Lent in the Time of Coronavirus

How to repent in the midst of pandemic

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

Thus began the Lenten season in the year of Our Lord, 2020, just as Lent begins every year, a morbid invocation from the priest as he marks your forehead with ash in the scrawled form of a cross. Not only does he remind you that you will die, but that when you die, you will molder into indistinguishable nothingness.

This Lent began on February 26 — by then, everyone had written Joe Biden’s candidacy off (the South Carolina primary took place the following Saturday), President Trump was speaking to stadiums packed with crowds in India, and whisperings about coronavirus were starting to become audible.

Since then, the entire state of California has been ordered to shelter-in-place. Similar orders are being prepared elsewhere. Unseen, and unnoticed, likely for months, coronavirus has been spreading, carried by people without symptoms and spread to innocent neighbors, none with any contact with the wet markets of Wuhan. The virus is in my county. And now, people are starting to die.

And I’ve had news from my friends, hard news — and had to deliver hard news myself. Some of it related to the virus, some of it random, just the flotsam of life bubbling up at the appointed hour from the doomed wrecks of human endeavor and swept into the irresistible slow-motion mass trauma of a nation deciding who gets a ventilator, and who doesn’t.

Cancelled plans. Churches shut. Layoffs, with no promises the job will ever come back — assurances even, that it won’t. Rent for empty storefronts piling up. Old sins returning, with a vengeance. Broken promises, a betrayal, filing in court. Elderly parents, refusing to stay home, risking their lives for air travel. An assault. An adoption. An abortion. A conversion.

All of life focuses its intensity into what feels like a single moment. A wildly discordant tapestry, each thread dyed a different, clashing, electric hue. Isn’t this precisely what Lent is for? Cliches abound: No atheists in a foxhole; only two things are sure in life — death and taxes; nothing focuses the mind on life quite like death.

We grow fat every year, on our sin, in our comfort, in our ease. And every year, God holds before us the prospect of death. If we become dust when we die, then wouldn’t it be right to say that when the black, ashy dust is wiped onto your forehead, you’re being anointed with human remains? They may be the ashes from the branches of last year’s Palm Sunday, in an immediate sense. But what — or who — were they before that?

The Prophet laments:

It is good for a man that he bear
the yoke in his youth.
Let him sit alone in silence
when it is laid on him;
let him put his mouth in the dust -
there may yet be hope.

During Lent, our mouths are supposed to be put into the dust. This Lent, we haven’t any real choice. I suppose you can always choose, like the Spring Breakers flocking to Florida’s beaches while we’re all urged to respect “social distance.” I haven’t any scorn for them, really. How many of us lack only the courage of our desires, courage which they have in spades?

But this Lent, God has force-fed me the dust. And I’ve come to believe that it’s a pity that every time some national disaster happens, a televangelist immediately announces that it’s “because of abortion.” Not because I like abortion. Or even because I have a problem with Providence working “negatively,” so to speak.

In fact, that’s why I think it’s such a pity: We are diligent to thank God every day for His many blessings. Shall we ignore His curses? Surely, do those not come from Him too? Do we presume upon Him, that there will always be hope? Let us remember the promise only that “there may yet be hope.” So when He curses, do not ignore Him.

The Prophet laments:

Who has spoken and it came to pass,
unless the Lord has commanded it?
Is it not from the mouth of the Most High
that good and bad come?
Why should a living man complain,
a man, about the punishment of his sins?

In Lenten disciplines, we simulate punishment: We deprive ourselves of foods, of pleasures, even of necessities like sleep. This Lent we have received punishment. I do not pretend to know, like a televangelist, what we are being punished for.

That’s the great tragedy of what the televangelists do when they announce an earthquake is “because of abortion.” They make the whole idea look ridiculous, even to we who might be sympathetic to their aims. Ignore them. Interpreting a disaster as a punishment is a good idea. But as soon as you interpret a disaster as punishment for someone else’s sins, you place yourself in the judgment seat.

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

The desire to know the meaning of the chastisement is a good desire. But the knowledge you seek is a heavenly knowledge, accessible only by faith. And so, the only way to learn it is to do the work of faith — to pray, to fast, to repent. To do the things you are supposed to be doing during Lent.

The Prophet laments:

Let us test and examine our ways,
and return to the LORD!
Let us lift up our hearts and hands
to God in heaven:
We have transgressed and rebelled,
and you have not forgiven.

We are an unjust people. Truly the Prophet says that “we have transgressed and rebelled.” As the Apostle says: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”

It is harder, this year, to say that new life springs forth out of death. Easter is what makes Ash Wednesday not so morbid after all. But this year, my church will be closed at Easter.

I remember living in a French monastery during Lent — it was years ago, and yet I can remember the anticipation of Easter morning like it was only this past morning. For forty days, the soaring, soul-tingling “Alleluia” anthem had been missing from our prayers as we waited in a veiled silence for our Lord. A lightning storm rolled over the Rhone valley that night, and I fell asleep to the flashing of electricity on the dark walls of my shared room.

And when we woke we greeted each other in fifteen different languages, acclaiming that yes, truly, Christ is risen! And the alleluia anthem that morning was deafening.

There will be no such morning this year. We’ll be huddled in our houses, waiting for the virus… to do what, exactly? Disappear? I’m not actually sure of the endgame. But we won’t be in church, acclaiming that Christ is risen, shouting “Alleluia.”

It will be a reminder of the darkness in which we live before Christ — in which the Prophet lived, when he lamented:

We have transgressed and rebelled,
and you have not forgiven.

His fate is ours, until we throw ourselves upon him. But even the Prophet, with a divine knowledge, saw through a glass darkly what we see face-to-face:

For the Lord will not
cast off forever,
but, though he cause grief, he will have compassion
according to the abundance of his steadfast love.

Did our Lord have these lines in mind as he trod around Galilee? Did He know that He had come to fulfill them?

I believe that He did, for he borrowed some of the words the Prophet uses in the very same chapter of Lamentations, when he talks about the man who puts his “mouth in the dust.” The Prophet urges such a man:

Let him give his cheek to the one who strikes,
and let him be filled with insults.

Did the Prophet, long dead and clasped now in the bosom of Abraham, look down and notice our Lord using his very words in the Sermon on the Mount? “If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also,” and “blessed are you when others revile you.”

How many men have this honor, to be quoted and have their words invoked by our Lord? Passingly few.

Every insult, every slap, is a little Lent. If you can accept it, you can offer it as a sacrifice to our Lord.

Every rejection, every layoff, every tribulation, if you can accept it, you can offer it as a sacrifice to our Lord.

Every virus, if you can accept it, you can offer it as a sacrifice to our Lord.