Thoughts after voting during a pandemic
After meeting with a condemned man about to be hanged, Samuel Johnson wrote “the prospect of death wonderfully concentrates the mind.” Contemplatives and mystics have known that for centuries. I have practiced contemplative prayer for years and meditated on death for countless hours. These practices helped me through my own brush with death after a massive stroke and through the deaths of several loved ones. It might sound morbid to the uninitiated but there is nothing like a shared threat, like a pandemic, to concentrate our collective mind. If we let it it could help us focus on what is true and important and strip away everything that is not.
One surprising and delightful effect of this pandemic, for me, has been to increase my sense of solidarity with the human race, not just those alive today but in centuries past. This is not the first time we vulnerable beings have faced such a dangerous and mysterious threat. if I think of words like “Black Death”and bubonic plague and diphtheria and tuberculosis and small pox and typhoid and Spanish flu and polio, I can almost see men and women just like me huddling in their homes wondering if they will be next or if it is safe to go outside. My 96 year old father recently died and I wish I had asked him what it was like to face these threats to humanity. I suspect he’d have told me to hold tight to those I love and take care of the lonely and vulnerable and appreciate everything that you usually take for granted.
I certainly know that threats to the human race need to be faced by all of us, together, of one collective mind. I voted in the primary today and my mind was, as Johnson said, wonderfully concentrated on selecting those who will bring us together to fight the common enemies that threaten us and our planet. We must have no more tolerance for hate or division or “leaders” who tweet about “the Chinese virus” and shithole countries. We become complicit in that which we tolerate.
