Reality is gracious

Like the ghost of Prince Hamlet's father, the effect of this second wave of the Coronavirus in India has been quite devastating.

Remember what the ghost said in 'Hamlet' Act 1 Scene V –

"I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood:

Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres;

Thy knotted and combined locks to part,

And each particular hair to stand an end,

Like quills upon the fretful porpentine."

The cumulative impact of TV news, doom-scrolling on the mobile phone, and the horror stories daily relayed by friends, colleagues and our social media groups, has been a frightening loss of morale.

If the health care system has almost collapsed, so too has the balance and perspective of the average person. Chronic fear, wild imaginings, nightmares about possible futures, palpitations and a racing pulse, full-blown panic attacks, - all these are becoming rampant. And no wonder.

The effect of this toxic atmosphere of doom and gloom is that we start to breathe in, and believe in, the "fact" that underlying reality is something frightening and threatening.

"Things fall apart…the centre cannot hold," prophesied Yeats in 'The Second Coming.' And it does look as if the ravages of the virus are ripping everything apart.

But does it have to be this way?

The very fact that we feel that something has gone wrong with our world and our nation, means that there is something that is objectively right.

Our sense of things having been messed up and mismanaged, points to the fact that this is not the way things were meant to be. This is not the way things need to be.

When we cry out, "unfair", does it not indicate that there is a standard of fairness and justice, which DOES exist (even if we see only its absence).

We see scenes which show humanity at its lowest and worst. But even by the side of the gasping Covid patient, we see either a doctor or a nurse or a paramedic, or at the very least, an anguished member of the family. The fear of Corona has not driven service from her position or love from her throne.

Looked at this way, we realize that order, justice, fair play, truth and love are part of underlying reality. Though the world we have pulled down in ruins around our own heads, is a frightening and destructive place, this was not the way it was designed to be.

Reality is good, reality is gracious. We still have eyes to see it and a will to re-make our lives and our world in the image of the highest and best that we can imagine.

The virus that is ravaging the earth is just a scrap of DNA covered with a coat protein! It is not even "alive" until it borrows life and the power of replication from another living cell!

What is this compared to the resilience and strength of the human spirit?

Where is the bulldog determination that gave Britain the grip to hang on grimly even as the nation and its capital were being battered by the blitz?

How did tiny Japan rebuild a shattered nation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

And did the inhuman massacre of an estimated six million Jews stop Israel from re-forming and regaining its nationhood?

Granted, Churchill is not very popular in India but his extremely unflattering - and racist - opinion of the Indian capacity to self-govern and of the calibre of Indian leaders, seems uncannily prescient today (despite the many good leaders and many efficient governments we have known and which are still in evidence today.)

But one thing that he told his own countrymen, will resonate with all of us today – "Never give up! Never, never, never, never, never give up." I forget how many 'never's there were!

But this is what we need to hear. Despite what we see, despite the bad news, despite the stench of doom in the air, despite the death of those we love - those to whom we could not even say a proper good bye – we should never give up.

We must pull ourselves up by our bootstraps,

call up reserves of energy we never knew we had,

♦ use the brains and common sense we do have,

♦ spend the money we were keeping to keep ourselves alive,

♦ and ask for wisdom and grace and guidance from the source.

With the awareness that this is not the way life was ever meant to be and with the vision that in truth, reality is good and gracious, we can overcome.