Saints and viruses are not to be married

 

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.