It was the beginning of the Pandemic and people were getting
familiar with the new lockdown normal. A protestant
pastor had the bold idea to protect his community by praying for the safety
of every single parishioner. He took his commitment seriously and not a single
day passed by without his earnest prayers that were meant to protect the faithful
believers (i.e., modern Israel) amid this Egyptian-like plague. He envisioned
the possibility that all members of his church will be spared, and none will
get infected. The first few weeks went by successfully and his optimism grew
accordingly. But in less than a year he not only had to abandon his initial
plan, but had to perform several CORONA funerals.
Liberated
after the first lockdown, some people flocked to the church to find spiritual
consolation. Fully masked, they respectfully attended the open-air religious
service separated from their neighbors by two meters of wind and fresh air. At
the end of the Mass the crowd piously lined up to receive the Holy Communion.
But Communion was served with one and the same silver spoon as the officiating priest
believed that the Blessed Sacraments are at odds with all viruses. After this event
got some attention from the press, the Orthodox
Church publicly apologized and officially renounced the practice.
A rabbi from Israel openly declared that CORONA represents God’s curse
designed to punish the LGBT or gay community. But a few months later, the same
rabbi carelessly scratched his nose during a prayer meeting and inadvertently got
crowned by millions of viruses. Was this a sign from God that he was part of
the invisible LGBT community? I don’t know about that, but I know for sure that
it couldn’t be a shorter way to rapidly gain him an international, super-star
like mockery fame.
After the vaccine roll-over started,
a prominent Romanian Orthodox priest claimed to hold a superior solution: his
daily communion has the power to protect him (and everyone else) beyond the
effectiveness of any human-made vaccine. However - and here I want to abruptly
change to course of the argument - there is no evidence (scientific or
otherwise) that a symbol is able to repel a virus, even if that symbol is
invested with multiple sacred meanings. As far as I know, any symbol, including
religious ones, gets to be just a symbol and throughout time it continues to
have the same or an evolving meaning, depending on what various generations decided
to ascribe to it. The fallacy comes from clumsily mingling two different levels
of analyses in a desperate effort to marry them and force them to take the same
wedding picture as bride and groom. But saints and viruses are not to be
married. Religious symbols are meant to offer hope, to mold our inner life and
boost our motivation for altruism, to positively impact emotions and stimulate
gratitude, to talk to our meaning-making and symbolic being that our physical
bodies were designed to entertain. Viruses on the other hand couldn’t care less
about the symbols we use to grace our churches with or to part-take in religious
rituals. All they care about are the biological conditions that allow them to
multiply and strive as a species and all they fear are the physical barriers
that hinder their progress. Do you see why they are the worst candidates for
getting married, and why they don’t like kissing each other? Forcing them to
sleep in the same bad will only increase the chance of procreating monsters
that that will abate us from getting a straight picture of both our spiritual
traditions and our physical world.
Saints and viruses are not to be
married not because they are consanguineously related as distant cousins. On
the contrary, they are not to be married because they emerged from radically
different worlds and house radically different underlying mechanisms, rules, laws
and values under their shelters. This doesn’t mean that they have never met, or
never touched hands. They did! For example, it is well accepted in psychology
that our mind or spirit can influence our body; that generally hopeful people tend
to have a stronger immune systems; that adding an extra religious motivation
(i.e., considering our bodies as the temple of the Holy Spirit) can effectively
contribute to adopting and maintaining healthy behaviors by making us more responsible.
But the psycho-somatic relationship is just one of the myriad of influences
meant to either strain or uplift our bodies, and not an invincible protective wall
against viruses or other foreign invaders. The belief that God reigns in the
heavenly realms, lovingly watching and protecting his flock could be helpful and
inspiring. But beyond a certain point it can get dirty and entangled in the mud
of unrealistic illusions. And our heartfelt wishes expressed in prayers -
whether desperate, hopeful, faithful, or casual - are rather dependent on the
uncontrollable Will of the Almighty that most of the time gets so sovereign and
mysterious that remains impenetrable for our humble minds. That’s why I think saints
and viruses are rather distant friends whose spheres of influence only partially
overlap; they are acquaintances with different interests and orientations in
life, not long time husband and wife. That’s why saints and viruses should neither
get married nor be granted a resounding divorce, because their friendly, nonsexual
hand-shake represents the mutually fulfilling relationship they both long
for.
Although the spiritual and
transcendent values are placed high above and up on the vertical axis while the
earthly human ones are placed below and beneath on the horizontal axis, this
mere positioning shouldn’t deceive us when it comes to their jurisdiction. The
distance between the two spheres resembles rather the haven–earth dichotomy
than the dominance of one over the other. Didn’t you ever had the unmistakable
impression that transcendent values are placed so high in the sky that they
cannot remotely control the earthly details of our below and beneath horizontal
axis? Didn’t you ardently wished and prayed for something as if your life
depended on it, only to find the circumstances turned in the opposite
direction? I did, and it was tremendously frustrating to see that my spiritual
efforts to do something (like remote-controlling the mundane events from post
of my horizontal axes) appear futile, that the earth seems to be guided by
different laws than the haven, that the natural world appears only partially
connected to the transcendent. The relationship between the two seems so
different from the one cherished by the pinions and cogwheels of a mechanical
clock or the gears of a car, where the turns of one wheel are proportionally
spinning the other parts in an intimate and coherent move. The relationship
seems rather like the loose interactions among the disparate parts of a complex
system where discrepant movements and offbeats sometimes play a synchronicity
game in a charming and mysterious tango. I am currently and concurrently watching
and playing this intriguing tournament, observing in amazement the convoluted
mosaic of multiplex movements. But at least for the moment, I am reticent to
sail the boat of building fervent generalizations on the narrow basis of
singular events. I also trained myself to delay the sweet gratification of
manufacturing and erecting immediate theories about how the world works on the
basis of my transcendent values and aspirations. I have found enough reasons to
believe that saints and viruses are actually only distant, nonsexual friends
who enjoy a rather platonic relationship. That’s how they naturally fit
together, enjoying fundamentally different jurisdictions. However, their worlds
seem to partially and occasionally overlap, and the meeting happens when they
decide to respectfully shake hand in spite of the pandemic recommendation to abstain
from it or use only the elbow bump.