A Plague on All Our Houses

By Audrey Stallsmith

In Romeo and Juliet, a dying Mercutio calls down a “plague on both your houses,” in reference to the Capulet and Montague families whose feud has cost him his life. We might say that the corona virus is a plague on all the nations of the world, who can’t seem to stop fighting with each other either.    

It’s funny how quickly things can fall apart. Not ha-ha funny, but peculiar. We thought that science and the increase in knowledge had finally brought us a certain level of security, only to be reminded that they haven’t.

A few years ago, when I was researching the 1918 flu epidemic for a novel I was writing, many of the articles I read warned that such an outbreak would happen again.  It was only a matter of time. Even though modern science has acquainted us with how and why such plagues occur, our knowledge obviously still doesn’t give us much control over them.

But such pestilences only emphasize the mortality that already should be obvious to us. People in earlier centuries probably understood that better, life expectancies being so much shorter back then that everybody was reminded of their vulnerability on an almost daily basis. 

That should have proved to them that there was little point in dedicating their lives to the accumulation of wealth, power, or prestige if they shortly would have to leave all that stuff behind anyway. Nowadays, it sometimes takes natural disasters to confront us with that reality.       

As Chuck Colson points out in The Faith, during the time of the early church, Roman cities experienced their share of epidemics—including what probably was smallpox. Panicked pagans often would abandon their ailing kin in the street to save themselves, since they had no tradition of human life being sacred.

The early Christians, on the other hand, would take in the sick and attempt to nurse them back to health, even though those believers knew they were endangering their own lives and finances by doing so. As Colson notes, to them, caring for the abandoned was caring for Christ. So the risk they took wasn’t just an obligation but a privilege. 

And, although I think all of us are at least somewhat intimidated by death, the early Christians didn’t fear it as much as the pagans did. Those believers knew that, once they got beyond the scary part, being with Christ in heaven would be wonderful. But working down here for Christ also was wonderful, so it was all good. We might say that they weren’t invested in this world but in the one to come. 

And, even if they couldn’t save the bodies of those they rescued, they might be able to save their souls. One of the tragedies of the current epidemic is that too many people are dying alone with little time or help to prepare. Of course, even having a spiritual advisor on hand doesn’t always aid people who can’t accept their new reality.

Corrie Ten Boom relates how, when she was in a Nazi prison camp, she shared her cell briefly with a Jewish woman who was scheduled for execution. Although Corrie tried to talk to that fellow prisoner about her soul, the woman wasn’t interested. It didn’t appear that she was actively opposed to Christianity but, rather, preoccupied with all she had lost. And Corrie couldn’t seem to convince the woman that her soul was more important, that she wasn’t defined by her possessions. 

Thomas Merton points out in Seeds of Contemplation that all our striving after success seems to be aimed at proving ourselves better than the common herd. People who get caught up in that rodent race, he points out, “can only conceive one way of becoming real:  cutting themselves off from other people and building a barrier of contrast and distinction between themselves and other people.” 

“God does not give us graces or talents or virtues for ourselves alone,” he reminds us. “Everything that is given to one member is given for the whole body.” In other words, our skills don’t originate with us, so there’s no reason for us to take pride in them. They also don’t belong to us. They belong to the whole family, and our Father expects his children to use those skills to take care of each other.

One of the good things about crisis times is that they help us realize people are more important than things. Such states of emergency also bring us together with those other people to achieve a common goal. But we need to remember that our common goal shouldn’t be just to survive the corona virus. If that doesn’t kill us, after all, something else eventually will.

No, our common goal should be to help each other get to heaven. For that, Barnabus might be a better example for us than Paul was. Although brilliant, Paul could be perfectionist and unforgiving. But Barnabus believed in Paul when no one else did and, later, extended the same benefit of the doubt to John Mark who had abandoned them once. Barnabus apparently saw other people’s potentialities rather than their past sins or failures. 

Like him and the Good Samaritan, we should aid our fellow travelers through life rather than building defenses against them. In The Great Omission Dallas Willard speaks of the “amazing simplicity” of transparency, where we are honest about our own weaknesses rather than trying to hide them. We can guess that far fewer people would have lost their lives in this epidemic if the nations had been more transparent with each other.

I suspect our governments will go back to their bluff, guff, and tough talk just as soon as this is over. But "we the people" at least will have been reminded that there is a better way.