In the past year I’ve often heard it said that in spite of the negative aspects of living through a pandemic, there are many good outcomes and positive developments resulting from the difficulties of COVID restrictions.
I suppose that’s true. Things like not having to drive to an office in the rain because now I work from home.
There’s much less travel for meetings because we have Zoom. And because of that, we can bring in people from farther afield than we ever would have thought pre-COVID.
Now we have more time to stop and smell the roses. I read that both the number of marriages and the number of divorces in Central Europe have declined significantly under the pandemic. Personal and spatial hygiene is much better now. Almost nobody gets colds and there’s hardly any flu.
Wash your hands. Who knew?
On the negative side, there is one word that trumps all of these “gains”: FEAR.
Yes, fear is debilitating. Fear freezes us in place. Fear makes our world less beautiful. Fear is the antithesis to love. Fear is the enemy of love.
Fear terrorizes us and keeps us from connecting. Fear has emptied our churches. It’s not COVID that closed the churches. It’s the fear of COVID.
See how they tremble with fear
without cause for fear;
For God is with the just.
— Psalm 14: 5
Fear of COVID keeps us physically distant and emotionally distant, leading to a greater feeling of isolation for so many people.
Three quick stories that have been played out thousands of times:
- I received a call to anoint a woman at 1 a.m. She was 90 years old and would not last the night. I arrived at the hospital at the same time as her 93-year-old husband. He was not allowed to see his wife for three weeks, and more importantly, she was not allowed to see the love of her life either. Now she was semi-conscious, living in that almost transcendent state between life and death, and soon she would be gone to her Lord. Why couldn’t they have been allowed to spend more time together? Fear, that’s why.
- Another anointing was for a woman who just gave up out of loneliness. No family visits were allowed. Fear of COVID.
- My sister was being beautifully taken care of by her children and grandchildren around the clock for the last couple of years. The children all got COVID and so they had to put her temporarily into a care home. Forty days later she came out with bed sores and an infection that ended up killing her three weeks later. Neglected and lonely in the care home, no one could visit or even call. Fear of COVID killed my sister.
Empty churches, virtual Masses, drive-thru Communion (something I’ll never understand. There’s a perfectly good church sitting right there.) All of these things are driven by fear.
“See how they tremble with fear without cause for fear.”
On balance, when you weigh the positives against the negatives resulting from COVID-19, fear wins by a landslide.
Father Lynn is pro-life chaplain for the Archdiocese of Vancouver and assistant pastor at Our Lady of the Assumption in Port Coquitlam.