There’s no upside to this thing.

COVID-19 is now the leading cause of death in the US and I don’t see resurrection in it. You’re free to look at your life however you wish but most of what I hear and read from religious people and spiritual but not religious people is look-on-the-bright-side-thinking disguised as mindfulness or contemplation and it rings hollow to me.

Have you cried and gnashed your teeth over the senselessness of it? Have you cast around for meaning and found none? Have you mourned the death and wide disparities again revealed to exist between the poor and rich, black and white, between material scarcity and abundance? Have you shouted and cursed in a Zoom meeting and said, “To hell with it all and to hell with all of you and this goddamn sonofabitch bastard virus?”

I haven’t. Not really.

But I should. I ought to. We all ought to cast aside our pathetic search for meaning and cloying positive thinking. We ought to dig our fingernails into our scalps and scream; “What the fuck is going on!?” until we can’t scream anymore.

Then we might make space for a question about what we owe to each other now and after and what we always owed each other before. We might ask how we could do better next time if we could get a measure of grace. We might dream about a time and a place where we don’t fear death, where we freely bear each other’s burdens and feel each other’s pain, and where when a beast stalks us we turn to each other first with mercy and the confidence that when the complete comes the partial shall come to an end.