The world looks so different now. It hardly seems possible that in one month, almost to the day, the 2019-2020 academic year will come to a close. My warmest congratulations to all who will be graduating. While you have been cheated out of your customary celebrations, I pray that each new sunrise will give you a reason to be grateful and that, in time, you will look back on this time and celebrate your enduring courage during challenging days.
It has been two months, nearly to the day, when our community of scholars learned that we would remove ourselves from the university campus in ten short days, suspend most of our research activities and all our religious gatherings, and shift to remote teaching and learning.
During that final week of winter quarter, I could not help but hold Rockefeller Chapel open for any confused or bewildered soul who might wander in seeking a moment of respite. In those final open hours, before the guard we retained secured the building and shut off the lights, I wrote an update to the Rockefeller and Spiritual Life staff who were already working remotely:
“At the moment, a lone visitor obscured by a face mask sits in a Rockefeller pew, a jarring reminder of the photograph of Dr. Li Wenliang that first drew my attention to what now has all our attention.”
The world looks so different now. At the time, the sight of a mask worn outside of a doctor’s office or construction site seemed jarring or at least a curiosity to those of us who grew up in the United States. Now I look back and find it strange that I found it odd. Masked faces are everywhere now.
A month prior to President Zimmer’s March 12 announcement to the community about the part we would play in mitigating the spread of Covid-19, almost to the day, I had learned of an outdoor vigil planned for Dr. Li, organized by an anonymous group of students. I remember regretting that I knew no more than a few phrases of Chinese, learned from my Chinese American partner. I wanted to track them down and welcome them into one of the chapels.
A February snow storm interrupted our mild winter on the day of the vigil. One of our staff, it turns out, was able to reach the organizers and we welcomed a meandering crowd of 125 or so to Bond Chapel for a moving tribute to the man whose now iconic masked face, whose faithfulness to his healing profession even to death, had so moved me that I had eulogized him in the Sunday sermon the weekend prior to our campus vigil. (A copy of that sermon appears here).
The world looks so different. Sometimes a seismic shift is precisely what brings the world into focus.
“We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny. Caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
These words are no longer the faint echo of a sermon preached by one of the nation’s most celebrated prophets a half century ago. A microbe, easily destroyed by soap and water outside of the body, has brought a world economy to its knees, driving the truth home for us all. If this does not inspire humility, nothing will.
Spirituality is an awareness of the interconnectedness of all things. Spiritual practice is the intentional, disciplined awareness of that recognition. Religion is, among other things, an historical and evolving aggregation of spiritual practices, of texts and oral traditions, music and myths, interlocutions and interpretations. Its fundamental purpose is to heighten our awareness of our individual relationship to the whole and to challenge us to respond to that awareness in our own way and in our own day. To be spiritual is to attend to the reality of interdependence, not as a knee-jerk reaction to a crisis, but intentionally, gratefully, reverentially.
Many of us who embrace theism do so, in part, because we experience this ongoing call to attention as a divine mandate. Attention is the call. Love is the response. Love for ourselves as fearfully and wonderfully made. Compassion for our neighbors, especially the most vulnerable among us. Delight in the world, not only because of how useful it is, but because we in the world and the world is in us.
Love is the fruit of spirituality. Faithfulness is sustained by love. During trying times like these, when feats of heroism seem to elude us and virtuosity fails us, as our instruments lie inaccessible beyond the bolted doors of the chapel ,when brilliance is dulled in the face of constant change, we are left with the task of meeting each new day with thanksgiving and mere faithfulness. We educate the young as best we can under the circumstances. We care for ourselves, our loved ones and our neighbors. We remember those who are alone, and those who have lost hope and jobs and health and lives. We see the inequities that are laid bare by this crisis, if the fact somehow escaped us when we were too busy to notice. We vow never to forget what we have seen, and to recreate the word rather than return to the world as it was. When we are overwhelmed by it all, we simply remember to move and to breathe.
When these interesting times have passed, what will remain, and what will be celebrated as heroic by our companions along the way, is our faithfulness to the humble tasks before each of us.
While cycling past the empty campus the other day I couldn’t help but stop and admire the tulips. They are in full bloom now. And while the lush grass seems barren without students lounging on the quads, books in hand, those perennials will return each spring despite the brutality of Chicago winters. They always do. And so will we.
– Dean Maurice Charles