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| photo by Christian Oterhals / flikr |
This Conoravirus virus is hard on us all. I have a very sick friend in the hospital and nobody can visit, and he is too sick to answer his phone. We lost one off the great men of our community. He has seven children and a whole community that loved him. We can’t plan the funeral. Family members cannot visit and console one another. Neither can his friends. I have a wonderful Catholic priest who is very sick with this virus. I have a nurse-granddaughter who works this week in the respiratory wing of the hospital and we all worry for her. This sad list seems seemingly endless.
I could talk about those millions who cannot work and so many of them have no paychecks coming in—their places of employment shut down. At the first of the month so many are worried about rent, mortgage and car payments—not to speak of their credit cards. The ripples in the stream touch every continent and the death toll of today is 3,727 in our own country. 183,532 have tested positive to this virusd as of today. We don’t know when this epidemic will end. We wear gloves and masks and wash our hands continually. All through the day many of us find ourselves praying for our loved ones and the whole world.
Many Chinese folk here have been turned on and spit on and called terrible names. Some people called this the Chinese virus. They are not any more guilty than the rest of us. This is not the time to blame. And it is not the time to play politics. This is not the time to act like this epidemic is just like the flu. Nor is this the time to keep the TV on hour after hour. We just don’t know how long this strange virus will last.
The closest analogy I can think of is what happened to England during the Second World War. As the country knew the Germans would either invade or at least drop bombs. It was scary time. So they sent more than a hundred thousand children, the infirm, pregnant women and mothers with babies and thousands of expectant mothers from their homes to obscure villages and farms until the war was over. So the people back home built bomb shelters and planned how they might use subways and other places so their citizens would be safe.
And then the bombs came. For 57 consecutive days bombs fell on England. 40,000 British citizens lost their lives, 2,000 in London alone. Homes, businesses, schools—everything was disrupted. Over a million homes were destroyed in those terrible years of 1939-1945.
Their leaders held out hope that one day life would return to normal. Their songs like: “The White Cliffs of Dover” kept them going. Listen to the words and the music. Somehow in those terrible war years they hung on to that slender thread of hope.
One of the stories that came out of those hard days told that one springtime on the gashes of those bombed-out places hundreds of flowers began to come up and covered the bombed out craters. And botanists discovered that when the bombs fell the nitrates unearthed seeds that had been buried for hundreds of years. And there flowers bloomed. And, as I remembered that English story, I looked around and in this strange springtime-flowers bloom and the signs of life are everywhere.
“Tomorrow when the world is free
The shepherds will tend his his sheep.
The valley will bloom again.
And Jimmy will go to sleep
In his own little room again.”
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| photo by will_bremen / flikr --Roger Lovette /rogerlovette.blogspot.com |
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