being at risk, or simply because being locked down is inherently depressing – at those moments, when any words we try to say come out as sobs or tears, we have to remind ourselves that this is how God the Spirit is present at the heart of the agony of creation…
…In a time of acute crisis, when death sneaks into houses and shops, when you may feel healthy yourself but you may be carrying the virus without knowing it, when every stranger on the street is a threat, when we go around in masks, when churches are shut and people are dying with nobody to pray by their bedside – this is a time for lament. For admitting we don’t have easy answers. For refusing to use the crisis as a loudspeaker for what we’d been wanting to say in any case. For weeping at the tomb of our friends. For the inarticulate groaning of the Spirit. “Rejoice with those who rejoice,” said Paul, “and weep with those who weep.” Yes, and the world is weeping right now. The initial calling of the Church, first and foremost, is to take our place humbly among the mourners.
Grief, after all, is part of love. Not to grieve, not to lament, is to slam the door on the same place in the innermost heart from which love itself comes. Our culture is afraid of grief, but not just because it is afraid of death.
In all this, I return to the theme of Lament. It is perhaps no accident that Psalm 72, setting out the messianic agenda which puts the poor and needy at the top of the list, is followed immediately by Psalm 73, which complains that the rich and powerful are getting it their own way as usual. Perhaps that is how we are bound to live: glimpsing what ought to be, then struggling with the way things actually are. However, the only way to live with that is to pray with that; to hold the vision and the reality side by side as we groan with the groaning of all creation, and as the Spirit groans within us so that the new creation may come to birth. What we need right now is someone to do in this challenging moment what Joseph did at Pharaoh’s court, analysing the situation and sketching a vision for how to address it. We urgently need statesmanlike, wise leadership, with prayerful Christian leaders taking a place alongside others, to think with both vision and realism through the challenges that we shall face in the coming months.
Wright also addresses the scriptural meaning of “working together.” He interprets the translation of working as not for the benefit of (ergazomai), but rather working together or with (synergeo). He references Paul in Romans 8:28, 1 Corinthians 3.9, 1 Corinthians 16.16, and the image-bearing vocation of humans in Genesis 1 and Psalm 8.
What does this theology mean and what relevance does spiritual abstraction have for us in the present tumult?
Let me summarize:
I believe that more Americans are listening now. We are inflicted and shaken to the core. We must come together with the recognition of interdependence and compassion. The attitude of everyone for himself results in everyone by himself—and none of us can survive alone. We are responsible for not harming each other.
Individually and collectively, we must come to grips with the self-interest and fear that makes threat, defensiveness, and aggression loom in the face of everyone who is not like us, competes with us, or may take what we have or want. This requires self-control, social control, and spiritual control. For our society to survive and thrive at any reasonable, civilized, and satisfying level, we’d better cooperate and get ahead of the devolving trends that are choking us off.
We need to take deep breaths, pray, speak, and act.
When I am overwhelmed and don’t know what or how to pray, I groan. God hears this sound and nurtures his creation.
Inequality asphyxiates hope. And hope is the oxygen of democracy.
— Darren Walker, President of the Ford Foundation
— Mark Steinberg, PhD
