Love in a Time of COVID-19

Safeway, St. Patty's Day 2020

Tuesday I was shopping for groceries at Safeway, and somewhere near the coffee aisle, I found some new thoughts running through my brain—questions about everyone in the store and every surface I touched, all of which can be summarized in one phrase: 

“Will this give me the coronavirus?” 

Of course, I may be particularly selfish, but it wasn’t long before another thought, more other-centered, came to mind, “Who might I be infecting?” (I don’t have any symptoms, but of course, there is asymptomatic COVID-19 infection. So it wasn't a moot point.) Third thought as I looked around: “What is happening here?” I looked at the shelves and found gaping holes because people, being concerned about their personal stock piles, were hoarding. (Above, you’ll see a shelf usually filled with canned goods at my local Safeway.)

All this got me to ponder the effects of COVID-19, not just "social distancing," which is having profound effects on loneliness and isolation, but the related effect of thinking that every single persona might be somebody carrying this particularly pernicious disease--that could, at the least, send me into a 14-day quarantine, and at the worse, into a painful set of upper respiratory symptoms and hospitalization.

This all sounds a bit dower to me, and I realize where I'd like to go with this post--that is, to affirm our fundamental calling to love one another. So let me allow the great Christian teacher of the 4th and 5th century, Augustine, do some heavy lifting. 

In preaching on 1 John 4:4-12, this great Christian thinker uttered this:

“Once for all, then, a short precept is given you: Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.” Augustine

Similarly, if I jump up a millennium or so, Martin Luther produced an amazing tract, "Whether Christians Should Flee the Plague." right at the time that a bubonic plague hit Wittenberg, Germany in 1527. In response, Luther refused to flee the city in order to protect himself.  He stayed and cared for the victims. 

As Lyman Stone comments:

"Luther provides a clear articulation of the Christian epidemic response: We die at our posts. Christian doctors cannot abandon their hospitals, Christian governors cannot flee their districts, Christian pastors cannot abandon their congregations. The plague does not dissolve our duties: It turns them to crosses, on which we must be prepared to die." 

And so I return to that central question, stated just a bit differently, "What happens when everyone around you might have COVID-19 or when they might get it from you?"

My strong hunch is that no Christian leader of the stature of Augustine or Luther--or of lesser fame, faith, and insight--would allow the coronavirus to make everyone around us an object of suspicion. 

Nothing, it seems, should interrupt our call to love.