Miroslav Volf: How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? We are now in many ways in exile; We’re now in the strange land; we’re now in the strange land in our very homes. Can we sing the Lord’s song in the strange land? Can we overcome our fears and act with courage? Can we let go of our obsessive self-concern, which endangerment tends to produce in us? Can we open ourselves up to help others?
Evan Rosa: This is For the Life of the World. A conversational podcast about seeking and living a life worthy of our humanity.
I’m Evan Rosa, for the Yale Center for Faith & Culture—welcome to our very first episode of what will be a weekly podcast, dropping episodes every Saturday. In just a moment, I’ll pass things over to Miroslav Volf to say why we’re starting this show. But here at the outset, as of the first week of April 2020, we’ll be publishing regular episodes; and you’ll be able to subscribe in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen to podcasts.
We’re living in a time of rupture, confusion, anxiety and the loss of control. We need space to mourn, lament, grieve; our human condition makes us fragile, but while we have life in us, we can create, work, learn, and grow—and we can share that life with each other.
We’re offering these conversations in a spirit of creativity and hope, which we give to and receive from each other, and hope to inspire in you. And we offer them ultimately in the Spirit of Christ, who is the Life of the World, and who offers us life that is truly life.
These are strange days, indeed; and home is starting to feel like a strange land. But can we continue to sing the Lord’s song? Here’s Miroslav with a response to this pandemic, COVID-19, reflections on how to live in the midst of it, and why we’re producing this show. Thank you for joining us. I’m excited for what’s ahead.
Miroslav Volf: Dear friends, for those of you who do not know me, my name is Miroslav Volf and I teach systematic theology at Yale Divinity School, and I’m the director of the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.
One of the things that we do at the Center... we try to think through, research, write, and speak on the questions that are facing us at any given time, and obviously today the great pandemic has gathered all our thoughts around itself. We maybe can say that we live in COVID-19-time.
Many of us have become sick; many of us here in this country—but many of us in the world as well even more so—have also died. All of us live under a dangerous cloud, dark cloud of a pandemic.
And as we think about how to live and what we do in the face of such pandemic... of course many of us are there to battle the pandemic and that battle is often carried out primarily by scientists those that are searching desperately for a vaccine and some kind of cure; epidemiologists who are tracking distribution of the illness and who are working to control the spread; medical doctors and nurses they’re on the front lines trying to help those who are sick; politicians, too, are trying to implement measures and keep the country running; and then, of course, economists and business people—what would we be doing without them?—making sure that basic goods are produced and distributed and so forth.
When we observe what’s going on around us, trying to combat Coronavirus, we may think that, as Christians and especially as theologians, we have little to contribute and what we contribute to these efforts that I have named is, of course, to support those efforts. But most of us are called to stay at home, stay safe ourselves, make sure not to endanger others. Which boils down to something like personal hygiene and social distancing, not much of the fullness of life when you put it in those terms.
For the most part the pandemic seems like a major interruption in life, major interruption in life as we used to live it. And this phrase, Life as usual, that’s the key phrase when we think about the interruption here, for though our lives have been seriously and severely disrupted, they have in an important sense not been interrupted.
For the truth is that our life goes on; the truth is actually that our life cannot be interrupted. You cannot put life on pause; you can not do with life as do you with a Netflix movie because something has come up: press the stop button and then do what you need to do and then return and press the play button and then life starts again, the movie starts again. Unfortunately we can't do that with our lives.
The question for all of us is how do we live with this disruption? How do we live with this menacing cloud that is over us? And the Christian faith—and I think theology as well—has something very important to say to that very question. In some ways I think that this time is a particularly important time for us to speak out and to speak our contribution of the Chrsitan faith.
For the central question of the Christian faith is what kind of life is worthy of our humanity? How are we to live our lives as the creatures of the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ— Jesus Christ who was the savior of those who suffered, who was on the mission to free people from power of evil that destroy life and make life difficult and to restore us back to something like true life, life abundant, flourishing life—to make these possible. And I think the central question is Might something like that be possible also under the conditions under which we live?
In the Christian tradition, this question of the true life was never an armchair question of those who are comfortable, a question that those whose basic needs have been met, and those whose life is not endangered; it was never a luxury question.
The Christmas story, as you will recall, describes the coming of Christ into the world as “light shining into darkness”—darkness of imperial oppression, darkness of widespread destitution, darkness of incurable diseases, darkness of hunger, darkness of vulnerability, darkness of precarity of our fragile lives. And what better underscores the fragility of our lives than the pandemic that we are experiencing right now! This little virus has threatened lives across the globe.
The question about the true, flourishing life for Christians is always a question of how to live that kind of a life as we are surrounded by the forces that push us to make our lives and the living of our lives false, to stifle the flourishing of our lives, to the make us languish—or to express it with the Psalmist, who was writing during the Israelite exile in Babylon; "how can we sing the Lord’s song in the strange land?"
The current pandemic is just such strange land. We are now in many ways in exile; We’re now in the strange land; we’re now in the strange land in our very homes. Can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? Can we overcome our fears and act with courage? Can we let go of our obsessive self-concern, which endangerment tends to produce in us? Can we open ourselves up to help others? Can we live well with the loneliness and isolation that [Coronavirus] has imposed on many of us especially the elderly who were, in any case, suffering from loneliness? Can we learn how to live confined in small places, which many with families have to do? How to manage the inevitable tensions?
Can we do better than to experience time of confinement as “empty” time, time that just needs to be filled so as to forestall the boredom: Netflix, snacks, and more Netflix and more snacks?
In a phrase: Can we live some of the true life under the cloud that seeks to make our life false?
Now these are questions that accompany us as we step back a bit from our fears and immediacy of what demands our attention. We will see these questions surface, and the Christian faith has important resources to help us live as exiles in our own homes, in empty cities and towns.
This is the time I believe and we believe as the Center to ask a fundamental question: What is this brief life of ours about?
How can we live so as not to betray our own humanity, the humanity of our loved ones, and the humanity of our neighbors? How can we do so as we live under oppressive conditions of the pandemic?
The key question for us is to consider in this series of conversations we are about to introduce is What does it mean to say at this time that the God of Jesus Christ, the healer of the sick, the critic of powers, and the crucified and resurrected Savior... what does it mean to say that this God is our God? I want to invite you to follow our conversations with the team, as we engage the critical issues, hoping to get clarity ourselves at what is at stake and what bearing the situations have on our lives and how to respond. And also hopefully to invite you into that conversation to offer some help and some light in this time of darkness.
(Endnotes) Evan Rosa:
For the Life of the World is a production of the Yale Center of Faith & Culture at Yale Divinity school. This episode features the theologian Miroslav Volf, founder of the Yale Center of Faith & Culture. You can follow him on Twitter: @miroslavvolf . For more information, visit us online at Faith.Yale.edu, and subscribe to the show wherever you listen to podcasts. We hope these conversations serve to spark much more with you and your community, so share it with a friend or two and let us know what you think. Thanks for listening; we’ll be back next week.
