We’ll return to last week’s “Reframing” focus and Practicing Foolishness prompt next week. It’s not too late to share your responses!
Do you find your eyes glazing over yet when the COVID-19 case counts get announced? Every day a bunch of numbers get shared by news conference and online sources, with dozens of shares on social media and e-mail. This many new infections. This many hospitalized. This many who have died in the last twenty-four hours. The numbers for our state, and for the nation as a whole, and maybe some specific hotspots where the numbers deserve some special attention.
We could be forgiven if we block some of this out. It’s one of the ways we cope with the anxiety and confusion of this time. It’s natural.
It’s odd, though. We probably paid more attention to the numbers when they were in the 10s and 20s than we do now that they’re in the hundreds and thousands, and hundreds of thousands.
And the longer those numbers come at us, the harder it will be for us to see them.
An opinion piece this week by Charlie Warzel laments this increasing indifference. Quoting a Tweet, this writer says,
The coronavirus scenario I can’t stop thinking about is the one where we simply get used to all the dying…. “We keep losing 1,000 to 2,000 a day to coronavirus. People get used to it. We get less vigilant as it very slowly spreads. By December we’re close to normal, but still losing 1,500 a day, and as we tick past 300,000 dead, most people aren’t concerned.”
Charlie Warzel, Opinion, “Open States, Lots of Guns. America Is Paying a Heavy Price for Freedom.” The New York Times, May 5, 2020.
Warzel points out our similar indifference to the gun violence that claims about 100 lives a day in this country. We get inured to the numbers, and barely notice the lives behind them. We figure we can’t do anything to stop all this anyway. And when the next report comes, it’s easier, actually, to simply swallow the number mindlessly rather than to think about the actual, individual, peculiar, multi-faceted lives behind it. I can see this dynamic in my own waning reaction to such reports. Sometimes I just register an uneasy, “this again,” before I get back to what I was doing.
What a terrible response, whether it happens with guns or with a virus or a natural disaster! When we stop registering the weight of human lives lost, something of our own humanity is sacrificed, too.
And if we want to be people who love–really love–the way Jesus did, I don’t think we have the luxury of hunkering down against the truth and heaviness of numbers like that.
I was heartened to learn last week about the way the United Methodist Church of Wilton, Iowa, is counting in this time of Coronavirus. Every day, the pastor, my friend Steve Braudt, rings the church bell once for each life lost so far in Iowa to COVID-19. Today he rang it 219 times. Tomorrow he’ll be adding another eight, perhaps, or another twelve. And more the day after, and after that, too.
This brings to mind a short story I read many years ago, set during World War II. The main character would get the newspaper each day, check the report of lives lost, and then, literally, count them out. One. Two. Three. And so on. Thinking, with each beat, of that life as well as the many intertwined with it. That forgotten author depicted so beautifully the power of pausing, and counting.
Each of those lives counted, after all.
It’s a discipline I’ve adopted now and again, in the wake of gun violence, or other tragedies. Pausing to count makes it real. It makes those persons real, marking each one with time, and regard.
So I want to invite you to try it, right now. You could use the twelve new deaths reported in Iowa today, or choose a number relevant to your context. Pause right now and count them out: 1. 2. 3. 4. and so on. Leave a little space in between the numbers, to think about and pray for not just the person, but for their loved ones, the church or community members with whom they were connected, the healthcare workers that accompanied them through their final days and hours, their colleagues, classmates, and connections who will soon hear of and lament their passing. Keep counting, all the way to 12, or whatever your number is today.
(In the current pandemic, I should note the many neighbors who are counting things in addition to cases and deaths. We could also count businesses that fail, and persons who are hungry due to an economy on hold, and cases of domestic violence within families shut in at home. Please, let’s count those things, too! Loving our neighbor means caring about the many injuries in our midst. When we can count real hurts more honestly, perhaps we can more appropriately respond one-on-one and through our public policies.)
You’ll hear all the news differently, my friends, with this practice. Listening and counting is a #FoolishChurch move in the direction of love. For our neighbors as for ourselves.
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