Searching for faith amidst a pandemic

I’m living in a time that I never imagined would or could happen in my lifetime. For everyone, most constant activities have ground to a halt. Many people live in fear of going outside. Plans are disrupted, priorities like time spent with loved ones and caring for one another come to the fore. Uncertainty rears its head at every corner you turn. It’s distressing, and we long for clarity not only about how the pandemic can end, but also about whether there are things to truly enjoy when all around us there are only dire sighs from strangers stood outside at a distance.

This is an ironic time for anyone seeking faith. I have friends who have reclaimed nuggets of their Buddhist or Taoist upbringing in this trying time: reflecting on ways to live a good and flourishing life amidst the suffering by living at peace with others and with the world around us; some reaching out to a hope of reincarnation or a final state of being promised in those teachings. I also know of people who have tried other ways to ‘speak’ with the supernatural, using burnt incense and other ritual objects. Even those who wouldn’t call themselves religious, in a time like this, entertain questions about where God is, if there is a God. 

Yet this search for a God sits at tension with the question that inevitably crops up: why is the world like this if God exists? If the world is like this—the Covid count keeps rising exponentially, as does the death toll—then surely God isn’t there and there isn’t a point seeking or summoning her or him or them, except as a hollow coping mechanism in our helplessness: praying to a non-existent god just to stay afloat in the eddies of grief. But amidst the helplessness we can’t shake the question: is God really there? You can’t tell for certain using scientific methods of discovery. So it continues to itch at a corner of your brain and at the base of your heart: is there more to life than coronavirus, more to hope in and hope for, than the possibility of a vaccine? Is there a God to believe in? Here I give my thoughts as a Christian who has asked and still asks these questions.

'Caring for Spanish flu victims' from British Red Cross, under CC license

There is beauty in the world. Organisms that are so minute (bacteria), things more minute than that (coronavirus), organisms that are large, those that are colourful, those that are intelligent. It's a beautiful universe. But why is the beauty meshed up with terrible messes like Covid-19? During the Antonine Plague of the 2nd century, it was thought—according to Roman mythology—that the messes such as plagues were ‘the work of angry and capricious deities’ (Lyman Stone). This didn't offer much comfort because whatever higher beings/deities to pray to were the capricious agents of the suffering in the first place, and any relief from them would have to be achieved with fearful attempts to appease them. Christianity offered a different message. It held that the plague was ‘the product of a broken Creation in revolt against a loving God.’ This new message, offering knowledge of a loving God we could approach and hope in, led to Christianity flourishing amidst the Plague. The human revolt spoken of—whereby we press God out of the picture of our lives and desire to rule ourselves—might sound foreign. But I like to think of it as being like us building roofs over humanity to shut out the life-giving sun (i.e. God), in order to live in our self-created light. But that’s inferior to the sunshine, and is ultimately a lifeless darkness. Things don't flourish without sunshine; in fact they wilt. That's the way we are: a loving God who wants to be with us, sustain us, and bless us, has been shut out and the result is—as one might expect—a withered creation with haywire viruses and frustrations to the natural world.

The first book of the Bible, Genesis, speaks of the first event of this human revolt: Adam, the first man, and Eve, his wife, were given a beautiful garden, in which they could speak freely with God and eat the fruit of the garden and enjoy the company of the creatures. But they had one command: not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for otherwise, God pronounced that they would die as a penalty. But, after responding to the temptation of the serpent, Eve ate the fruit anyway, and Adam followed along. This represented the turning away of human beings from the rule of God, rejecting his authority and jurisdiction over us, in favour of ruling ourselves. But because God is God, and he made us to live under his hand of blessing, the result of this turning away was the darkness we now find ourselves in. This may all sound freaky (!) and weird (!!) but it is nevertheless a powerful narrative about humanity. Let it sit with you for now, and carry on reading!

You might ask, why can't God then just wipe it all away and start clean with a perfect world without drastic and painful malfunctions like pandemics? If he did ‘just wipe it all away’, he would have to wipe us all away too, and create a new universe with new lives for new people altogether. If we want a God who holds to justice, then he must be one that ensures that the consequences for people are according to what they done and how they have acted. And so, because God upholds justice, the penalty of death had to be paid in order to move on. To satisfy this necessary justice equation, we would have to die. But God didn't let that happen. Instead, he sent his own divine Son—Jesus—into the world (yes, meta!), assuming human form, and dying the death that we're supposed to die. And after that, he rose from the grave and went up to heaven. This means the penalty has been paid through and through. This is the mega bridge that connects us to God again, mending the relationship that had been broken. But we can only step onto that bridge if we believe what Jesus has done and believe that that can bring us to God. Alongside that, we are called to leave behind our old ways of pushing God out of the picture in our lives. Once we do that, the sunshine doesn't then pour in immediately: we don't suddenly live in a perfect world free of Covid and other ills. There are slivers of sunshine here and there, but we still largely live in the darkness. That's only to be expected because we are still at a point in eternity when people are still hearing about this news about Jesus, and Jesus hasn't come back yet.

Jesus has promised that he will return to restore the brokenness: he has achieved it by dying in our place, but that's not the reality just yet. We wait, patiently and with hope. It is to come. Meanwhile, Christians look at Covid and grieve that this is the darkness we live in because of our propensity to push God out of the picture. But we sigh with relief and become filled with joy when we think forward to a sure future when the flaws of this Universe will be no more. The result of this is a firm hopefulness. Indeed, in plagues of the past, this hope manifested in Christians taking self-sacrificial, fearless action for others. They were neither paralysed by fear nor deterred from helping for self-preservation. Dionysius wrote that Christians, ‘Heedless of danger ... took charge of the sick, attending to their every need ... and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbours and cheerfully accepting their pains.’ Christians happily follow in Jesus's footsteps, mourning the brokenness of the world but knowing a perfect future awaits. And so we stand with no need to fear. 

Of course many questions arise. For example, one might think, how do we even know if this wacky story of a man rising from the dead is true? These can be explored. They are not reasons to dismiss Christianity outright. If you're seeking hope (we all are), I personally invite you to put your painfully ironic pursuit to rest. The tension doesn't have to be there. I believe we do have a good and loving God we can seek and hope in.

Me social distancing in a very quiet Cambridge

Amidst the pain and uncertainty, we mine every crevice of life around us for any sliver of hope. National Geographic makes this point when they highlight the popularity of fake animal news in this period: e.g. a tweet about swans reappearing in Venetian canals was retweeted thousands of times, and turned out not to be entirely as reported. A psychologist explains that the reason for the popularity of these posts is that they ‘give us a sense of meaning and purpose—that we went through this for a reason’: it is the impulse that if any good comes out of this dire pandemic, it was the flourishing fauna. But the article warns that fake good news ‘can be even more demoralising than not hearing it at all’. Therefore it implores, ‘I'd encourage people to share positive things, but it doesn't have to be anything dramatic. It just has to be true.’ I share these things about my Christian hope not just as rays of sunshine that will brighten your today, and then tomorrow ring hollow like a tattered storybook. It is certainly a dramatic story—the son of God dying for human beings??—but in my 21 years of life so far, I've become persuaded (as have many in the last thousands of years), that this drama is as true as it is beautiful. So come and hope with me.

A good place to start is uncover.org.uk/mark/ where you can take a look at an authoritative account of Jesus's life in an easy way.