Christian Mindfulness in the Time of Coronavirus

Blogging in my new apartment in Kyoto, Japan!

Who knew on Ash Wednesday that we’d be giving up this much for Lent? School, jobs, church, retirement investments, gathering with friends, touching our faces or each other or the play equipment in the park…

C.S. Lewis said it bluntly in 1939 England: “All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that centered in this world, were always doomed to a final frustration. In ordinary times only a wise man can realize it. Now the stupidest of us know” (“Learning in War-Time”). Lewis's “now” was World War 2; ours is the Covid-19 pandemic.

All last week, my insides were in a knot. I had no appetite. I was trying to follow my own advice of praying to be resigned only to the present uncertainty rather than to all possible outcomes (as I blogged here 2 weeks ago), but my body wasn’t listening. Then Tuesday came again. Every Tuesday during Lent, the devotional book I’m using has a Psalm reading from Psalm 26 and includes the line, “I have always been mindful of your unfailing love” (NIV 26:2). That line jumps out at me for 2 reasons: (1) if I were always mindful of the Lord’s unfailing love, I don’t think my stomach would be this unsettled and (2) the popularity of that word “mindful” in education recently, especially in the context of social and emotional learning (SEL). I’ve felt a little leery of some of the practices recommended under that heading in secular settings, but I’ve also suspected that there is a strong core of Christian mindfulness we could be making more of in Christian education. I want to explore this for myself before I can think about how it might work with students.

I returned to a classic from the 1600’s, Practicing the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence. While C.S. Lewis reminds me that if loss of a sense of personal control reminds me it was always an illusion anyway, that loss is a blessing, Brother Lawrence reminds me that a nervous digestion is a blessing if it leads me to repentance and Christian mindfulness of God’s unfailing love. Anxiety should not surprise me, only trigger repentance; peace of mind shouldn’t swell my head, only trigger gratitude. Worry is what I will always do apart from the power of God; peace is only the result of his presence. Brother Lawrence’s interviewer in the first part expresses it this way: “He said he carried no guilt. ‘When I fail in my duty, I readily acknowledge it, saying, I am used to do so. I shall never do otherwise if I am left to myself. If I fail not, then I give God thanks acknowledging that it comes from Him.’”

In the meantime, carrying on what Brother Lawrence calls “a continual conversation with [God] with freedom and in simplicity” is the key to his Christian discipline of mindfulness. Of what does this conversation consist? Brother Lawrence describes it like this: “We need only to recognize God intimately present with us and address ourselves to Him every moment. We need to beg His assistance for knowing His will in things doubtful and for rightly performing those which we plainly see He requires of us, offering them to Him before we do them, and giving Him thanks when we have completed them.” Sounds a lot like giving thanks in everything and praying without ceasing.

What follows is an attempt to ride my train of consciousness chugging down the track of  Brother Lawrence’s advice in 2 regular activities: exercising and showering. 

While exercising: I give thanks for the strength, health, and opportunity to exercise. For the amazing bodies God has given us, how all the systems work together. (I recently spent time with a family with a diabetic member—how much technology and effort it takes to regulate what my body does without a moment’s conscious thought or effort!) How using that body tunes and strengthens it. I pray to steward this gift well. I pray for those I know who have needs in the area of bodily strength and health, including my own. I segue into analogy: Prayer for spiritual health, strength, flexibility, and endurance for myself and all my family, dwelling on specific needs that I am aware of. I acknowledging that physical and emotional challenges are often the spiritual exercise that grows and strengthens our souls. I pray for open eyes to see that, including in this current pandemic crisis. I pray for those in fear, those suffering, those serving the sick, those making public policy decisions, and those researching treatments and vaccines. I commit myself, my community, and my world to God.

While showering: I give thanks for the pleasant physical sensations of steamy warmth, pounding water, foaming soap, getting clean. For all this available at the twist of a knob—remembering backpacking trips that helped me realize the blessing of modern conveniences by their absence. I give thanks for those trips—the beauty of the scenery, the delight of the fellowship. I pray for friends remembered from those trips and for new friendships in my new location. I pray for the preservation of creation, development of new technologies, wisdom for policy makers and individuals to care for creation. I segue into analogy: Gratitude for Jesus giving up all of his rights so he could wash sin from my conscience, swirling guilt and shame down the drain like the grime, sweat, odor, and germs from my body. I pray for open eyes to see my omissions and commissions quickly and clearly. I examine my conscience and confess what I find. I pray for wisdom and discipline to learn new habits and to grow in love for God and neighbor. I give thanks for baptism by water that typifies all this. I pray for those at whose baptisms I’ve promised support—especially my kids and grandkids. I pray for the Spirit of God to fall like water on this needy earth…at which a line of a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem bobs to the surface of my mind: “Because the Holy Ghost over the bent / world broods with warm breath and with ah! bright wings.” I get out of the shower and look up the rest of the poem “God’s Grandeur,” which as it turns out, is just as fitting a meditation:     

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

I add a thanksgiving for the beauty and power of language and the skill of those who wield it well. I commit this world and all in it to the grace of God.

I can do the same when I’m cooking, shopping, taking out the garbage, walking down the road. It can be true for me as it was for Brother Lawrence: “He said he was more united to God in his outward employments than when he left them for devotion in retirement.”

And my appetite is returning!
Go in peace—even in the time of coronavirus—and practice the presence of God, always being mindful of his unfailing love. If I can grow in my Christian mindfulness like this, maybe, just maybe, I can figure out a way to share it with my students.

One of the sights I saw and gave thanks for walking home from the grocery store today!

Literature in the Time of Coronavirus

Have suitcase, hand sanitizer, and disinfecting wipes; planning to travel!

We have tickets on Delta to return to Japan next Saturday. I’m supposed to start teaching at a different international Christian school in April. Then the coronavirus began its worldwide spread. The Japanese prime minister asked all elementary, middle, and high schools to close. United Airlines suspended flights to Japan. Delta cut back our Portland-Tokyo flight from daily to 3 times per week. So far, our tickets appear unaffected, but we are checking daily. 


What if…? What if the coronavirus pandemic explodes, and we can’t return to Japan as planned next Saturday? What if we go, and school closures there continue past the beginning of the new academic year in April? What if we go, and we can’t buy toilet paper? What if we go, and we can’t come back to see our families? The questions begin proliferating in my heart, with the toxic byproduct of worry which produces fear which can permeate my whole being.

Then I think of a work of literature which I have studied every year for the last 4 years with my 11th grade AP Language students: The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Our literary objective in reading the book was to master an understanding of satire: it’s written as letters of advice from the experienced devil Screwtape, now promoted to a desk job up the “lowerarchy” (i.e. hierarchy), addressed to his nephew Wormwood, a novice tempter in the field with his first “patient” (i.e. human). Wormwood’s assignment is to preserve his patient from influence by “the Enemy” (i.e. God) and retain him for “Our Father Below.” 

The satire form allows the commentary on the foibles and follies of human nature to sneak in under my guard. I don't realize how true it is of me until I've laughed at the inverted advice. In letter 6 Screwtape tells Wormwood, “There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.”

What I need to do today, therefore, is to not worry about what will happen to me, but simply to act with love for God and my neighbor. Today that means joyfully, compassionately, and skillfully carrying out my obligations at the mission conference I’m attending. It also means protecting myself and my neighbor by washing my hands well, refraining from touching my face, and strengthening my body with good food and sleep. And it includes praying for peace in the uncertainty and leaving the “what-ifs” in the future since there is nothing I can do to affect them, and since all of them certainly won’t happen, and possibly none of them will.


As Screwtape continues:  

Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with patience to the Enemy’s will. What the Enemy means by this is primarily that he should accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to him--the present anxiety and suspense. It is about this that he is to say, “Thy will be done,” and for the daily task of bearing this that the daily bread will be provided. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross but only of the things he is afraid of.  

Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practice fortitude and patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible, and the Enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to attain it: resignation to present and actual suffering, even where that suffering consists of fear, is far easier and is usually helped by this direct action. (Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter VI)

So, for the moment, my present cross is uncertainty. I plan to be on my way back to Japan at this time next week, and I act on those plans, but I also hold them loosely because the coronavirus and response to it could intervene. If they do, I will address myself to resignation to that fate when the time comes. Thank you, C.S. Lewis, for recollecting my scattered thoughts in this time

I am grateful for the thinkers and saints who have lived before me, who have captured their insights in writing. I am grateful for the way my profession as an English teacher has disciplined me to the repeated readings of the great writing that I teach each year. I hope the students in my classrooms get even a taste of what that’s like. 

How about you? What books have you re-read until certain parts of them have become part of the landscape of your soul?

P.S. A part of The Screwtape Letters was also significant to me when my mother was dying several years ago. I reflected on that in my post "Processing Death through Reading and Writing." I never would have thought that The Screwtape Letters would be so important, but there are at least 2 other passages that occur to me at times. They may be the subjects of another blog.