#COVIDA, A Pandemic’s Lessons about Love

Italian men performing under quarantine (Nicolò Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)

My 85-year-old friend Sr. Bea stands in the doorway with tears in her eyes. She wants to hug me. We cannot touch. I know she loves me, and she knows I, her.

There is something both so sweet and sad about this moment. I do not know when we will be able to hug again because of this coronavirus pandemic. Or even see each other. She seems frail and vulnerable as she hesitates to say goodbye and tries to hide her tears.

This moment is so beautifully vivid in my awareness now. The preciousness of life and of our love for one another. How much I treasure life, love, deep connection with others.

I think of my son, far up in Nome. The special moments we had nearly two weeks ago. Before COVID-19 had reached Alaska. Before Nome would nearly double in population as strangers descended upon it for the end of the Iditarod, making that little town susceptible. I had thought he would be safe, unaffected by the virus. Luckily, he remains healthy.

No matter where we live or who we are, our lives are being affected. We find ourselves coexisting in the midst of something that is not understandable nor within our control. Yet this pandemic has the potential to teach us something invaluable: how we are inexplicably connected.

That’s why I have renamed this virus COVIDA – vida being the Spanish word for “life.”  Because we truly are in this life together. We cannot separate ourselves from that fact. We live on this planet together. We breathe together.

And, as we are witnessing, in reality, no physical barriers can separate us. No 18 ft-tall steel border wall can protect us. When something like this hits, we understand that globally, we are connected. Global solidarity does matter.

From a spiritual perspective, a crisis has the potential to heal and bring us together in ways that nothing else can. It can teach us, “wake us up” to how we have been living, how we have been treating ourselves, each other, and our Mother Earth. It can teach us what we need to change. Reconnect us with our spiritual grounding, cause us to turn to our spiritual practices. Remind us of the spiritual laws of love, of brotherhood/ sisterhood, of our responsibility for one another.

Most importantly, it can remind us to turn to love rather than fear. The Love that loves us so and mysteriously “sustains us, in everything,” as my teacher Jim Finley would say.

Like most people, I have been paying attention to the news. But in small doses. What has struck and uplifted me are the positive and beautiful ways people have been finding to connect. As if they cared. As if we matter to each other.

As if we instinctively know that we don’t have to physically connect to touch someone’s heart.

Strangers are performing selfless acts of kindness: neighbors offering to get groceries for the elderly and homebound, high schools donating medical supplies and face masks to hospitals, volunteers “staffing” food banks and delivering food to low-income children who are missing their school lunches. And, most importantly of all are those selfless nurses, doctors, and other healthcare professionals who are working such long hours and returning, day after day, to exposure to this virus.

Then there are those positive social media messages and videos. Like the young Danish doctor happy to be able to give back to her country and the elderly who supported her education and career: https://www.boredpanda.com/danish-doctor-wants-to-pay-back-to-her-country-during-coronavirus/?utm_source=smartnews&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=organic

Or the many virtual communal prayer or meditation offerings. Like Contemplative Outreach’s “United in Prayer” Day this Saturday, March 21st: https://www.contemplativeoutreach.org/2020-united-prayer-day

Or like blogger Cameron Bellm, a contemplative, “writer of prayers,” and Seattle mom of two boys, who wrote this beautiful Prayer for a Pandemic

Cameron’s prayer found at http://krugthethinker.com/2020/03/prayer-for-a-pandemic/   

As Pope Francis counseled recently, “Don’t waste these difficult days….We must rediscover the concreteness of little things, small gestures of attention we can offer….We must understand that in small things lies our treasure. These gestures of tenderness, affection, compassion are minimal and tend to be lost in the anonymity of everyday life, but they are nonetheless decisive, important.”

Loving in place is possible. Even vital. In this time of COVIDA.

Sending you a big, virtual hug, Bea!

Beauty and the Beast

The woman was pregnant with her second child when she started out, her 2-year-old daughter in tow. She knew her older sister would take her in, provide the comfort and safety she needed. The journey would be long and treacherous. But she was willing to take it. Her other options were not good, to put it mildly.

Unfortunately, she was not warned. Not told she’d have no options when she arrived at our port of entry requesting asylum. There had been no public service messages in her home country of Honduras. No warnings about the changes in US policy towards asylum seekers. Changes that had turned even crueler. No government money had been applied to educating vulnerable people about how nearly impossible the process of seeking asylum had become. No spreading of information that could actually assist people and prevent them from making such a journey. Only the spreading of false promises made by smugglers preying on desperate people. Promises assuring them they would reach the US border.

Whether the young mother paid a smuggler or not I do not know. I only know that when she arrived at the El Paso port of entry, now nearly 8 months pregnant, she and her daughter were whisked into a cold holding cell, processed and put in the queue to be deported.

But not back to Honduras.

Instead, thanks to what some in our administration have called a “beautiful” agreement known as ACA, or Asylum Cooperative Agreement, she and her little girl were to be flown to Guatemala where she would be required to seek asylum. Guatemala, a country with one of the highest rates of violent death and crimes against women in the world. A country where she knew no one. A country where she’d be alone and vulnerable, and soon to give birth.

severe poverty in Guatemala

The decision seems unbelievable. Unbelievable in the level of nonsensical cruelty being randomly inflicted on other human beings.

Certainly it is unconscionable.

Yet, this is happening. Often without our knowing. I only know about this woman because of my role on the board of directors of Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.

And her story is one of the few that ends on a more positive note.

Through some act of grace, the woman’s sister in Houston discovered what was going to happen, found  Las Americas in El Paso and frantically called asking for help. Fortunately, one of the attorneys was able to intervene and stop the deportation.

This young woman’s story could have turned into something quite tragic. But she is only one among many vulnerable people seeking asylum who are now being flown to Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador as part of the ACA. Countries where persecution, violence, and poverty are rampant. Countries in which people are being deposited without being told where they are. Or what they are supposed to do next.

And we do not know about their stories.

What has been disguised by our administration as a “beautiful” solution to the immigration problem is actually a cruel “beast” underneath.  Like the fairy tale “Beauty and the Beast,” only in reverse, what appears before our eyes is not what it seems.

Nothing is as it seems.

And so I feel it necessary to return to the basics, to what I learned as a child in Catholic school religion class. The basic fact that a child of God is valued as a child of God, no matter their appearance, no matter where they’ve come from, no matter what they’ve done.

Honestly, this is much harder for me to live by in relation to some people rather than others.

But I know that what I was taught is true. Each one of us is created in the image of God and is a temple of the Holy. Therefore, each one of us deserves to be treated with basic human dignity, to be safe, to be loved.

Even the beast I find hidden in others. And in myself.

My prayer is to fully live and accept this teaching. And that others will join me.

In the meantime, to better educate yourself on the ACA, I invite you to read a more in-depth explanation from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops: https://justiceforimmigrants.org/what-we-are-working-on/asylum/asylum-cooperative-agreement-backgrounder/

“A core Catholic social teaching is that every human being is created in the image of God and is therefore entitled to dignity and respect….Regardless of their legal status, migrants, like all persons, possess inherent human life that should be respected and protected.”