Rebuke Me Not in Thy Anger?: Notes in a Time of Pandemic

We are living in strange times.

Certainly, I never expected to have occasion to sing the above molieben, “Sung in Time of Devastating Epidemic and Deathbearing Pestilence.” Or even had an inkling that such a service existed. (Not that I was very surprised—the Russians seem to have a molieben for every occasion…)

And yet, I sung it today after Liturgy, in a choir deliberately reduced to a handful of people, each of us prudently spaced at our own stand.

I also never dreamed of attending Orthodox services where the very materiality of our worship was so carefully restrained. And yet, we all carefully avoided actually kissing icons in church, even while celebrating their restoration last week on the Sunday of Orthodoxy.

And it goes on and on. These are but small manifestations of the measures we all must take in light of the present pandemic. The scale of it is hard to wrap one’s mind around; certainly, no epidemic in my lifetime has been felt so pervasively.

Meanwhile, along with the necessary, thoughtful measures, there is also widespread panic and hysteria. Which is how grocery stores end up looking like this:

Grocery shopping at a local Trader Joe’s after work on Friday…

[NB: When you encounter a store like this, please remember to be kind to everyone working there. It’s not their fault that they have no more toilet paper or bread!] 

As Christians, what can we begin to say in the light of such a crisis?

I’ll confess that while singing the above molieben today, I felt somewhat troubled by all the language of averting the righteous wrath of God. (Is the coronavirus God’s punishment for our sins?) But the language of wrath in this service appears in a plea for mercy, as is common in Scripture, including the psalm the service opens with (even if we skipped it today):

O Lord, rebuke me not in thy anger, nor chasten me in thy wrath! For thy arrows have sunk into me, and thy hand has come down on me. There is no soundness in my flesh because of thy indignation; there is no health in my bones because of my sin. For my iniquities have gone over my head; they weigh like a burden too heavy for me. (37/8:1–4)

This plea for God to avert his wrath is the natural cry of human suffering—of our suffering. It is a recognition of our sinfulness, yes; but even more fundamentally, of our utter contingency. (Even our enlightened secularized society retains act of God as a legal category for certain kinds of calamities!)

But we must take care never to assume, like Job’s friends, that people are being punished for their sins when they suffer. Jesus specifically speaks against such an understanding in the Gospels:

As he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus answered, “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest in him.” (John 9:1–3)

There were some present at that very time who told him of the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. Or those eighteen upon whom the tower in Silo′am fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, No; but unless you repent you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:1–5)

I tell you, No…

We certainly can’t say that the victims of the coronavirus are being punished for their sins, that they suffer thus because they are worse sinners than their neighbors! And speculating on why particular people suffer and others do not is an exercise in futility. As far as I’m concerned, abstract theodicy is a recipe for despair. For Christians, the only answer to such questions can be found in Christ: Christ on the Cross, Christ trampling down death by death, Christ descending into hell and loosing the bonds of the captives.

…but unless you repent you will all likewise perish. 

At the same time, when we are confronted with suffering, we should take stock of ourselves and our own failings, as individuals and as communities. Disaster has a way of clearly showing us who we are; the spotlight shines brightly enough that we cannot hide from ourselves any longer.

What does our response to this present pandemic tell us about our own lack of faith, our hard-heartedness and our selfishness? What does it say about our society’s neglect of the poor and vulnerable, our fear of the stranger? O Lord and Master of my life, grant me to see my own transgressions, and not to judge my brother! 

If we allow it to, disaster can also show us the path of repentance, to becoming who have not yet been, but who we are still meant to be. Be we must allow it to.

During WWII, my patron, St Maria of Paris, wrote the following in an essay titled “Insight in Wartime.” With a few changes of detail, I think it is also applicable to our own crisis:

In fact, war is the wing of death spread over the world, war is for thousands and thousands of people an open gate into eternity, war is the collapse of the philistine order, coziness, and stability. War is a call, war is an insight.

And there are two ways to respond to this call, to this sounding of the archangel’s trumpet. We can respond as a respectable visitor at a funeral service responds to death, as something sad but extraneous. That is the usual response. If it sometimes does not amaze us, that is only because we are somehow used to everything.

In fact, if you think of it, should we not be amazed by any issue of an illustrated magazine in which there is a picture of sailors drowning in the sea—human lives perishing—or of a dead soldier in the snow, frozen, his open, glassy eyes staring at the sky, and on the next page some movie actress, pampered, well-scrubbed, all made-up, smiling as she performs some physical exercise? Or a caricature of Parisian midinettes, or something else from that other, already submerged world? These juxtapositions are innocent, because their absurdity does not amaze editors or readers, but at the same time cynical, I would even say sinister.

Enough, enough. Right now, at this moment, I know that hundreds of people are face to face with what is most serious, with Seriousness itself—with death; I know that thousands and thousands of people are waiting their turn. I know that mothers are watching for the mailman and tremble when a letter comes a day late; I know that wives and children feel the breath of war in their peaceful homes.

And, finally, I know, I know with all my being, with all my faith, with all the spiritual force granted to the human soul, that at this moment God is visiting His world. And the world can receive that visit, open its heart—”ready, ready is my heart”—and then in an instant our temporary and fallen life will unite with the depths of eternity, then our human cross will become the likeness of the God-man’s cross, then within our deathly affliction itself we will see the white garments of the angel who will announce to us: “He who was dead is no longer in the tomb.” Then mankind will enter into the paschal joy of the Resurrection.

Or else… Maybe it will not even be worse than before, but merely the same as before. Once again—and how often has it been?—we will have fallen, we will not have accepted, we will not have found the path to transfiguration.

The old, sad, dusty earth races through the empty sky into eternal emptiness. Death-bound mankind rejoices over small success and weeps over small failures, renouncing its election, painstakingly and assiduously pulling the coffin lid over its head.

The choice, as always, is ours.