Category Archives: COVID-19

How Do We Pray for This President?

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Angel and Church pray for the victims of a violent century (mural, c. 1940, Église du Saint-Esprit, Paris).

But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

— Matthew 5:44

Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.”  No, “if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.” Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

—Romans 12:19-21

In my last post, “Subjected thus”—The President Gets COVID,” I touched on the question of how to pray for the President. Of course we pray in general for all who have been infected by the coronavirus, but regarding specific petitions on the President’s behalf, I wrote: “I will pray that Trump’s time of trial may effect the healing of his soul. If he is going to suffer, may his illness be for him a birth of empathy, compassion, humility and goodness.”

With every passing day, that prayer becomes harder to offer with any conviction. As we witness Trump’s continuing disregard for the safety of others—both those around him and the country at large—we wonder whether he may be past saving. Instead of being humbled by his illness, he has only grown more malicious. The people around him are dropping like flies, and countless Americans will continue to die from his mismanagement. And now we fear that his relentless disparagement of life-saving protocols will kill even more. “Far less lethal!!!” than the flu, he tweets against all evidence. It’s as if he’s shouting to the world, “Hurry up and die!” 

What, then, is our prayer to be for such a man in such a time?

In the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, prayers for the sick don’t ask that the ill simply be restored to their former state so they can resume their story exactly where they left off. While those prayers ask for relief from pain, protection from danger, freedom from fear, the banishment of weakness and the gift of healing, they also propose a life transformed by suffering: 

“… enable him to lead the residue of his life in thy fear, and to thy glory.”

“… that, his health being renewed, he may bless your holy Name.”

“… restore to him your gifts of gladness and strength, and raise him up to a life of service to you.”

“… restored to usefulness in your world with a thankful heart.”

“… that he, daily increasing in bodily strength, and rejoicing in your goodness, may order his life and conduct that hemay always think and do those things that please you.” [i]

As for a President and all those in authority, the Prayer Book asks that they be guided by “the spirit of wisdom,” beseeching the “Lord our Governor” to “fill them with the love of truth and righteousness, and make them ever mindful of their calling to serve this people in your fear.”[ii] Would that it were so! But the way things are going, the prayer “For our Enemies” seems more to the point: 

O God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth; deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.[iii]

The “and us” is a critical part of this prayer, because we have all, symptomatic or not, been infected by the Trumpist pandemic of hate and cruelty. If we say we have not had a few hateful thoughts in the past four years, the truth is not in us. Resistance to evil and purity of heart are not soul mates or easygoing partners. They must work hard to stay coupled. 

Another timely prayer is the Collect for the Feast of Holy Innocents, when we remember the children of Bethlehem murdered by King Herod (Matthew 2:13-18). The prayer is not concerned with the state of Herod’s soul, but with the damage inflicted by his successors: 

We remember today, O God, the slaughter of the holy innocents of Bethlehem by King Herod. Receive, we pray, into the arms of your mercy all innocent victims; and by your 
great might frustrate the designs of evil tyrants and establish your rule of justice, love, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the 
Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.[iv]

We are all standing in the need of prayer these days. And even though we can never fully understand what prayer is and what prayer does, prayer “without ceasing” is an essential part of the healing of the world and the perfection of our souls. 

Prayer isn’t like online shopping—placing our order and expecting 2nd-day delivery. It’s not a mechanism for producing outcomes. It’s a relationship, a state of being-with and being-for. It is offering and entrusting ourselves to the One who is “always more ready to hear than we to pray,” who knows “our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking.”[v]

Knowing exactly what to pray for is impossible. We cannot see into the hearts of others, nor can we foresee the future. God only knows what is best. As for our own judgments, perspectives and desires, they can taint the purest prayer. In our essential state of imperfection and unknowing, perhaps the safest petitions are these: “Hold us in your mercy” and “Thy will be done.”

But with regard to more specific petitions for this President, I will be guided by the examples cited from the Book of Common Prayer. I will pray for his suffering to be brief but transformative. I will pray for his power to be guided by wisdom and truth. I will pray that his evil designs be frustrated, and that he (and we) be freed from the grip of hatred, cruelty and revenge. But I must confess that Donald Trump is not easy to pray for.

When I think of the monster who has tortured children in cages and caused countless COVID deaths, I struggle with my anger, my horror, and my disgust. But as I sat in the silence of a moonlit garden before this morning’s dawn, I was given the image of a little boy so damaged, so broken, so unloved, locked deep inside the dungeon of Trump’s psyche seventy years ago—guarded by dragons, hidden from the light, lost to the world. That tragic, wounded, forgotten child is someone I can pray for with my whole heart.

[i] The Book of Common Prayer, according to the use of The Episcopal Church USA (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 458-459.

[ii] BCP, 820.

[iii] BCP, 816.

[iv] BCP, 238.

[v] BCP, Proper 21 (p. 234) and Proper 11 (p. 231).

“Subjected thus”—The President Gets COVID

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Richard II (Georges Bigot), Téâtre du Soleil at Los Angeles Arts Festival, 1984.

For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been depos’d, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping kill’d,
All murdered – for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;
Infusing him with self and vain conceit,
As if this flesh which walls about our life
Were brass impregnable; and, humour’d thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell king!
Cover your heads, and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence; throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and ceremonious duty;
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread like you, feel want,
Taste grief, need friends – subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am a king?

— Richard II [i]  

Shakespeare’s tragedy of Richard II dramatizes the gradual stripping away of royal power, until the mighty king is but a naked subject—“subjected thus” to mortality and the threat of nonbeing like everyone else. The moment comes when the impregnable aura gives way, “and farewell king!” Almost 40 years ago, I saw Ariane Mnouchkine’s Téâtre du Soleil perform the play as Kabuki theater, and the wrenching transformation of the richly vested monarch, who could “kill with looks,” into a caged prisoner, naked and helpless, remains vivid in my mind to this day. It was an important part of my political education, and it came to mind when I heard that the President has COVID.

Dante also came to mind. In Canto XX of the Inferno, the pilgrim Dante is rebuked by Virgil for weeping over the fate of the damned. While Dante certainly condemned their fraudulent deeds on earth, their disfiguring pain in hell moved him to tears. “Reader,” he says, “imagine if you can how I could have kept from weeping when I saw, up close, our human likeness so contorted…” 

“Stop acting like an idiot,” Virgil tells him. “There’s no place for pity here. You will never learn piety if you sorrow over the shape of justice.” [ii]

This is not the only time that Dante the pilgrim experiences feelings of sympathy in hell. Modern readers always side with him, sharing the natural human response to the suffering of others. But Dante the writer and theologian remains committed to the poem’s implacable design. For the damned, there will be no exit. But then, none of them shows any desire for escape. Hell is populated by souls who refuse to change. As Helen Luke puts it in her Jungian reflection on the Divine Comedy, “the damned are those who have not only fallen into the unconscious but have chosen to remain there and so have lost their will to choose.” [iii]

Souls in Dante’s hell are no longer really persons in the sense of autonomous individuals engaged in a process of development and growth. Instead, they are indistinguishable from the sin which possessed them in their mortal life. Although they may appear vividly lifelike, with memorable personalities, they are ghostly simulacra, like cinematic images of long-dead actors, repeating the same self-absorbed words and actions, without change, for all eternity. 

So our horror at the Inferno’s ingenious punishments is meant to be directed at the sins rather than the punishments. As Dante scholar John Freccero points out, “The punishments fit the crimes, provided we understand ‘fittingness’ as an aesthetic category.… If the bodies in hell are really souls, then it follows that their physical attitudes, contortions and punishments are really spiritual attitudes and states of mind, sins made manifest in the form of physical punishment. It is therefore correct to say that the punishments are the sins.” [iv]

Dante’s ambivalent interplay of sympathy and judgment resonates with my own response to the news that Donald Trump has tested positive for COVID-19. I do not wish suffering on anyone, nor do I even find much satisfaction in the blatant ironies of his case. It is a terrible disease and he is in an especially vulnerable category, and when I pray daily for the 7.5 million Americans who have the coronavirus, he and his wife will now be in that number.  

At the same time, there is a degree of Dantean “fittingness” to his case. The pandemic, which Trump has made worse by things done and things left undone, has come home to roost. The sin has become the punishment. Trump is responsible for 38% of dangerous misinformation about the virus; he has encouraged millions of Americans to engage in reckless behavior; and even after learning of his own exposure, he continued to endanger others with physical proximity. 

But as much as I desire an end to the abuse he has inflicted on our country, our world and our planet, I want that to come from a vote, not a virus. However, there are some who are openly enjoying the poetic justice. “I wish Trump, his wife, and cabal,” writes one blogger, “the same care and consideration they have given to those struggling to survive COVID19.… I wish Trump, his wife, and cabal the same care and consideration they have given to those grieving lost loved ones – the children, parents, and grandparents, friends and family who mourn.…  I wish Trump, his wife, and cabal – Justice.”[v]

Eric Stetson, a Unitarian minister, blogged an admonition in “Don’t be a jerk about Trump getting COVID.”[vi] Not only would too much shadenfreude risk political blowback, he cautioned, but indulging our hates is “spiritually dangerous” for ourselves and our country. As Bobby Kennedy urged us after Martin Luther King’s assassination, “We must admit in ourselves that our own children’s future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.” [vii]

Another blogger, a therapist, disagreed, arguing that it was fine, even healthy, to gloat. “I am not religious or spiritual,” he wrote. “I do not think there is any danger to me if I take pleasure in the suffering of evil people.”[viii] Really? God forbid! There’s more than enough such “pleasure” going around. A better world will not be built out of our darkest shadows. Resistance without love is the road to nowhere.

In addition to pleading mercy and care for all who suffer from COVID, I will pray that Trump’s time of trial may effect the healing of his soul. If he is going to suffer, may his illness be for him a birth of empathy, compassion, humility and goodness. Impossible, you say? The business of prayer is precisely the impossible. The possible can take care of itself.

In his poems on “affliction,” 17th-century poet/priest George Herbert, who died at 39 from consumption, discerned a transformative dimension in suffering. In “Affliction (III),” he prays:

My heart did heave, and there came forth, O God!
By that I knew that thou wast in the grief,
To guide and govern it to my relief …

In “Affliction (IV),” Herbert confesses to be “broken in pieces all asunder, / … tortur’d in the space / Betwixt this world and that of grace. / My thoughts are all a case of knives, / Wounding my heart …” But, he finds, all “those powers which work for grief” are actually in God’s employ. “And day by day” they work for “my relief,” 

With care and courage building me,
Till I reach heav’n, and much more thee.

[i] Scene III, Act 2 (151-173. As Marjorie Garber notes in Shakespeare After All (2004), the more the king’s power wanes, the more poetic and reflective he becomes. “The failed ruler becomes a poet, writing the tragedy of Richard II.” As in Herbert’s poems cited at the end, suffering can be a teacher, guiding us toward our best self.

[ii] Inferno xx.19-21, 27-30.

[iii] Helen Luke, Dark Wood to White Rose: Journey and Transformation in Dante’s Divine Comedy (New York: Parabola Books, 1989), 13.

[iv] John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), k105-106.

[v] Onamastic, “I wish them justice,” Daily Kos (Oct. 2, 2020): https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/2/1982751/-I-wish-them-Justice

[vi] Eric Stetson, “Don’t Be a Jerk About Trump Getting Covid,” Daily Kos (Oct. 2, 2020): https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/1/1982696/-Don-t-Be-a-Jerk-about-Trump-Getting-Covid#comment_78754030

[vii] Robert F. Kennedy, “Remarks to the Cleveland City Club” (April 5, 1968): https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedy-speeches/remarks-to-the-cleveland-city-club-april-5-1968

[viii] Hal Brown, “As a therapist I want to remind you not to feel guilty if you have dark thoughts about Trump,” Daily Kos (Oct. 2, 2020): https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/10/2/1982773/-As-a-therapist-I-want-to-remind-you-not-to-feel-guilty-if-you-have-dark-thoughts-about-Trump

Time to Welcome Summer (and refuse the darkness)

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The author watches the Solstice sunset from Friedrich Point on Lake Pepin, Minnesota.

For 150 years, James Thomson’s The Seasons was one of the most widely read books in the English-speaking world. Its ornate classical style and lack of emotional inwardness fell out of favor in the Romantic era, but it still sits on my shelf along with other great ruminations on the circle of time, like Edwin Way Teale’s quartet of road trips through the American seasons, the “spiritual biographies” of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter compiled by Gary Schmidt and Susan Felch, and the four diminutive volumes of seasonal poetry selected by Robert Atwan.

Essential summer reading.

Thomson’s Summer begins:

From brightening fields of ether fair-disclosed,
Child of the Sun, refulgent Summer comes . . .
Hence let me haste into the mid-wood shade,
Where scarce a sunbeam wanders through the gloom,
And on the dark-green grass, beside the brink
Of haunted stream that by the roots of oak
Rolls o’er the rocky channel, lie at large
And sing the glories of the circling year.

But the poet’s encyclopedic survey of the world beneath the summer sun is not simply an inventory of its pleasures and beauties, for Nature is not uniformly benign. Storms, floods, drought and earthquakes are part of the mix. Et in Arcadia ego. Thomson’s description of a plague (“the great destroyer”) feels ripped from current headlines. Pandemic mutes “the voice of joy,” sickens human communities and empties public spaces. People shelter in place, hoping to escape the “awful rage” of pestilence, as “o’er the prostrate city black Despair / Extends her raven wing.”

The sullen door,
Yet uninfected, on its cautious hinge
Fearing to turn, abhors society:
Dependents, friends, relations, Love himself,
Savaged by woe, forget the tender tie,
The sweet engagement of the feeling heart.

Who among us is not “savaged by woe,” cut off as we are from tender ties and seasonal rituals? But the poet, trusting the Providence “of powers exceeding far his own,” does not leave us there. He envisions the evils of this world subdued within a larger harmony, and even in the time of trial faith knows, impossibly, that all shall be well. “Nature from the storm / Shines out afresh; and through the lightened air / A higher lustre and a clearer calm / Diffusive tremble;  while, as if in sign / Of danger past, a glittering robe of joy, / Set off abundant by the yellow ray, / Invests the fields, yet dropping from distress.”

Summer 2020 does not arrive robed in joy. Tonight’s dark and deadly Trumpist rally in Tulsa, a demonic parody of traditional Summer Solstice affirmations of light and life, seems to augur a summer of darkness. But we must not succumb to the pestilence without­­­­––or the pestilence within. We must live as children of the light, refusing the gloom and resisting the storm. Already, voices are rising across our tormented country, demanding “a higher lustre and a clearer calm.”  And each of us, in ways both great and small, must continue to welcome the light, and to remember our joy.

Enough for us to know that this dark state,
In wayward passions lost and vain pursuits,
This infancy of being, cannot prove
The final issue of the works of God,
By boundless love and perfect wisdom formed,
And ever rising with the rising mind.

 

 

Poetry excerpts are from James Thomson, Summer (1727), part of his quartet, The Seasons (1730).

“I will not willingly die for the economy”

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Mark Harris in his printmaking studio (May, 2019).

Mark Harris is an artist/priest I’ve known over 50 years. In our twenties, we did campus ministry and experimental worship together in Ann Arbor at a coffeehouse featuring concerts by Neil Young, Doc Watson, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and David Ackles. In our thirties, we collaborated on an all-night Epiphany liturgy in a circus tent. Now entering his eighties, Mark takes issue, brilliantly, with the Republican suggestion that America sacrifice its elders on the altar of capitalism. As another elder, protest singer Faith Petric, once wrote in “Grandma’s Battle Cry”––”I’ll shield you with my brittle bones! I’ll nourish you with rage!” Mark originally published this “J’accuse” on his blog, Preludium, and he has kindly allowed me to share it here. As Mark makes clear, COVID-19 isn’t just about health and economics. It’s about values.

 

A little personal clarity. I’m 80 years old this year, provided I make it to May 21st.

1. If I am in hospital and the medical folk make a decision that others, younger than I, need to be treated first, or me not at all, I get it. Triage is a sometimes miserable ethical fact. Got it. Perhaps in some way my death could be a noble or valuable or even holy contribution to the life of the world.

2. If I am out there in the world (but of course social distancing) and the bumbling system of supply and manufacture of needed medical gear fail, and I end up in the hospital and am triaged out of care, I get it. But I won’t forget that the “greatest country in the world” screwed up. There is no reason for these shortages except poor planning and bad use of resources. I will die of systemic governmental and business failure. There it is. But it will not be noble, or valuable or holy that I died. It will be stupid.

3. If I am out there in the world and the President or the government, or whatever the powers that be, decide that social distancing and its value to the health and safety of the world is less important than the economic safety of corporations and business enterprises, I will die because someone decided that the triage decision is really about whether my life was worth attending to rather than the life of money-making entities. So when I get the virus, end up in hospital, find myself triaged there and die, I will die because Boeing and some damn cruise ship company would otherwise lose money, place, or even go under. Not because of too many people in hospital. Not because of lack of equipment. Because of the economy. I got it. I will die for the almighty dollar. They will say, no no, you will die because the wellbeing of so many relies on our keeping the economy going. You die so that others may live. But I know. I will have died for reasons of greed, not reasons of need. It will be evil.

If this third possibility takes place, I will hold those who made the decision to go for the economy and not for the health of the society accountable. If alive I will scream in your faces unmercifully. If dead, I will plea to return to haunt you, ruining your sleep, your digestion, and your health. I will be pissed beyond imagination.

Be warned. Old may be just a thing to you. Old is what I have. I use old creatively, and to mostly good ends. The years I have left promise to be some of my best, in terms of action for justice, truth and beauty. But if it ends for the “economic good” I say, screw it. I know about this reasoning. It is the reasoning that was used to weed out the gypsies, the Jews, the queer, the gay, and anyone else who stood in way of the State’s grasp for economic power.

I accuse: The proposition that death as necessary to the well being of the economy is a lie. More, it is evil.

Ask what I will give for the country, but don’t assume you can ask what I will give for the economy. That’s mine to give, not yours to take.

––– Mark Harris, who understands the difference between the cross and the dollar.

 

Related post: The Artist Formerly Known as Priest