Let’s have hope for the future

The microscope the author saved her allowance for when she was 10.

Lynn Werner

As we battle COVID-19, we have many pandemics that sweep through humanity that we do not name. Not all diseases are caused by viruses or bacteria. The causes of these pandemics cannot be found even under the most high-powered microscope.

When I first learned words like “universe” and “galaxy” as a young girl, I lost myself in imaginings of the vastness of space. I began to wonder about just where humans fit into such vastness. At the same time, I learned about the microscopic world. I saved all of my allowance money to buy a microscope when I was around 10. I remember the transforming moment when I saw my first amoeba moving about in a drop of water I took from an old tin bucket that gathered green slimy stuff next to our porch in Georgia.

I was mesmerized watching the amoeba moving about with its undefined “arms” and its utter disinterest in human stuff. My parents were sure they had a budding Madame Curie. I overheard my parents innocently tell my visiting grandma, “Lynnie doesn’t like boys yet. She is more interested in what she finds in her microscope.”

I did get interested in boys. And the spontaneous love of exploration, unfortunately, grew self-conscious. I began to define my life by outer expectations. Though I discovered poetry and theater and literature and injustices, what had been my desire to “find a cure for cancer” spread out into the newly infinite ways I was defined and began to define myself. I grew into my adolescence discovering an awful truth. We are not as free as we think.

I have taken 40 days of silence twice in my life. Those were voluntary periods in which I had no communication at all with the outside world. One of those periods was when I was already at a hermitage in Kentucky. The second was here on my piece of land just outside of Galena. I have written of those periods in the past in this column.

I was prepared for both. I had planned my food, pulled out some spiritual texts to read, made arrangements to get no phone calls and no mail. I did not listen to the radio or log in to my computer. The first was arranged around the rotation of the psalms chanted by Trappist monks at the nearby Abbey of Gethsemane; the second structured around prayer cycles of my own tradition.

In both, I felt my human boundaries dissolve. In the first, that moment happened when I stood in a cornfield on the 40th day; in the second, it was in a patch of milkweed. I had the joy of knowing that every single cell in my human self was an extension of what was vast beyond imagining and what was small beyond perception.

COVID-19 isolation is not the same as my 40 days of silence. I have social media. I have followed the daily updates and analyses of this pandemic with almost obsessive attention. I have a heart-shattering personal sorrow that captures me as my mind chews and chews away at it, trying to make sense when there is no “sense” to be found.

Boundaries can be erased not only in the silence. They can be dissolved through suffering. This shattering of what we considered material “truths” can lead us to a more just world.

We know that in 2021, we will be living in a world we cannot yet imagine, even as some imagine returning to the familiar. Some of us have the luxury of time to imagine a world that is not motivated by greed.

Until we are ready to truly dissolve the boundaries of privilege, power, pride and human violence–until we are ready to challenge economic systems which exploit the many for the sake of the few–until we are ready to unite for the common good, the most dangerous pandemics will be of the human sort.

We will one day find a vaccine for COVID-19. May we also find the cure for our human pandemics as we dissolve our self-imposed boundaries with our capacity to create and to love. I still have hope that we will.