WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM THE CORONA CRISIS:
An Experience of our Mortality
The sudden outbreak of the Corona crisis has changed our private and public lives dramatically. Many things that were taken for granted and many certainties have been shaken: the workplace, school and day-care centres for children, freedom of movement, full shelves in the supermarket… We have realised that many things in our lives are precarious. No one can tell us what the future will bring.
As Christians who know that God is present in all situations, we ask ourselves questions. What does God want to tell us through these experiences? What could we learn from the coronary crisis?
We want to reflect on this in the four weeks of the ecumenically celebrated Creation Time. Our society usually suppresses the thought of death. The corona crisis forces us to think about it. In christian tradition there is much that reminds us of death and transience: the ash cross at the beginning of Lent “Remember that you are dust”; the prayer at the end of each funeral, which is shocking for some: “We pray for the next one among us who will die”. Easter and every eucharistic celebration reminds us of the death but also the resurrection of Jesus and gives us the hope that death does not have the last word.
Quotes
This dramatic situation
has reminded us a how vulnerable, fragile and in need of salvation
we human beings are,
and it has questioned many certainties.
Pope Francis
This is a pandemic, a crisis that concerns everyone (pan demos – All the people), each individual and the whole of society. For everybody, it means an sudden interruption of their previous lifestyle, habits and many everyday certainties that we take for granted. Cardinal Walter Kaspar
In the liturgy, Holy Saturday is the day of the burial of God, who often remains hidden and silent in the history of mankind… But Holy Saturday promises us that Jesus, in his death, went into this kingdom of death to bring the presence of God and his love into this kingdom. Cardinal Kurt Koch
We do not have everything in our hands, but we are in God’s hands. George Augustine
Wonderfully secured by good powers, we confidently expect what may come. God is with us in the evening and in the morning and certainly on every new day. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time….For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice,
but by the will of the one who subjected it…Rom 8,22.20
