Pastoring in a Pandemic
By Reverend Dr. Melinda McLain
Pastor for The Good Table UCC
This isn’t my first pandemic. As most of you know, I began ordained ministry as a community-based HIV/AIDS chaplain in the mid-90’s after burying over 250 people before I was 30 years old. So “plague” has always been part of my ministerial portfolio along with the dire necessity of cultivating hope in times of intense fear, love in the midst of hatred and injustice, and finally, how to cope with multiple losses over time.
This may sound impressive, but believe me, I’m still not very good at any of these things. I just know what it is to grapple with such realities. And if you’ve ever survived a terrible loss, a natural disaster, or a life-threatening illness, you probably know more than you think you do about how to live when living is hard.Right now, we all need to dig deep into our souls so that we may become courageous “for the living of these days”. With that in mind, here are a few of my initial thoughts for your consideration.
Sadly, there is still no effective licensed vaccine for preventing HIV infection after nearly forty years of work on this ongoing global scourge. But there is effective treatment and behavioral prevention, if we’re willing to do what is needed. And so, I suspect that we will not get a vaccine any time soon - or perhaps ever - for preventing COVID-19 or the next novel virus that will emerge. But don’t take this as a certainty because I’m not a scientist or physician, but I do know something about false hope and real faith. And when we know the difference between those two, we can all be part of the solution to any emergency.
False hope is based upon the illusion that there will be some sort “magic fix” that restores everything to the way things were after the pandemic, the tornado, the earthquake, or the wildfire happens and ravages everything. I may be a person of faith who believes in miracles of all sorts, but this sort of “magical thinking” is dangerous and deadly. False hope makes us prisoners of the past and will keep us from really healing from the trauma of living through a pandemic or other disaster.
So how do we have real faith and real hope? Real hope comes when our fears are named, faced, and we begin to move forward courageously. As Mark Twain once said, “courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear”. Real faith comes when we learn again to trust ourselves and each other and we begin again to create lives devoted to love, peace, and care for one another.
And so, I invite us all to use this time of public health emergency to place our faith and trust in the essentials we will need when the crisis passes as we re-create our lives from a new point of view. We can choose to be grateful for those who are on the “front lines” by supporting their efforts and by caring for them, our neighbors, and ourselves in appropriate ways.
“We can also use this time to recognize and choose to re-create our world with an eye toward ending the grotesque inequality that constantly picks winners and losers based upon wealth, instead of the inherent and sacred worth of each life.”
I know I am particularly moved by the sacrifices being made by janitors, farm workers, check-out clerks, and delivery people working to support the heroic efforts of our healthcare professionals. And for those of us who are privileged enough to work from home this internet meme is on point, “your grandparents were asked to fight in world wars. You are being asked to sit on the couch and wash your hands. Do not mess this up!”
We can also choose to confront our own choices made through convenience instead of clarity about what is really essential for our well-being. In conversations with those who lost all their possessions during Hurricane Katrina, there was a remarkable consistency among them that “things aren’t very important” and that letting go of having so many things brought a certain freedom. We can use this time of world re-ordering to become free too.
Those of us on the Jesus path will celebrate Holy Week and Easter this year without physically gathering together. I have no clue about whether this will be the worst or best Easter ever, but it won’t be the “same old, same old” so the possibility of being surprised by real resurrection would seem to be greater. May it be so for us all.
What questions are you sitting with during this time? What helps you cope with your fear? Where do you find hope and faith? What wisdom do you have to share?
