Orthodox Reflections

After more than a week in a rehab facility, the last thing we expected was to see Dad looking worse. The doctor thought that a few weeks in the facility would help our 83-year-old Dad improve after surgery. He’d been in this rehab facility before, but that was pre-COVID and things had been different. For the past week, Dad had been in complete isolation for safety, of course. No visitors, no leaving the room. Just hours of sleeping or watching television. We had come into town to “visit” him by standing outside his closed window and talking to him on his cell phone. He looked worse than we had ever seen him. It was all we could do to keep from crying.

Despite testing negative for COVID multiple times in the hospital, Dad had been sentenced to solitary confinement as you can never be too careful. If it saves one life, after all… During his isolation, Dad had developed a tremor so bad that he could barely hold his phone. He slumped in his wheelchair, disoriented and sullen. He had trouble remembering simple details. His eyes were dull and sunken. While we were outside talking to him, a worker came into his room with lunch. It was in a Styrofoam takeout container instead of on a plate because COVID. She was totally hidden in PPE, saying nothing to Dad as she dropped the food and hastily retreated because COVID. With trembling hands, Dad managed to lift the lid and show us the pile of slop underneath. He couldn’t remember the last time he ate. He said he wasn’t hungry and the food was garbage anyway.

No one was allowed to bring him outside food because COVID. We asked Dad if there was anything we could do to make things better. He pleaded with us, “Just take me home.”

Within minutes, we were on the phone with his physician demanding a discharge. It took till the next day, but we got Dad home to mom. Fortunately for Dad, he is in a Red State with relatively mild COVID measures. So while the rehab facilities / nursing homes are still totally locked down, life on the outside is mostly normal. After a few days with his family, the tremor subsided. Dad’s disorientation passed. He began to eat, to carry on conversations, and to laugh. The light returned to his eyes. He even resumed rolling his wheelchair to the corner to get his great-grandkid off the bus in the afternoons.

My wife is a clinical educator. After seeing the state Dad was in, she told us all that he wouldn’t have lived another week in that place. Often referred to as “Failure to Thrive,” the elderly can simply lose the will to live. Fortunately for Dad, he had a family that intervened and got him out of isolation and back home before it was too late. But what about all the other moms and dads who don’t have tight-knit, professional families to look out for them? What is happening to them?

They are withering away and dying in solitude. To “protect” the elderly, governments have taken away everything that makes life worth living to begin with. Nor is it even just the elderly who are suffering from enforced isolation. Public “health” authorities in one area of Canada issued guidelines to parents instructing them to keep children whose classmate tested positive for COVID-19 isolated in a separate room from all other family members for 14 days. Healthy, young parents are locking up their own kids in isolation for two weeks because some government bureaucrat told them to. It is hard to tell what is more insane – the fact that some parents are actually doing this or the fact that they tell others about it on social media.

Mom had COVID last year at 82. Dad was with her the whole time, caring for her the same as he had the previous 65 years. He never got COVID from Mom. Even so, Dad would have rather died than abandon his wife when she needed him. Mom recovered in a week, and is healthier now than she has been in years. Mom and Dad have never embraced Orthodoxy, but their Evangelical faith is deep and it comforts them. The limits of the Church are known, but the limits of God’s grace are not. It is a hope that I cling to. Though they are both much better now, over the long haul there is only one way this ends and that is before the Judgment Seat of Christ.

We live in a society plagued by a multitude of fears. Chief among them is the fear of death. As Bishop Irinei wrote last year:

In the face of an illness, we have seen fear turn brother against brother, society against society; we have seen the economies of whole nations destroyed, which means families left without the means to provide for themselves; we have seen fear upset the education of our children and young people; we have seen fear increase the rates of depression, domestic violence and even suicide to unknown heights — and again we must be clear: it is not a virus that has caused these things, it is fear.

 

And it is grounded, ultimately, in the one fear that a society without God cannot overcome: the fear of death. The virulent fear that eats away at human hearts is fueled by the secular inability, or outright refusal, to see beyond death. The secular mind cannot see death as anything other than ‘the end’, and thus a thing to flee from as the utmost evil. For this reason, the avoidance of death is seen as the highest aim, the highest good — even if the result of this is a so-called ‘life’ utterly overwhelmed with fear, sorrow and grief. But I tell you this: death will never be avoided by fearfully clinging to fragments of life — not in the face of sin, nor in the face of a disease. Society today is constantly provoked to base its every decision on the dichotomy between life and death. But death is not the the opposite of life: the opposite of life is fear.

As a son, I have now watched how this obsession with preventing death is, ironically, killing our elderly. As a dad, I have seen the mental damage done to my children. They sit in front of computer screens all day, longing to see their friends and experience real life. As a business professional, I have seen the wholesale economic devastation as hundreds of thousands of businesses close permanently. To preserve “fragments of life,” we are turning Earth into Hell and people into zombies.

We have often written that COVID has at least a 99.5% survival rate under 70. Even over 70, the survival rate is 94.6%. COVID is infectious, but hardly the Black Death. Unfortunately, for those still trapped in hysterical fear, facts will never make a difference. Something much stronger than persuasion is needed.

To pull our society back from the brink, Christians must demonstrate pure, bold, seemingly stupid faith. The same faith that Christians showed during previous plagues:

Certainly very many of our brethren, while, in their exceeding love and brotherly-kindness, they did not spare themselves, but kept by each other, and visited the sick without thought of their own peril, and ministered to them assiduously, and treated them for their healing in Christ, died from time to time most joyfully along with them, lading themselves with pains derived from others, and drawing upon themselves their neighbours’ diseases, and willingly taking over to their own persons the burden of the sufferings of those around them.

As Christians, especially as we approach the Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ, we must show the world how to truly live in boldness. We must not let our elderly waste away in isolation. We must visit and care for the sick. We must throw away our masks and stop “social” distancing. We must gather together in spirit and truth with smiles and hugs, the way God intended humans to worship Him. All talk of multiple spoons or other changes to Orthodox practices must be silenced. The world must know that the Faith of Jesus Christ once delivered to the Apostles does not change. The Gates of Hell (or death) will not prevail against the Church. 

We must take our children out into the sun. We must never treat them as sources of infection to be locked up. They are gifts from God to be adored.  We must demand schools open and that normal life resume for our future generations. We must go out into the streets, and carry on living while laughing the loudest, loving the most, and giving God the glory for all things.

Our love, our joy, and our courage can save the world from the gathering darkness. This is our time to serve. To this task we are called. The Church of the living God must cast away all hesitation and doubt. We must show the world how to overcome the fear of death. Only we can.

Nicholas – member of the  Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America, a COVID refugee from the Greek Archdiocese