Covid-19 a “blessing in disguise”?

For more than two months now we have been quarantined in our homes. Call it “enhanced”, “general” or “risked area”, the lockdown guidelines forcibly limit our personal freedom of movement for the sake of the common good. So okay let us put aside our human right. Let us follow the guidelines. Let us cooperate. Let us respectfully call the attention of authorities to mistakes and blunders. Let us constructively help solve problems. Let us help the poor, needy and the sick whatever and whenever we can. And let us pray to God “since it is in him that we live and move and exist” (Acts 17:28).

With thousands of death worldwide it is insulting to think of Covid-19 as a “blessing in disguise”. The deadly virus does not cause whatever is positive and blissful that happens. It is our human capacity and will, and God’s grace, to survive. But Covid-19 can be considered only an occasion, not the reason, for the good that happens.

To be sure, many of us have seen, heard or done those unexpected “blessings”. There are many who continue to believe in the ongoing creative Presence of the Creator who, according to Meister Eckhart, the famous 14th century Dominican priest, monk and mystic, “is closer to us than we are to ourselves” (Acts 17:28).

But if the compassionate God is the so-called “Ground of being” why does He allow such an Occasion, like Covid-19, to exist? We do not know. It is a mystery.

Squinting the endless speculations and debates among holy and wise people in the centuries past on the existence of God and evil, a mystery which is beyond our human intellect to comprehend, we can perhaps accept, yes, if we can, two simple words of wisdom to live by:

1. “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, naked I shall return again. Yahweh gave, Yahweh has taken back. Blessed be the name of Yahweh” (Job 1:2).
2. “The heart has its reason which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart that experiences God, not the reason. This, then, is faith: God is felt by the heart, not by the reason” (Blaise Pascal, 17th century French philosopher). End.