When COVID-19 Meets Pandemic Hope: Existential Care of,and in,the Impossible

I recently gave a talk and dialogued with persons in China about existential issues related to our pandemic situation with COVID-19. The beads of sweat that formed on my brow were not due to the virus, but due to what it meant to me that 507 people showed up via Zoom for this presentation, while 8,100 people were listening to the live broadcast. Little did I know, though, while I completed this piece in the States, I found out that I tested positive with COVID-19, thus adding an existentiality to these reflections that was as unexpected as the pandemic itself. Although I have traveled often to China to teach and learn with Mark Yang and the International Institute for Existential–Humanistic Psychology in China, and also supervise others there weekly via Zoom, I had not endured what China as a whole was enduring and did not know if I could offer anything of substance that did not come across as imperialistic or as a bouquet of platitudes. But I wanted to respond to this call nonetheless.

Typically, “doc discourse” and its biological and epidemiological explanations were continually leaving out the inseparably intertwined existential concerns of this global situation, and merited one more voice trying to bring the existential concerns to the same level of mattering as the biological ones. I am grateful for the scientists and doctors fighting for life, and, at times, losing their lives, in doing so, but natural science is not wired to address lived meaning—which, I believe, is as, if not more, significant to those living through this situation.

I had originally called the talk “Pandemic Hope for Epidemic Times,” but by the time I was to present, the epidemic had already become pandemic. The heart of the talk was about highlighting existential issues central to encounters with COVID-19 and to propose that hope was and is stronger than what the virus has and can take from us. Hope, in other words, can be as pandemic as the virus, if, as Dumbledore reminded us, we remember to turn on the light. The rub, of course, is how to offer hope without disrespecting abject anguish related to the horror and mourning of the havoc wrecked in the virus’ path.

The existential concerns include the experiences of being unexpectedly visited by a black swan event, without our consent, that is unmitigated, that mocks our ability to get rid of it, and that leaves us feeling impotent and incompetent. We sense its impersonal randomness as well as its personal targeting of us and our loved ones. We are handed the existential guilt of feeling perpetually incomplete in that we can never do enough for enough suffering persons, thus feeling out of control. This experience is perpetuated by the fact that the virus inflicting our being out of control, is itself out of control. No one, or thing, is in charge. We are left vulnerable, insecure, incomplete, bewildered, scared, enraged, worried, disoriented, simply, “little.” We realize what the film based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men (Coen & Coen, 2007), meant by the sentiment that death is coming, and we cannot do anything about it. This is the lived experience of “the impossible.” There are, however, other dimensions of the impossible: the unconditional and the irreducible, and thus, hope.

Hope must live out of these situations, not as a phenomenon in a separate world unfettered by the pain and horror of existence. So I reached to friends to help me offer a response: Kierkegaard, Blanchot, Mother Teresa, Fred Rogers, and others, including China’s own courage and resilience. Hope, as Kierkegaard noted, is a recognition that each moment’s incompleteness signals a sense of something more than what is apparent in any given situation. Hope shifts the figure/ground gestalt. Hope is not far off in the future, but in the next moment, and then the next. Yes, no doubt each moment is a thrown visit to us, and there is nothing we can do about how we find ourselves thrown, but each moment’s constitution also holds an inescapable call to possibility embedded in it, or what the Continental philosophers of religion call, “what might be . . . perhaps.”

The existential givens that we are interconnected, that we cannot control what others chose to do if infected, that we are as much related to our environment as to each other, that our vulnerability and interconnection mean we are infectious and susceptible to infection, all also mean that we are open to being cared for and can care for others, and that we are not alone, even if 6 to 10 feet from each other. The existential reality that we are inherently incomplete and cannot take on everything and everyone, unwittingly discloses that we can and do take on something, someone, somewhere at some time, all the time. When Mother Teresa was asked how she handles the sea of suffering, she said, “one drop at a time.”

Yet, our fear and terror, though, has left more shadow sides of ourselves, breeding another contagious disease for which we do not wear masks to prevent affecting others: the contagion of greed rather than collaboration. Examples include hoarding toilet paper (screaming as a trope or metaphor in so many ways), blatant racism against the Chinese (I know of situations here in Chicago where hand sanitizer has been thrown on Asian Americans, not to mention the unconscionable discourse of our nation’s “leaders”), treating testing kits as commodities, and so forth. I know this is not the flu. I also know this is not Ebola. I know that 2% of deaths is unthinkable if the 2% are those whom you love and know, but it is 2% and not 100%. I have appreciated the anarchy of the clown in responding to this situation, such as John Oliver’s advice to calm down if you think you can get the corona virus by eating Chinese food and prevent it by gargling with bleach. He also advised, on the other hand, not to lick subway poles. And I appreciate the meme that remarked, “The way people are responding to this situation is exactly why we don’t tell them about what is really going on in Area 51.” Laughing at absurdity is a way to fight back, and a way to embrace our fragility; this has always been the anarchic clown’s calling. Listen to them. The laugh is an act of hope.

Here are some of the questions the participants in China were asking me during this talk and our dialogue: Why do Americans look at us so strangely when we wear masks? Why don’t Americans where masks? Why do people hoard toilet paper and leave nothing for others? How do I handle feeling so guilty when I am relatively healthy and others are dying? What could we offer Americans? What am I to do with my career, which I have just begun, as work has shut down and my industry may never recover, it took two years for us to recover from SARS? I will leave these questions open for your own answers.

Here is some suggested advice when offering hope: We may not be impervious or in control of what happens to us, but we are invincible in THAT we can respond (even to give up is a de-cide). Saying, “It’s going to be alright,” is helpful, IF we mean, “No matter what, we are in this together,” instead of, “Look only at the bright side of life.” Stress breaks down immune systems. Worry and obsession turbo charge Cortisol. Cortisol stresses, which breaks down immune systems. Bios and logos (meaning) are inextricably intertwined. While washing your hands, wash your stress too. Stress, though, is existential—soap can’t wash it away; you have to clear a space to give it a hearing. Viktor Frankl reminded us that although human beings invented the gas chambers, they also had the Shema Yisrael on their lips as they walked into those gas chambers. When asked how to talk with children about catastrophes and disasters, Fred Rogers said, “Tell them to look at all the people helping.” Hope does not need a receipt to be itself; whatever the response to our hope, hoping itself opens worlds.

We are in a pandemic situation, but not just virally; our existential condition is pandemically hopeful as hope is an ontological condition, while a virus is not. We are not viral every moment of our lives, but we are hopeful every moment of our lives, even in moments of despair, as we are intentional beings, leaning into an “in order to” and “so that” moment to moment. Meaninglessness and despair are mournful recognitions of immoveable limitations. The pain of mourning, however, discloses that one has hoped, lived, and leaped into prior possibilities, leaving us with the hope of hopeful possibilities to come. Keep in mind that even suicide is a desperate act of hope, an act I prefer we help each other not have to confront, but an attempt at some kind of liberation nonetheless; I am also thinking of the bravery at Masada, where I was this past Fall, and of the 9/11 hand in hand jumpers in the World Trade Towers taking their own deaths in their hands before the towers came down. These are the hardest of things to think about, but they still show the invincibility of hope in the most difficult times of our existence. Our situation need not be as extreme; momentary wonder about what might be mocks the mockery of nihilism.

Now for the unholy and unthinkable: Rather than fighting against COVID-19, what if we hosted this guest? I recall Rumi’s (2004) invitation in The Guest House,

. . . Even if they are a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house . . . still, treat each guest honorably. . . . The dark thought, the shame, the malice . . . meet them at the door laughing and invite them in . . . because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.

Strangely, as Passover approaches and we remember how the blood of the lamb diverted the path of the death angel, I will offer a cup of coffee if it intrudes into my house, and, I assume, it will (as I write, I am symptomatic with something, probably not COVID-19, but I am afraid to go outside and cough lest I be stoned to death). This is where the bio doc and the soul doc work differently. Biologically, we do not invite COVID-19 in our houses, but existentially we fair better if we do. Does hosting stop if guests show up uninvited? Not how I grew upCan the best way to medically and existentially host its remarkable tenacity, its beautiful resiliency, is to let it die with social distancing? Could not hosting also be offering it an assisted virus-cide?

There is an uncanny grace in the nihilism that this pandemic can evoke and invoke: It’s shipwrecking brings us together (remembering Jaspers’ thoughts on boundary situations), it humbles our sense of being “as the gods”—which allows us to “be with” rather than “do to,” it reminds us of our capacities to respond in ways we never knew we could, it helps us clarify what matters and what seems to matter, and it invites us to appreciate life as a gift rather than a taken for granted right. Let us thank those persons and moments of life now, rather than later, lest we bypass the tender mercies we have minimized, whether the home cooked meal, the laugh that brings us perspective, the understanding smile, the warm hand that wipes away tears, or breathing.

I have aging and dys-abled parents, one of them with Pulmonary Arterial Hypertension, and other immune compromised loved ones in my life who are very vulnerable to this guest’s violence. I am frightened for them and for the annihilating grief I would feel if I lost them . . . or . . . what I would lose if it took me. I could be paralyzed by this possibility, or live in different ways. Both pathways make sense. Both responses have their own integrity. I am going to try to sing my hymn of thanks. I am going to laugh and I am going to eat pecan pie. And when I cry I will cry hard, as hard as I will laugh when I laugh. I will hold out my hand to grasp your extended hand. We are existentially closer now than ever before in our “social distancing.” Let us link arms and move through this event of Otherness . . . together.