Tag Archives: Coronavirus and Christian Faith

A Chocolate Coronavirus Christmas

As the United Kingdom began vaccinating people against the coronavirus, the U.S. diagnosed its thirteen-millionth case of the virus. Tears of joy and grief mingled. Hope and despair created a sense of whiplash in my heart. While listening to the news, I was trying to fold beaten egg whites into melted chocolate to make a flourless chocolate cake. The recalcitrant chocolate seemed as slow to incorporate egg whites as my soul was in blending hope with the sorrow that swirled in my heart.

I need hope. I need a light to shine in the darkness. I need flourless chocolate cake.

Making a flourless chocolate cake (click here for recipe) has become my metaphor for 2020. The beaten egg whites create lift when folded into the dense bittersweet chocolate. The stark white of the eggs eventually becomes so incorporated that it blends in and transforms everything into a lighter, fudgy, silky creation. I need the light of hope to do something similar with the dark and bitter times of 2020. I need the hope of a new creation on the other side.

Folding egg whites into melted chocolate, butter, and sugar

I need that hope because the whiplash and suffering continue even as vaccines become available. In the past week, Congress passed a relief bill that brought hope to hundreds of millions of people, but the President has refused to sign it. Therefore, over 14 million Americans lost their enhanced unemployment benefits this morning and more than 40 million become eligible for eviction this week. Just before I hit the publish button on this post, the President finally signed the bill. It’s good news and more whiplash.

Holding onto hope in the face of such interminable tragedy, injustice, and loss is really hard. I need my egg whites to transform the chocolate and bring forth goodness. I need a light to clear away the darkness.

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. (John1:5)

Like finding hope, folding egg whites into melted chocolate is counterintuitive. If you push it too fast, you lose their transformational effect. You have to be patient and gentle. The egg whites don’t permeate the chocolate all at once (see the picture above), so you shouldn’t give up hope that you’ll succeed. It takes time. You have to persist and trust the process you’ve been told to follow. Eventually the light prevails.

“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it” (John:5).

That’s why, when my husband and I decided to spend Christmas by ourselves this year, I decided to make another flourless chocolate cake. I noticed again how the dark chocolate seemingly resists the egg whites as strongly and resolutely as 2020 resists glimmers of hope. Nevertheless, I persisted.

Then I prayed as I stirred. I prayed a Christmas prayer that light and hope will enter our lives and bear us up. That love will shine in the darkness and bring good from all that is happening. Patiently and gently I folded the eggs and chocolate together, making space for light to transform the heavy darkness. Little by little, the alchemy happened and something miraculous was created again.

Mary and Jesus, India

It may seem odd for a flourless chocolate cake to remind me of the Christmas message, but the Christmas message is odd, anyway, don’t you think? The Creator of the Universe loves humanity so much as to become human? To be born as a vulnerable baby to poor parents under an oppressive government? The Divine becomes incarnate in human flesh and lives among us?

If we believe that, we might as well say that God is present in the suffering of patients who gasp for breath and the medical staff who care for them, in the black and brown people killed by government and the people who work for change, in the families who wait in food lines and those who carry it to them, in all who are lonely or grieve during this pandemic and those who provide comfort.

Believing that God became human and that our lives matter to the Holy One takes a stretch of the imagination or an opening of the heart. Yet this is the meaning of Christmas. And if “the hopes and fears of all the years” are born in Bethlehem, then I suppose it is alright for me to see them in my mixing bowl, as well.

SUNRISE, FLORIDA – An aerial view shows vehicles lineup to receive food provided by the food bank Feeding South Florida and given away by the City of Sunrise. The groceries include milk, chicken, apples, tomatoes, cantaloupe, and eggs. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

I need Christmas and chocolate cake to help me see that God is even now folding hope and courage into our lives. God is even now helping us create something good, true, and wise from what is happening. God is helping us even now to feed the hungry, care for the sick, welcome the lonely, mend broken hearts, and create a better future. Together, we will will help God bring justice and compassion to a world torn by chaos and injustice. Good will triumph over evil and life over death.

The light shines in the darkness even now, and the darkness cannot not overcome it.

Happy Christmas.

No Greater Love

Despite the coronavirus, blue skies, cherry blossoms, and bright daffodils have come to Seattle and I want to be outside with them. I’m tired of my house and of seeing no one but my husband. I love him, but seven weeks of Safe at Home is boring.

Recently, I was so thrilled to have a steering wheel in my hands and an accelerator under my foot as I drove to the pharmacy that I wanted to drive for hours. But, no. I went straight home afterward.

At the same time, I feel comfort and solidarity in knowing that we’re all suffering through this isolation together.

Except that we’re not. Some states carry on as if the coronavirus is no more dangerous than car accidents and seasonal flu. Even in areas with stay-at-home orders, millions of people disregard them. Come on, folks. Millions of people around the world are staying home and sacrificing their income and businesses to save your life. Please return the favor by staying home and saving their life, too. Stay home to make the sacrifices of people who’ve lost their jobs worthwhile.

Grocery cashier wearing mask

Stay home to save the lives of people doing work on which all of us depend: first responders and medical workers, custodians and delivery people, cashiers and shelf stockers, drive-up window employees and cooks, warehouse employees and garbage collectors, transit workers, food bank volunteers, and telephone help lines. If you reduce the spread of the coronavirus in your area by staying home, you make their world safer.

We can do this. We can come together as one community–locally, nationally, globally. The coronavirus gives us an opportunity to remember that social solidarity is part of being human. As David Brooks wrote recently in the New York Times,

Social solidarity is an active commitment, not merely a feeling of connection but an “active virtue.” Solidarity recognizes both the inherent worth and dignity of each person and the way we are “embedded in webs of mutual obligation — to one another and to all creation. It celebrates the individual and the whole together.”

. . . It is out of solidarity, and not normal utilitarian logic, that George Marshall in “Saving Private Ryan” endangered a dozen lives to save just one. It’s solidarity that causes a Marine to risk his life dragging the body of his dead comrade from battle to be returned home. It’s out of solidarity that health care workers stay on their feet amid terror and fatigue. Some things you do not for yourself or another but for the common whole.

Screw This Virus!, David Brooks, New York Times, March 19, 2020 see here
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Solidarity is why we stay home even if we feel healthy or invincible or have cabin fever, for we know we might unwittingly pass the virus to others. It’s why we stay six feet apart, hoping that by so doing, we’ll lessen the burden on first responders and medical staff. Solidarity is why we don’t hoard food and supplies but leave plenty for others.

Last Supper of Jesus with Brazilian streetchildren as by Joey Velasco, artist
Last Supper with the Street Children, Joey Velasco, artist

Holy Week seems an appropriate time to write about love and sacrifice, life and death, despair and hope–the themes of life in the coronavirus pandemic. I began this post on Maundy Thursday, the day on the Christian calendar when we believe Jesus said to his disciples, “This is my commandment, that you love one another, as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

Laying down our life for others is what we do when we stay “safe at home.” When our jobs and business are sacrificed for the “greater good.” When we risk our life in essential jobs, both seen and unseen. When we set aside our work to care for and teach our children at home. When we stay away from church, synagogue, mosque, and temple and postpone weddings and funerals to a safer time. Jesus, who laid down his life for humanity, calls on us now to sacrifice in ways we could not have imagined before coronavirus crashed over us.

On Holy Saturday I returned to writing. This is the day between Jesus’ crucifixion on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday is a day of darkness and despair when Christians keep vigil until Sunday’s dawn. In this space we contemplate our complicity in Jesus’ continuing crucifixion, praying for God’s forgiveness and for a glimmer of hope. Between the crucifixion and resurrection, we, like Jesus’ first disciples, cry out for answers into an echoing silence. We long to know that Life is greater than Death and Good more powerful than Evil. We long for suffering to be redeemed.

That’s what we hope for, too, as we see refrigerator trucks outside hospitals and cars lined up for miles at food banks and unemployment offices. We cry out for answers as nurses and doctors plead for masks and medicine. We long for hope as the death toll climbs and we grieve both those who have died and those yet to succumb. We keep active vigil until Easter dawn.

Abstract light rays from a bright center.

And now, it is Easter. Christ is risen! Life has overcome death. Good has won and will win the day, somehow, some way, even if we only see glimmers of it now: A violinist serenading an emergency room; a loved one recovering from the virus; a child drawing a rainbow on a sidewalk; a whisper thanks for family and friends, for daffodils, and birds singing. God is not silent but speaking through officials who order social distance and quarantines and nurses who tell the dying they are not alone. God’s love touches us virtually in people who reach out by phone and internet. Love, not death, has the final word.

On this Easter day tombs of despair roll open and hope returns in smiled greetings from six feet away, music played from separate balconies, clapping hands at 7:00 P.M., and DIY masks that tell us someone cares. A new day will dawn fully, eventually. We trust that promise–that suffering will be redeemed–because we have already seen glimmers of light among us.

Yes, Safe at Home is boring and hard. Sacrifice and sorrow are real. Yes, we are in this together, all of us, for we are all God’s children. And yes, if you look carefully you can see glimmers of dawn among us, the light that will fully dawn, some day. Christ is risen.