On Stage Now: "Coronavirus 2020"

I've come to believe that crises, like this Coronavirus experience, make good people better and bad people worse.

It is encouraging to hear stories about people sacrificing their routines, coming to the aid of a neighbor in need, or continuing to do jobs that carry a risk of contracting the disease,

Good people go out of their way to bring peace to the anxious, food to the hungry, money to the no- longer employed! The intervention of the many Good Samaritans out there makes tolerable the loneliness, anxiety, and fears that inevitably steal into the hearts of all who suffer through these trying times.

Bad people double their efforts to be self-centered and manipulative, hoarding foods or paper products, or scamming people with deceptive phone calls claiming to be from Medicare or from a medical service providing coronavirus testing.
                                               
Assessing this pandemic from my religious perspective I have to ask, "What is God trying to tell us?
What questions should we be asking ourselves? What lesson am I to learn?"

The answers may be applicable to the behaviors of the world at large, or to any given nation or political party. Above all, the answers must be personal to each individual human being! Each of us has the opportunity (responsibility) to pause, to think, to listen to conscience and the insights of ethics and morality.
                                         
Over the years I have developed for myself a fundamental principle from study of the Bible, from reading biographies, from personal experience: "God often directs us in indirect ways."

I think of God as a movie director watching the unfolding of each scene of our lives. He seldom tells us how we are to act, but more often subtly coaches from us a performance based on our own unique combination of talents.

I am not fond of this script, this "Coronavirus 2020," but I suspect the Director is watching carefully how each of us plays the role he or she has been given, trusting we will use our talents to bring this production to a happy ending.

And as is always true, God waits to see whether the bad people, the villains, will have that epiphany moment which brings about conversion. Bad people can become good. That possibility adds to the drama, and may be the raison d'etre for the entire production.

The plays the thing wherein the Divine One catches his actors. He has given the general description of the story, but allows the actors to contribute in their own way.

And still He directs in indirect ways.

The Burden of Human Freedom

I have a hunch it is harder for a human being to be a human being than it is for an angel to be an angel.

Human beings have an ongoing wrestling match between their intellect/will and their emotions.

Although the intellect seems to be naturally oriented toward truth, and the will toward good, the freedom we have allows us to thwart that natural orientation.

Emotions can either help or hinder our efforts to be homo sapiens.

Our intellects, the spiritual power that enables us to know, can be mistaken in its effort to opine, to think things through. (I think we are not entitled to our opinion until we have made an honest effort to seek the truth.) Emotions such as anger or hate can interfere in the process of thinking. (A person filled with hate usually doesn't think straight.)

And we can choose to do wrong in spite of our natural orientation toward good. Even our sinful acts are choices for good, that is, we see some good in the act, and even though the search for truth reveals that evil outweighs the good, we choose to act because of the "good" we see in it.

I realize I am on shaky ground when I question whether angels have emotional interference in the choices they make. Some have proposed that satan's fall from grace was because of jealousy. It is said that Lucifer was upset when God announced his plan to make creatures that could share in his creative power, creatures blessed with the power of pro-creation, of bringing new life into existence.
(It's a theory; any substantial evidence to back it up?)

The human burden of free-will may be among the reasons God forgives so readily. God understands.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov contains a parable called "The Grand Inquisitor,"
an argument proposed by Ivan, the unbeliever, that Jesus could have relieved human beings of the wrestling match between intellect/will and emotions but failed to do so. He sees the three temptations Jesus faced in Matthew 4:1-11 as the occasion when Jesus could have acted but failed to do so. As a consequence, the parable proposes, the Church has had to step in and make decisions for people, relieving them of the need to "think things through."

There is risk in having to think. There is uncertainty. Thomas Merton wrestled with such freedom as the so-called "Merton Prayer" makes plain: "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me... Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please does in fact please you."

I suppose that if we had all the answers and complete surety we would easily conclude we don't need God's help. It is the uncertainty that can lead us to allowing Jesus the Christ to have entrance into our life.

Among the many crosses humanity must bear I suspect freedom, the ability to choose, is one of the heaviest.  It is comforting to know that in Jesus we have someone who will accompany us all along the way, even if we stumble and fall.