Love takes risks

Bob Cutillo is a Christian family physician. Crossway recently interviewed him about the coronavirus. I think the entire interview is worth a read if you have a few minutes. Here's an excerpt I appreciated:

I think what we see in Jesus's actions towards the leper, he didn't have to heal by touching. And yet, because he did touch it argues that somehow when we deal with people who are potentially contagious, there's a risk we're going to take if we're going to be able to love. But you really can't love faithfully if you're not willing to take risks. How do we judge that risk? I think we could further that conversation, but if we don't at least acknowledge the fact that the only way to love faithfully is to take risks, then we're not going to be able to get the conversation started.

...It's interesting because I think that when you read about how different societies have responded to contagions in the past, there's almost a universal in the particular: in every situation there are common reactions and the majority of people are not reacting in a loving way. Let me try to simplify it in this sense: right now, if you watch how people are reacting to the virus, there's two main ways—now, I realize that there's a lot of subtleties that people jump back and forth between—but there are two main ways of reacting and what's interesting is how extreme they are. One of the ways that people are responding is to be, I would call it, nonchalant about the situation. They're saying something like, This is not very important. This is nothing but an inconvenience. This is something that's bothering my schedule. This is something that really should not get in the way. It's just an accident waiting to go away and I'm just going to try to wait it out. There's this wonderful passage in Albert Camus’s book The Plague and if anybody has time—and you'll have a lot more time in the next few weeks—to read people's reactions to the Plague, they should read his book. One of the reactions is the reaction of the townspeople when the city of Oran first gets evidence that there's a Plague and it's not even getting quarantined. And he said this about the townspeople: “Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others. They forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like Plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.”

...I think the counter reaction is the one that has excessive fear about the presence of this virus that is able to kill people. I think that you see a lot of that in people's responses. There's a great deal of fear and anxiety and that, I think, is something that the people of God can look at and say, Is that the response that I want to have? Do I have that response? And I think you have to look for yourself a little bit to ask, Do I have that response? because I think everybody's a little more prone to, as they pass someone, seeing that person not as a human being but as a potential source of contagion to them. So there's a fear factor that's playing out. Honestly, there's always fear when there's contagion in the environment. So the question is How do you deal with that fear? And is it realistic or is it free-floating and you've lost it? The thing that's unique about our modern society is the last time we had a virus like this was a 102 years ago in 1918 with the Spanish Flu. That was a much different society. It might be called the Early Modern society, but it was before the age of antibiotics and so that flu spread in an extremely rapid way and killed many, many people. One hundred and two years later, most of us don't have a personal experience of that, so this is a new one for us. But for us as an American society and for many in the modern West, this is a real disturbance to our well-being because we have lived for quite a while thinking that we are immune to this kind of stuff, that we have a sense of security and a sense of confidence about our lives so this doesn't make sense to us. In a sense, we want to push it away and we want to say, This is not the way our life is supposed to be. There's something wrong with this. And so we have an excess fear of it because we have never dealt with anything like this. We've been in the process of denying death for many years because we have been able to keep it hidden away through our capabilities in society to stay healthy and stay well. And yet this is a shock to our system. It's almost like we've been floating in a balloon and it's been popped and we've hit the ground. So I see a great deal of fear and I will name it and maybe explain it later, but it's really the fear of death that is before us and that's where I think the Christian can say, Do I have that same fear, or do I know something that others don't know that would change how I think about death and this situation?

...Basically for many of us, because we have lived in a modern society for so long, I would say since that epidemic of 1918, these last hundred years have seen the most incredible growth of our medical capabilities and the possibilities of delaying death, denying death, and conquering disease that has ever been before. But what that's produced is sort of a false ability that we can deny death, that somehow we can exclude from the fabric of our normal life any evidence of decay or death or helplessness. We've done that in a lot of different ways, and so in many ways death is something we don't even think about. We don't see it even as a necessity to be accepted, but more as an accident to be avoided. And so when something like this comes to play it's a shock to our system. It's even something that we get angry about and think, How dare someone disturb our sense of well-being!

I also want to add as I'm saying this that this is a unique perspective of only certain people in our society and in our world. There are many people in other parts of the world that this is not a shock to them at all. The presence of death is a part of their lives every day, and this is just another added danger. But for many people in the modern West who have enjoyed many of its fruits, they have somewhere along the line thought that maybe they don't have to deal with death and all of a sudden, it comes knocking on their door or jumps in through the window and they’re shocked by it. And I think for many they respond in excessive fear because they have never had an ability to even contemplate this possibility.