Neighbor Love through Fearful Days

Finding Purpose and Meaning in a Time of Crisis

Jason A. Mahn

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781506479477
• eBook ISBN: 9781506479484
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Neighbor Love through Fearful Days is a reflection on pandemics--the Covid-19 pandemic, the accompanying economic collapse, a summer of climate chaos, and the pandemic of white supremacy--as well as on the calling to "serve thy neighbor" and work toward the common good, even and especially in times of crisis. Mahn's real-time reflections begin with an entry dated March 17, 2020, after the college where he teaches moved online and his family began sheltering in place; they end with an entry dated August 31, 2020, when the college reopened for an unprecedented fall term. Through the intervening entries, he reflects on perennial questions about purpose, faith, and vocation as they take on a newfound urgency as cities lock down, economies reopen and close again, and our fractured country teeters on the edge of civil war. Each entry grapples with the anxieties and opportunities, the suffering and sense of being summoned, that characterize that same period.

Jason A. Mahn's evocative narrative is a story about living through a time when the world as we know it is being leveled by pandemics--and it is also a deeply philosophical exploration of what it means to live well. In the pages of this book, Mahn invites readers to muse on the difficult balance between self-care and other-care; the role of love in social justice, and how white privilege might be atoned for; and how, amid intense suffering, to practice a faith that is not escapist, but embraces a hope more durable than optimism and a public, strategic love more fierce and enduring than previously imagined. Ultimately, these reflections acknowledge the immense challenge of living a purposeful life in the middle of crisis but invite readers to the shared hope that from the ashen stillness, we may just hear new callings to imagine healing, cultivate hope, and love neighbors in creative ways.

Part 1

Who Is My Neighbor?

(March and April)

Banishing Snakes—March 17, 2020

It’s St. Patrick’s Day. I’m up a few hours before my sons Asa, age fourteen, and Gabe, twelve, who are on the second week of a now three-week spring break. The odds of them returning to public school before Easter decline with each COVID-19 news report.

Are there any news reports other than those about the coronavirus? I scroll down the New York Times Morning Briefing sent to my inbox this morning—past President Trump’s advice to limit social gatherings to fewer than ten people at a time, past reports of testing delays, past the order for residents in France to stay in their homes for fifteen days, past updates on the death toll in Italy (today at 2,100), past the postponement of the Kentucky Derby, past the release of actors Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson from the hospital, and past an opinion piece about how social distancing doesn’t have to be lonely—until I get to an article about Syrian refugees and another about Russian shell companies accused of meddling in the 2016 election.

Like my sons, I wonder when and in what form education will resume. On Friday, the Lutheran college where I teach religion announced that our own spring break would begin one week early, effective at four o’clock that very afternoon. We told students to take with them their computers, books, class notes, and other school supplies on the chance that we would have to move to distance learning two weeks from now. That “chance” is now nothing short of a likelihood, and “likelihood” seems to be our administration’s calming way of saying that, in fact, our residential liberal arts college will almost certainly look a lot like the University of Phoenix for the rest of the academic year.

I passed two senior female students, J. and S., Friday afternoon, as campus was already eerily quiet. Both were in my honors seminar three years ago. S. had been ready to present her religion senior thesis at the Midwest American Academy of Religion conference before it was canceled last week. “We are in great classes that we really enjoy,” they said. “And it’s our senior year and our friends are now scattering in every direction. We are supposed to go home but this is our home.” Students such as these deeply know both grief and gratitude, their callings as students, and the value of true friends, even if it sometimes takes a worldwide pandemic to put those sentiments into words. I told them to be well—in the deepest sense of that word. I admit that I don’t know what that means.

The 330 million people living in the United States are no doubt figuring out what being well means in this chaotic situation and anxious time. I imagine that they—like me—are primarily concerned with their own physical safety and that of their immediate family members and close friends. But will we also check in on our neighbors? Or will social distancing amount to spiritual and moral distancing out of fearful concern for me and mine?

I remember hearing a presentation from Lutheran pastor Jonathan Strandjord about the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas when I was in seminary long ago. Strandjord unpacked Levinas’s radical idea that being interrupted by “the face of the other” would compel a person to turn inside out in pursuit of justice. In Levinas’s words, the other’s very otherness should make one take the bread out of one’s own mouth, so to speak, relinquishing it to the other.1 Strandjord was asked during a Q and A how such self-sacrifice could ever happen, given that people are so self-concerned, so “curved in upon themselves”—as the Augustinian-Lutheran understanding of sin would have it. He responded by saying that neither he nor Levinas nor Jesus thought that the real barrier to neighbor love was an individual’s self-concern, strictly speaking. The problem is exactly what sometimes passes as neighbor love—love for my family or my friends or nation or race or others whom I deem as my neighbors. We must pry open love that seems so naturally selective, so fiercely focused on the communities to which we belong. Love needs to be summoned and stretched through unbidden encounters with the alien, the stranger, the one deemed enemy. At the same time, this stretched love cannot get too drawn out, becoming thin and immaterial like a fog in which all cats appear gray.

The challenge of broadening without weakening love was difficult enough when I first met Strandjord in person and Levinas through his writings twenty-five years ago. Since then, the self-selecting virtual communities of the like-minded on social media and the echo chambers they produce, along with the now dramatic rise in nativism and racism and the unprecedented quarantine-like divide between liberals and conservatives, mean that one is less and less likely to be summoned by a neighbor who does not already belong to one’s social group or political party. Online communities have been thoroughly gerrymandered through a gazillion friend requests and like buttons. Ironically enough, it is now just as likely that the neighbor who does in fact need the bread from your mouth is literally your neighbor—the one who lives down the street, whom you recognize through the window of your car but haven’t yet (be)friended, virtually or otherwise.

I’m trying here to describe the log in my own eye, not the speck in others more liberal or conservative. It was just two days ago that my wife Laura (an ordained pastor) and I were watching NBC’s Meet the Press together on Sunday morning, a rare occurrence made possible by the cancellation of her church service. We watched the political and cultural commentator David Brooks describe his fear that the same vicious self-protection and lack of compassion that accompanied the 1918 (“Spanish”) flu pandemic would follow the spread of COVID-19. He noted that while some tragedies generate feelings of solidarity and acts of kindness (consider the days immediately following 9/11, before any declaration of war), pandemics typically do the opposite. Conserving moral energy and cultivating moral righteousness to protect themselves and family, people cease to come to the aid of others. Mutual suspicion and competition increase, as does class warfare. Laura and I were taken aback when Brooks articulated his fears. Is this really where we are headed? Narrow concerns driving cutthroat competition and disregard for others? Class warfare?

And yet by Sunday afternoon, there I was, standing before the half-empty shelves of our local Aldi supermarket, buying provisions to add to our mostly full refrigerator. With the meat section particularly picked over, I briefly wondered whether I should leave the corned beef brisket, two turkey tenderloins, and a package of wild-caught flounder for someone with less access to affordable protein. But the shelves had already been thinned, and there were reports of people stockpiling food and amassing cleaning products, and my family was behind on all of it. Would I be morally culpable for not dwelling on the needs of a faceless other who may or may not be needier than we are? Later, as I rearranged the freezer so that everything would fit, I assured myself that Aldi would get restocked overnight.

I am writing these daily entries because I am scared—scared not only for my family’s health and safety (although that too, as my anxious grocery buying shows), but also for how I will respond to this pandemic, what will become of me, morally and spiritually, and what will become of my Christian calling to love and serve the neighbor. Brooks’s Sunday morning opinion piece was entitled “Pandemics Kill Compassion, Too: You May Not Like Who You’re about to Become.” I want to like who I’ll become, although I know not who that will be.2

I’m here committing to taking stock of this pandemic and more so of my own and others’ responses to it in thought, word, and deed. I’ll wake up early, make coffee, and type out my queries and musings related to regard for neighbors in a time of fear.

Laura and I told our boys that we would need to be intentional with one another and our neighbors during this time. We haven’t done much yet, but I hope some seeds will grow. We’re praying for those we know who are older, are alone, or have compromised immune systems: Grandpa-Great, Grandma S., members of Laura’s church, the homeless in our town who no longer have access to computers and daily shelter at the library, the mother of two young friends, my colleague’s spouse who has cancer. Laura is going grocery shopping tonight to buy food for homebound members of her church. We’ve committed to writing regular letters to people we’d otherwise visit. Will this field of concern open outward? Can it do so without thereby getting overly abstract and self-conspicuously pious, as prayers for “the whole world” sometimes do? How can we structure the weeks or months ahead along the lines of the old Benedictine discipline of ora et labora, of prayer and work, repeated throughout each day? Will either be effective in welcoming and sheltering the neighbor?

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***

I’m finishing this entry in the afternoon, after the first death from COVID-19 in our state of Illinois was announced and the state of Kansas declared that all public schools would go online through the end of year. Our St. Patrick’s Day cabbage and corned beef brisket simmers in the slow cooker. Among the legends attributed to Saint Patrick is the miracle of banishing all venomous snakes from Ireland by chasing them into the sea after they attacked him during a forty-day fast. In these forty days of Lent, the nation is beginning to ready itself for a widespread virus that will not so easily be washed away. Besides the virus itself, we will need to resist a legion of crafty serpents that would have us rationalize disregard for others out of protection for our own. Banishing those snakes—loving the neighbor in anxious and fearful times—could turn out to be the miracle of our age.

Sitting Shiva—March 19, 2020

Today is the first day of spring. Yesterday, the last day of winter, was a bustle of activity. Laura was up and off to her church early, where she announced suspension of Sunday worship through mid-April, planned the videos she will post to Facebook in lieu of live sermons, looked in on congregation members, and led her last Wednesday Lenten prayer service. I spent the morning online with a hundred of my colleagues going over the tools and best practices of teaching and learning online—how to use Moodle and Google, Zoom and Loom, forums and chat rooms and blogs (oh my!). In the afternoon, I reached out to the students in my classes—including S., the student prematurely nostalgic for the college she’ll graduate from in May. I’ve become more and more personal with students over my sixteen years of teaching, but my emails yesterday were full-blown parental and pastoral. I told them that I missed them dearly (which is true for almost all of them), that this was an emotionally exhausting time, and that they should try to establish rhythms of sleeping at night and being awake in the day, do some simple breathing meditation, go for walks, hug their family members, and wash their hands. I told them that I would check in by video chat soon.

It was also yesterday that President Trump declared that the coronavirus pandemic is the war of our time. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders had already compared confrontation with the virus to the waging of a war. French President Emmanuel Macron was more direct still. “We are at war,” he repeatedly declared when addressing his citizens two days ago, ordering them to stay in their homes for all but essential activities. In the United States, the administration considered invoking a wartime production act that would allow the government to mobilize industries for national service, requiring them to produce medical supplies and surgical masks. Headlines currently show a number of predictions that COVID-19 casualties may exceed those of World War II.

War language is powerful language, the language of power. Many thus interpret the administration’s talk of war positively; after early forays into glib optimism and empty assurances, politicians invoke war to exhibit clear resolve, to gird their loins, and to prepare for battle. Yet I think that much of our work ahead will be the far less unilateral work of patiently waiting out this infectious storm, of learning to care for the infected and affected, of grieving the loss of loved ones. There is much more that we will need to bear and survive rather than conquer and control. War language may be not only irrelevant but also counterproductive to these efforts.

I think of the week immediately following the attacks of 9/11. There was widespread fear and confusion, of course, but also countless makeshift memorials, solidarity vigils, and spontaneous help among strangers. There was an affectionate, palpable patriotism of the most profound kind. It was as if the nation was sitting shiva, purposely persisting in our grief while we waited on one another. That week was incredibly meaningful, whether we were watching images on television or roaming New York like it was a giant prayer labyrinth. It even had something of an overabundance of meaning, as though the importance of every story of firefighters working twelve-hour shifts, every photo of a missing person or hot-dog vendor passing out water, was heightened against the background of the meaningless tragedy itself. Paradoxically, though oversaturated with meaning, none of it meant any one thing. Or rather, because we couldn’t situate 9/11 within a well-defined framework of understanding, we didn’t know what it meant, which became part of the very enigma that we were so devotedly circumambulating. We had no national myth or collective story into which we could insert the event of 9/11 as climactic action before moving straightaway toward resolution.

And then we declared war. According to longtime war correspondent Chris Hedges, war gives meaning like nothing else. Americans know war; we know how to make sense of things when we are at war. We honor the fallen, pray for soldiers, hang flags, supplement the national anthem with “America the Beautiful” and color guards and flyovers. Bush’s declaration of war had the almost magical effect of transforming victims into heroes, terrorists into enemy soldiers, our passive mourning into active resolution, and our collective dread before God-knows-what into a clear mission to rid the world of evil.3 There were some small casualties; for example, most of the international community sitting shiva with us collected their things and quietly departed. But by and large, to be at war was much more understandable and reassuring than the meaning-soaked meaningless grief from which we were emerging.

For the record, I hope that we beat COVID-19—kick the shit out of each small set of genes enclosed in fatty lipid molecules and armored with protein spikes. My concern is for the collateral damage to our collective character and individual dispositions that waging war can yield. Will we be patient and kind? Will we be able to truthfully accept and faithfully bear this tragedy, even as we try to conquer it? How will we care for those who cannot be cured—a question made painfully difficult by the six or more feet of space that could separate the dying from their families? How well will we grieve—privately in our homes, locally in shifts of ten, and collectively as a human race?

Trump continues to call the coronavirus “the Chinese virus.” Am I right to hear echoes of “gooks” fought overseas or the “thugs” demonized in a war on drugs? If killing people requires their prior dehumanization, perhaps attacking a virus depends on its racialization. Already, too, speeches about containing COVID-19 include commands for a more militarized border security, lest a storm of sick immigrants infect us and strains our health care system.

These are some cracks in the armor, but the language of war mostly carries out its mission in garnering collective resolve, eradicating critique, and justifying the moral righteousness of those engaged. This goes for wars on diseases as well as on terrorists or criminals. In her profound work, Glimpsing Resurrection, Deanna Thompson, who was diagnosed with stage IV cancer in 2008, writes about how “those of us who live with cancer [often] are cast in the role of warriors called on to battle the cancer with all the ammunition we’ve got.” Swapping out a story of battle for the lens of trauma, Thompson asks what it would mean to live well with loss. She writes about, and with, “a different, non-military focused vocabulary to talk about what it means...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Storying Our Lives in Times of Pain and Crisis
• Part 1: Who Is My Neighbor? (March and April)
• Part 2: Strange Fruit (May and June)
• Part 3: These Three Remain (July and August)
• Epilogue: The Beginning of the End
• Acknowledgments
• Notes