Lenten Reflection Series – COVID-19 As a Global Lenten Practice

Loss vs Sacrifice

Video games, at their best, are artistically and narratively compelling blockbusters. Often allowing players to be transported into new kinds of realities, perspectives, and mythos that can speak to our human condition. Not many video games masterfully do this well, but there are gems and dialogues that can capture someone’s attention and imagination.

In the last decade or so, YouTube started seeing an increase of videos where people would upload all a video game’s cutscenes and a few gameplays to seamlessly create a movie-like experience. This is great for people like me who want to experience a compelling story without actually playing the game (and at 2 times the speed at that!).

Tomb Raider’s 2013 reboot of a young Lara Croft was one of those games for me. The story begins with Lara, our protagonist, going through an emotional growth arc throughout the game, beginning with a scared young woman washed ashore on a dangerous jungle island to a kick-ass heroine who is prepared to do what is necessary to survive at the end of the story. It is in this kind of media-the circumstance that the protagonist finds herself plays a big role too-that we sometimes get some food for thought on the human condition during an exchange of two characters:

“Sacrifice is a choice you make. Loss is a choice made for you.”

America and COVID-19

On March 1, 2022, during his State of the Union, President Biden announced the good news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a new masking guideline for all Americans- most Americans are now free to not wear masks. He then goes on in his speech to acknowledge what COVID-19 is and has done and what he hopes the future of America would look like.

“We have lost so much to COVID-19. Time with one another. And worst of all, so much loss of life. Let’s use this moment to reset. Let’s stop looking at COVID-19 as a partisan dividing line and see it for what it is: A God-awful disease. Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we really are: Fellow Americans. We can’t change how divided we’ve been. But we can change how we move forward—on COVID-19 and other issues we must face together. ”

Like Biden, many politicians in the past couple of months have spoken to this idea of moving past COVID-19 and looking forward to the future where we recognize COVID-19 as an “endemic”.

Lent

Lent is a forty-day season of reflection and preparation for the death of Jesus. It is a time of repentance and meditation, of considering Christ’s suffering and rethinking how we are called to take up our own crosses. Some of us give up things like chocolate or television during this season as a sort of fasting. As a result, we are left to rethink how we live and how we want to live. However, Lent is not necessarily a New Year’s resolution for Christians. Yes, we sacrifice and give up certain pleasures and bad habits, not because of self-improvement or righteous piety, but to reorient our lives towards the cross.

Additionally, Lent is not simply about mirroring Jesus’ fasting in the desert for forty-days and the temptations he had by Satan. Lent is a season where we hear, respond, and arrange our lives to Jesus’ call and the cross. It is a season of giving over our lives to Christ in union with his pending death. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it best, “when Christ calls a man, He bids him to come and die”.

Loss, Sacrifice, COVID-19, and Lent

Dr. Ajita Robinson, a licensed clinical counselor with expertise in grief and trauma defines loss as two categories: “physical loss” and “symbolic loss”. “Physical loss” are things that can be easily named that involve something tangible or something that can be seen. A physical loss can be a death of a loved one or a house due to fire or eviction. “Symbolic loss” on the other hand are things that we can’t see or are intrinsically intangible. A symbolic loss can be losing a sense of control or identity. However, Dr. Robinson states, “we don’t even see them as losses”. She further explains that “the challenging part of the symbolic loss is that we don’t have rituals or built-in support systems for them. So oftentimes they can accumulate when we don’t have the language to name them. This accumulation can trigger the same grief response as a physical loss”.

What does, loss, sacrifice, COVID-19, and Lent have to do with one another? True, the sacrifices that we do as Lenten practices aren’t the same as the kind of physical loss found through the pandemic. However, what this reflection series is getting at (and what I’m hoping that I’m correctly arguing for) is that we gave up on the symbolic losses that were dealt to us by the pandemic.

Whether it was for the sake of politics, mental well-being, technology, routine, etc., like a poker player, we made a calculated choice to sacrifice certain card(s) that the dealer handed to us.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers, nor do I know what we can do from here. It’s simply my reflections and my experience in looking at the past two years. However, maybe looking at COVID-19 as a Lenten experience can allow us to find the necessary language needed during this Lenten season and to live in this new “post-COVID” world.