Lockdown was traumatic, and so will be its aftermath, but that’s not all bad
The Catholic lockdown debate has focused on the primary place we must give to corporate faith, and participation in the sacramental life of the Church. There are two main elements at play here: a discussion centering on the unease that the State is deciding when people can practice their faith; and, concern for the well-being of the faithful. This essay is most directly concerned with the second.
In general, arguments about the coronavirus shutdowns turn on the payoff between between economic damage and public health. Lockdown skeptics argue that economic deprivation is at least as deleterious to long-term health as the virus. There are also concerns about the mental health of those locked down and deprived of human contact, particularly those with a history of depression, say, or difficult domestic circumstances.
Like secular concerns for mental health, some ecclesial discussions focus on the effects on people who have been locked down. There is anxiety over the spiritual life of the faithful, perhaps at least partly rooted in a disquiet about the thought that people could grow attached to their lazy Sunday mornings at home and choose not to return to Mass.
Such people would be experiencing a much more profound malaise than it seems when they feel drawn to make that second pot of coffee and read the newspaper till lunchtime. It isn’t coffee or reading the news that is to blame, but that ever-present instinct to be in control and be master of one’s own destiny. Prolonged withdrawal from church could really favor conditions that let the rot set in. Before long, God becomes an optional extra for a life lived for oneself and not for others.
The more generally shared concerns for mental health, however, are neither incidental nor peripheral to the Catholic discussion. Different societies have given different answers to the question of when and how to go into lockdown, and that regarding when and how to come out of it. The general experience of lockdown has been in every case traumatic.
The decisive moments for someone who lives through trauma often happen sometime after the event. In moments of acute trauma adrenaline kicks in so we can do what is necessary in the midst of the chaos and confusion. The real struggle comes afterwards.
Victims of motor vehicle crashes or violent crime, for example, report overwhelming experiences of bewilderment on leaving hospital. They try to reintegrate into their normal surroundings. Everything feels different. Things even look different, even though everything is placed where it was before. Victims of PTSD often say their real struggles began only when they to pick-up where they’d left off before their trauma.
All that is something to consider, as we think our way out of COVID lockdown.
As the restrictions ease, pastors have the difficult task of stewarding the faithful as they alight into what feels like a world quite different from the one they left when the virus struck. Many have commented that the strangest and most disorientating moments of the shutdown were when they ventured into a near-empty shopping mall to get some groceries, and stood in line two yards apart from other shoppers, everyone wearing a mask.
Being in a familiar environment that looks different is destabilizing, even uncanny.
In short, disruption to our spiritual life may sometimes be welcome.
Many of us will instinctively dip our fingers into the font before remembering there’s no Holy Water. Penitents will make confessions in socially-distanced chairs in side-rooms, not their usual confessional.
Priests will say Mass wearing surgical masks and latex gloves. The pew in which one always sits will have tape zig-zagged across it to ensure no two of the brethren come too close. Leaving, one will leave and greet the priest without being able to shake his hand.
This leads one to wonder if concerns around the shutdown for Catholics need to be redirected now. The issue need not be a deterioration of people’s spiritual lives by the instinct to be in control, but an opportunity for God to assail this instinct directly. Remember that this instinct can work away surreptitiously when we feel we’re at the peak of sanctity. In fact, it is often particularly active then.
Many saints observe that a religiosity attached to particular accoutrements of faith, to certain routines, is an insidious form of unbelief. It dictates how God’s grace is situated within one’s life. It signifies one who trying to contain God’s transformative power within manageable bounds, one whose instincts have covertly taken hold of the wheel so that they’re in the driving seat again.
In short, disruption to our spiritual life may sometimes be welcome.
It reminds us of the abyss between the earthly and the heavenly sanctuaries. It averts our eyes from ourselves to our neighbors. It turns stagnant cisterns into fountains of living water. It clears space in our hearts for the grace of God. The experience of disorientation thus considered may, therefore, dramatize an ineluctable fact of our circumstances: that here we have no lasting city (cf. Heb 13:14).
Jacob Phillips is Director of the Institute of Theology at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London.
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