Truth and Lies for Living at the Time of COVID

The author Kate Bowler has stage 4 colon cancer.  She’s written a book called “Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.”  She stresses our inability to acknowledge that sometimes life just sucks: that suffering does not ennoble us, that death is difficult and frightening and lonely and sometimes humiliating; that cruelty rains on the innocent as well as the wicked; that we can’t “believe” or “visualize” our way out of the tragedies that will befall us.

These are also the lessons of COVID.   They are stark, unyielding, uncomfortable, unpopular.  Religion has few answers.  There is no fairness or justice or mercy or rationale or protection or escape.  Even the idea of an afterlife has no comfort for us now.

After a lifetime of struggling with childhood abuse and its aftereffects, I've concluded that no God could have wanted or planned such suffering.  At the same time, no God prevented it, and no God saved me from it.

There are only three things that have made life more than bearable: first, the hope for something better than what my childhood gave me, and second, accompaniment--the witnessing and acceptance and love offered by 12-step groups and counselors and therapy groups and friends.

The third thing has had maybe the most profound impact: moments of transcendence I've experienced, usually in nature: at the top of Hawk Mountain, on a walk around a busy urban lake, hiking along a railroad track or in an old-growth forest.  A sense of the sacred on the side of a dusty mountain.  Also, unearned gifts, like my sudden passion and skill for drawing.  Moments when I felt bathed in a soft warm liquid light I can only call love. Unexpected guidance when I cried out—to Thich Nhat Hanh, angels, Jesus.  Moments of utter peace and bliss in meditation.  All paths for entering this state with so many names: nirvana, flow, grace, heaven. 

More than anything, these moments give me the hope that we are part of some greater project, even if that project is only the assurance of something beyond our own capabilities, and accompaniment through the worst suffering.