Nothing Will Ever Again Be the Same – Except That It Will

In his famous autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton ends with a chapter wholly devoted to the typical monk’s year. He goes through not just the daily round but the grand liturgical cycle of the Church’s calendar. He seemed to say now I am here in the Trappist monastery and things will always be according to this horarium and cycle.

Except it wasn’t.

He never fully adapted to the Rule and life and finally died a continent away while visiting Buddhist monks – an odd death for a man supposedly bound to a contemplative life.

Many odd things have happened in these last two years and forecasters – and ordinary people – are asking if things will ever be the same again. Work, medicine, roles of the state, economies – all have been upended. Will we ever just go back to the mythical ”before” time normality?

The first thing we have to address is that we have been living in a weird time of “normality” even before Covid. There has been a rapid acceleration of changes on so many fronts and in such an array of areas that most people are just struggling to keep an even keel. Maybe this describes you in your parish, diocese or home. It’s incredibly difficult to just keep a hold on things let alone get a higher grip on diagnosing both deeper trends and higher goals. Today I would like to look at several of these areas with a particular emphasis on Covid-19.

First of all, we really have to see how the role of the state has altered as a result of this pandemic. The vast and unsustainable expenditures, the direct intervention in the practical economy of the country, the direct interference in personal lives and decisions of every citizen, the bumbling and overreach with little democratic oversight or control have all contributed to the already high level of distrust at every government level. Trust is not something that is easily restored. It’s not a common thing to talk about the role of the state is but it is a necessary discussion in our time as the state has so much to do with not just life issues, but our whole lives.

Secondly, as pro-lifers we have often felt aggrieved about the strangle hold that big media has had on our activities. In all my time, we have been at the mercy of not just reporters or local owners, but the biases and world views of large, usually left leaning, media corporations. That has changed forever. Though everyone speaks about misinformation, bad information, and personal truths, the truth is that the information monopoly has been broken forever. Each of us have our media feeds and the sources that are hard to verify or correlate. One man’s trusted source of news, is another’s well of misinformation. Within the pro-life movement and within the Church, we have seen how necessary that it is to both use and develop a variety of platforms, methods and means to both speak to the world but also to evangelize it. This is both time consuming and far more expensive (on some platforms) than we had previously thought. As a thought experiment, how many media platforms, and media feeds (sources) do you use or consult in a single week? The world has drastically changed since we used to have to go to the marketplace or the well to get our news. We need to think about how our “pulpits” change too.

Medicine has also become front and centre in our dinner table conversation. We trade stories about Covid, what it is, what it really is, what treatments there are, what’s the baseline of real numbers and every other aspect. Who would have ever thought we would care about the Israeli medical system and its effectiveness in combating pandemics before now, for example. The development of vaccines has been fraught with ethical dilemmas. We have seen the emergence of new and powerful research technologies which will have an effect on the vast majority of the populations of the earth. These new genetic technologies will not be easily harnessed or controlled. How they will be used is something that concern each person but the public dialogue on that has been quite stunted. Yes, the science and research are complex but we need to simplify but not dumb down the information so a broad social discussion can take place. Even the fact that every major government has invested massively in these areas should give us pause for thought.

Lastly, here in Canada, our health care system has been shown to be both fragile and poorly constructed. The emergency about which our medical personnel have been warning for decades has hit us hard and exposed serious cracks and problems. We are obviously far behind most other jurisdictions and have to ask ourselves who is responsible, how we will fix it and how will we pay for it. As well, even in the worst of deaths mounting in nursing homes and jammed ICU’s the triumph of pro-death ideology is seen. Abortions continued. Mercy-killings rose. The elderly were locked away while questionable surgeries continued. The only way that these ideologies were allowed to triumph is because of the culture of secrecy that shows a lasting sense of shame. Where are the pro-life voices in the reconstruction of a truly well functioning medical system?

I know that if you are reading this, you are as tired as I am with what may seem like endless discussions without action. But sheer frustration and anger must be channelled into discussions and action on all levels as to the society we want to see emerge from this pandemic.

My mother was born in 1923 – not even 2 years after the end of the Spanish Flu. To her it was history, but the scale of the epidemic made her parents’ generation begin to demand a different way of doing medicine and healthcare. Their experience and memories shaped the system that has brought us great good but also facilitated great evil. This Covid experience will also reshape our systems. Will we be in control of that shaping or merely subject to it?

Fr. Tom Lynch (PFLC National President)