Pandemic Fatigue

 

In March 2020, we entered a new world. Restaurants, churches, schools, airports, schools and borders closed. We washed hands obsessively and emptied bottles of hand sanitizer. A traumatic disjuncture in our lives.

During those early days I heard a public health official say that the pandemic might go on for a few months. Months! Not until July! Impossible!

Twenty months later- -day after day of masks, elbow bumps, little boxes on Zoom, chronic stress— and we’re the lucky ones, living where we do. But the chronicity—like a chronic illness–is so hard for us as humans.

I, like many, found comfort and challenge in my faith community. But I also found it in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, as the classics book group I lead for Drury Lane Books read and allowed the novel to speak to our pandemic lives.

For example, reflecting on her great character Dorothea’s strain living in an empty marriage to Mr. Casaubon, we’re told this:

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

Well, that summed it up. Exhausted by the ongoing ness of the pandemic, we were well wadding ourselves with cookies and Netflix.

In May our exhaustion gave way to hope–with the vaccines, we could see light at the end of the tunnel!

Instead, we head into the darkest time of year still in our pandemic world. Added to the strain of chronicity is a thick layer of anger, since we would not be stuck here if the vaccine hesitant and resistant were not shirking their responsibilities.

What do we do with our fury at those who perpetuate this pandemic, who are (by their refusal to roll up their sleeves) making it more likely that more virulent strains of the virus will evolve? The writer of the book of James says, “Be angry, but sin not.” He doesn’t tell us how to do that.

Here’s another (what we called in our book group) “Middlemarch moment.” As readers we dislike Mr. Casaubon, whose life is destroying the life of our heroine, Dorothea. How can he be so selfish?!? Eliot brings us up short:

“One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea—but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?” Eliot goes on to bring Mr. Casaubon’s perspective and motives, bringing the reader to pity him.

I ask you, as I ask myself, how can I exercise, empathy (and even love) for those whose choices are inexplicable to me? How can I love this particular neighbor as Eliot challenges, and Jesus calls me to do?

Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Mary Ellen Ashcroft, Vicar of Spirit of the Wilderness Episcopal Church.