Tag: Death

After the Virus Has Passed

Posted on by R.W. Reed

“We have always lived on the edge of a precipice ready to crumble beneath our feet. The destruction caused by the coronavirus is merely a preview of what will one day happen to us and all we hold dear. Nations and economies, health and relationships will succumb eventually to the ravages of time. Moth and rust will destroy the treasure we thought secure. Life itself, which sprouts green in the morning, will wilt by evening.”

https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/after-the-virus-has-passed

– R.W. Reed

Learning in Coronavirus Time

Posted on by R.W. Reed

C.S. Lewis fought (and was injured) in WW1 and lived through the The Blitz of WW2 in the UK. During the terrible days of WW2, he gave a sermon titled “Learning in War Time”. If anyone could speak with an air of authority on the world seemingly coming to an end right before our eyes, it is Lewis. In this sermon, Lewis lays out the way we humans should respond to our present situation dealing with our current worldwide crises. And while he is speaking specifically about war, his words can also be applied to the many troubles we see today.

“I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective, The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.

Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life”. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies.

Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never come.”

(Read the full sermon here: https://bradleyggreen.com/attachments/Lewis.Learning%20in%20War-Time.pdf)

This darkness that has come for the world in 2020 isn’t new. The world has always been dark. There has always been injustice and sickness and disease and death and starving and crying and murder and pain. This year, that darkness didn’t just suddenly materialize, it was simply exacerbated.

And, for this reason, I believe this is why Scripture tells us over and over again to let not our hearts be troubled, do not worry, guard your heart, let the peace of Christ dwell in you, and on and on and on. When our hope is in this world, we will always be disappointed. When our hope is in the only One who can save us, and in a greater world to come, then the peace of Christ will dwell in us.

– R.W. Reed

(P.S. This is not to take away from how serious the virus is and the lives that have been affected by it. All necessary precautions should still be taken. This is simply a reminder to not let this dominate our minds to the point that we live in a constant state of fear and anxiety about what will happen next.)

C. S. Lewis on the Coronavirus

Posted on by R.W. Reed

“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.” – C.S. Lewis, “On Living in an Atomic Age”

C. S. Lewis on the Coronavirus

– R.W. Reed