Some people say, “If we don’t study history, we are doomed to repeat it.” I suspect history repeats itself regardless of what we do or don’t do, how much we do or don’t understand. History offers story after story about pandemics and plagues, yet here we are in the middle of our own. Though slews of people are writing now—scientists, journalists, thinkers of all stripes—describing the broad effects of plagues throughout human history, we can’t help but feel completely shocked and surprised. But is that a reasonable response? Contemporary writers make something very clear: Just as surely as humans have affected the natural order by opening a Pandora’s Box of microbial antagonists-turned-enemies, plagues have always changed humanity. They have forced new behaviors, evoked violent confrontations, and led to long-term changes within the structure of communities. Tale-telling of our disease wars may not stop them. Nevertheless, in the hearing we can learn from our errors and oversights as a species, counterbalance our intrinsic arrogance with the humility born of knowing we can’t understand everything. We can rediscover the imperative of coming to each other’s aid while becoming more thoroughly human in the process. One very early saga of—not one but TEN—plagues experienced in succession by people more than 3,000 years ago should bring us up to date. Told in the book of Exodus, the second book of the Hebrew scriptures, the ten plagues against the Egyptians are facilitated by Moses with the intention of forcing Pharaoh to end the Israelites’ 400-year captivity as slaves. Unbelievably, it took all ten plagues to do the trick. After a dynamic build-up—including crop-eating grasshoppers, frogs (lots of them), boils that were both disgusting and painful, and the ominously gross bloodying of the Nile, which aptly foreshadowed things to come—the tenth plague salvaged the other nine’s failure to bring about cultural reform. What, finally, was different? In the last plague, people straight-up died. Not just any people either. Children died along with every other first-born in the territory. It was a mournful and miserable plague, a ruthless and unfeeling plague with its own victims peculiarly susceptible where others were spared. Why didn’t everyone die? Why only some, the beloved, the pride of the family? Whoever wrote the story of that first Passover, whoever described these events, clearly knew what could have happened—what does happen—during a plague. Condensed into one terror-stabbed night are all the elements:
I have friends who believe good will come out of this mess we’re in, that our society is in its own moment of systemic change when injustice will be struck down and a new era of reparations will begin. I wish I could feel that positive. My sense is that good and evil are racing neck and neck, and while our desire for the triumph of Beauty and Friendship and Equality and Love is nobler, it also necessitates pure faith—faith in the unseen Power that makes positive transformation possible, that draws out and nourishes the good in people which otherwise often lies obscured within. Perhaps faith is still possible. Plagues clearly do something. The author of Exodus is trying to tell us to stay at home, feed the hungry, resist evil systems of governance and unjust economies and, while wandering the pandemic’s wilderness, hammer out a more meaningful identity within your community. Eventually, after we’ve suffered a long time, we’ll find ourselves in a land rich with resources enough for all, a land worthy of the promise we cling to: God’s victory over death, health for everyone, and freedom for captives whoever they are. Karen Jessee Please leave your comments, your reflections below. Invite your friends to Search and Know!
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"I want God more than all the old stories."
Not the old, old, stories, the ones we hear about when we read scripture, but the old stories we tell ourselves about life, about who we've been and think we still are. The friend who said, "I want God more than these," had come to a place I've come to many times before. And, although she was on her knees in church, plunked down into her desire like a cat caught by the scruff of its neck into a carrier, I have more often than not crawled there through the muddy yard of disappointment, doubt and debilitating exhaustion--which means I was collapsed in bed. Fortunately, God the Great Reviser can take whatever our stories are or have been and rework them according to his own aesthetic. Think, "Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted." A month from now, I'll be celebrating (if you can call it that) my father's 46th death anniversary. I can't say "observing his anniversary" because I'm already observing it--both consciously and unconsciously, interiorly and on the outside--even though the day is well in the distance, still a long way off. Every year, this vigil month of March erupts with surprising somatic symptoms: a spate of headaches, a back sprain, a manic swell which leads inevitably to embarrassment. It takes perhaps a week of trouble before I recognize where I am. I'm back in the thorny landscape of grief, wandering the same forty years or so which kept the Israelites busy starving and straying, returning to God with rejoicing and then going off the rails again. God promised them a land of release if they would only set their priorities straight, if they would just choose him and stop seeking security from knowing who they had been. Their old life was slavery, yet there had been food to eat and flesh pots to eat from. The confines of imprisonment defined them. . . and they knew who they were. The people of God? Who's that? Surely, not us. When I think of being liberated from my perplexing show of annual grief, I find I can't. I can't imagine it, can't imagine being myself without the subconscious fits of mourning which counter the more readily apparent and healthier ones. Being beset by crippling grief is my old story. I've been defined by that narrative so long, I figure I can't live without it. Which is true. Which is where God comes in. Once I've chosen to follow God the Deliverer through the waters of rebirth, I can't survive--the "me" that's a slave to a time long gone, even if the grief will never entirely go away. Just because God can and does bring me safely to a better land, a better identity fattened with fresh milk and honey, doesn't mean I lose my memory. No, my Mother doesn't prevent me from remembering the wilderness, my doubt and pain, the stress of my journey. These keep me grateful, faithful, willing to learn a new story of myself as one of God's people, firmly rooted and ready to thrive in rich soil. God wants me to remember so that, when difficult memories arise as they certainly will, my desire for her will flare and keep me crawling in the right direction. When I make it to her lap, whether it's on my knees or lying flat, I will discover my life has a new meaning born of Promise. From then on, more than anything, I'll be defined as hers. Iris Reid |
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