How black is your Friday? Honestly, I expected this morning to see more stories about nutty Americans risking their lives and duking it out in stores in a deepening pandemic for PlayStations and Xboxs. The world already thinks we’re nuts.
There are a few campers waiting in lines, just not the ones who traveled and can’t bring the stuff home on a plane or in a car already filled with family.
Black Friday has moved online more than in the past, making one wonder if Cyber Monday will be a bust. Crowds in stores this Black Friday will just mean Christmas will be blacker.
Maybe having lost a friend or relative to the virus has given a few Americans pause. A financial planner tells me, given his retiree clientele, that he has seen a half dozen die this year. A half dozen of my friends have had COVID-19 and survived. A cousin and her husband in the Midwest are home in bed with it now.
Our Franciscan* pope tells New York Times readers he nearly died at 21 while training for the priesthood in Buenos Aires. Doctors removed the upper right lobe of one of his lungs months after his admission to the hospital. He has some sense of what patients go through struggling to breathe. Quick work by two of his nurses kept him alive to have that later surgery.
He writes:
This theme of helping others has stayed with me these past months. In lockdown I’ve often gone in prayer to those who sought all means to save the lives of others. So many of the nurses, doctors and caregivers paid that price of love, together with priests, and religious and ordinary people whose vocations were service. We return their love by grieving for them and honoring them.
Whether or not they were conscious of it, their choice testified to a belief: that it is better to live a shorter life serving others than a longer one resisting that call. That’s why, in many countries, people stood at their windows or on their doorsteps to applaud them in gratitude and awe. They are the saints next door, who have awakened something important in our hearts, making credible once more what we desire to instill by our preaching.
They are the antibodies to the virus of indifference. They remind us that our lives are a gift and we grow by giving of ourselves, not preserving ourselves but losing ourselves in service.
Francis shakes his head at notions of personal freedom Americans have elevated to “a prism through which they judge everything.” It puts their immediate needs above others’.
This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities — what we value, what we want, what we seek — and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of.
God asks us to dare to create something new. We cannot return to the false securities of the political and economic systems we had before the crisis. We need economies that give to all access to the fruits of creation, to the basic needs of life: to land, lodging and labor. We need a politics that can integrate and dialogue with the poor, the excluded and the vulnerable, that gives people a say in the decisions that affect their lives. We need to slow down, take stock and design better ways of living together on this earth.
Perhaps President-elect Joe Biden and his team are listening. My faith in his political adversaries in Congress, however, is an empty cup.
The pandemic has exposed the paradox that while we are more connected, we are also more divided. Feverish consumerism breaks the bonds of belonging. It causes us to focus on our self-preservation and makes us anxious. Our fears are exacerbated and exploited by a certain kind of populist politics that seeks power over society. It is hard to build a culture of encounter, in which we meet as people with a shared dignity, within a throwaway culture that regards the well-being of the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled and the unborn as peripheral to our own well-being.
To come out of this crisis better, we have to recover the knowledge that as a people we have a shared destination. The pandemic has reminded us that no one is saved alone. What ties us to one another is what we commonly call solidarity. Solidarity is more than acts of generosity, important as they are; it is the call to embrace the reality that we are bound by bonds of reciprocity. On this solid foundation we can build a better, different, human future.
Ours is not a culture of encounter but of confrontation. Shared destination? Solidarity? Sounds like communism to anxious Americans so focused on self-preservation and personal freedom that they cannot even preserve themselves or their own families.
Even some who have come through COVID seem not to have had the Aha moment of gratitude Francis retains. The vaccines cannot get here soon enough. This culture does not have the right stuff to save itself through mutual concern and prudence. Not when there are PlayStations and Xboxs on sale.
Update: * “A Franciscan Jesuit for pope”