In the Biblical Book of Revelation, the apocalypse culminates with Armageddon, that final battle between the forces of good and evil before the return of the Messiah to make all things right.
The word “apocalypse,” however, is also a Greek word meaning to reveal or uncover. In that sense, we truly live in an apocalyptic age, an age of revelation.
Crises are apocalyptic, by nature. They reveal what we had not before noticed.
Hurricane Katrina revealed underlying racial tensions in New Orleans and FEMA’s underlying incompetence in responding to the storm. In like manner the coronavirus (COVID-19) has already been apocalyptic. It has revealed some things about us that were previously hidden.
Here is one, that is all too obvious--we’ve been taking for granted many things in our daily lives: mobility, food, health care, casual conversations with friends and strangers, eating out, hugs, to name a few.
And now we’ve lost them, and we don’t know when we’ll get them back.
We are sad.
So here’s a suggestion: Let the crisis of this Great Uncertainty reveal our grief over the losses we are experiencing.
This communal revealing of griefs is called “the common weeping” by Stephen Shoemaker who then quotes the Spanish essayist, Miguel Unamuno, “I am convinced that we should solve many things if we went into the streets and uncovered our griefs, which perhaps would prove to be but one sole common grief, and joined together in beweeping them and crying aloud . . .”
What if we have “but one sole common grief” and that it is loss--of whatever kind.
Who, regardless of political leaning or religious preference, or [name your favorite chasm], who has not experienced LOSS, of a loved one, a parent, a favorite aunt, a classmate?
With this Great Uncertainty, not only are we losing comfortable routines; we are losing the human contact that went along with them.
Far too many Mississippians have already died, and those loses are still roiling their way through those family trees, out to the farthest twigs.
Then there are those work-families that have fallen apart. Some have been real family and sources of real support.
Sharing our griefs over our losses would bring us together, I am convinced, and fit us for the work ahead: to build back our weakened communities, our injured institutions and our small businesses that are, in many ways, the backbone of the economy.
But how do we share those griefs?
The internet may be a blessing in this case, with FB and Instagram and ZOOM and Skype.
Maybe that’s the way.
But then there are phone calls.
Voices convey much more information, especially feelings, than mere words on a screen. And what about notes through the regular mail?
Whatever you choose, remember these words by John Donne, penned in 1624 as the Black Plague ravaged his native London:
any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankind;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
Dick Conville is a retired college professor and long-time resident of Hattiesburg.
