“Becoming a Community of Care and Empathy in the Age of Coronavirus”

If there’s one lesson we can learn about the coronavirus moment is the possibility to become a people of compassion and a community that embodies vulnerability and weakness, and intentional empathy and care toward the weak, the poor, the needy, and the marginalized.

The most daring expression of the human will is not action or participation, but the inaction and silence of the will. This is an act of human resistance, subjectivity, and optimism, too.

The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) reveals the fragility of human existence and our collective striving to stay healthy and away from physical pain; yet the virus also exposes a dangerous truth about human nature and capitalism: the anxiety of the rich and big corporations to preserve wealth than sustaining life.

A second lesson we can learn from this medical crisis is the opportunity it affords to all of us to alter our attitude toward war victims, refugee and undocumented communities and to ask them how can I serve you today? Do you have any unmet need at the moment?

The coronavirus disease grants us the opportunity to live in community and proximity with each other, and to solidify our interdependence, interrelationality, and common humanity. We are becoming a new people because of this dangerous threat that menaces our common existence and our common future.

In the midst of the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), let us turn our face toward God for mercy and grace and pray in this manner:

“Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom. All our days pass away under your wrath; we finish our years with a moan… Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.

May the favor of the Lord our God rest on us; establish the work of our hands for us— yes, establish the work of our hands.”

–Psalm. 90:9, 10, 12