Early in the morning on July 18, I got a phone call letting me know that Angela Smith had died a few hours earlier. (Her name is Angelia Johnson, but she pronounced her name “Angela” and regularly gave the last name Smith, the married name from her estranged husband—often claiming when she did that Will Smith, the actor, was her son.) At this shocking phone call, I threw on my clericals (priest outfit), left the house, and pulled into the hospital parking lot around 2:30am. Lane, who had called me, was in the parking lot standing by his truck with his fiancé Debra Lynn, Angela's long-separated husband Larry, and Angela’s daughter Precious. I hadn't even known that Angela was sick. Apparently, she had been in the hospital for less than a week. It hadn't occurred to me until I was actually driving to the hospital that the staff probably wouldn't let me back into the ER to offer Angela's body the ministry of the Church. I asked anyway. The receptionist was nice about it and made a phone call to double check. The security guard smiled. I think she was glad that I at least showed up. But I was told that, unfortunately, because of the virus I couldn't see my friend.
Over the last five years, Angela and I spent a lot of time together. She would come to the Church several days a week to join me and my kids for Morning Prayer, stick around for a cup of coffee, and often hang out around the Church for much of the day. On Saturdays, she came to my house to say Morning Prayer with me and then eat breakfast with my family. It was a bit of a surprise to me several years ago when I realized that this fifty-year-old black woman with a mild intellectual disability had become the best friend I had made since moving to Franklin. I am deeply saddened by the death of my friend. But more than a friend, she was my Sister by the grace of Jesus Christ. Even more, she was a daughter to me in the LORD--she even asked me one day if I would be her spiritual father. I'm so glad that I was able to take part in her funeral the next weekend after her death, and meeting her family was an absolute joy. But I'm still sorry I wasn't able to pray over her at the time of her death. Instead, I was back at the Church by myself at three in the morning saying the customary prayers. I could hardly get through them.
The last several months have been a strange mix of COVID-19 statistics and zoomed-in stories about people’s individual struggle with the coronavirus. Both are helpful in their own way. Both carry the risk of confusing or misleading us in other ways. One family’s vignette, where we hear about a young family man in his 30s who goes to bed with COVID but doesn’t wake up, is disturbing. It confronts you with the reality that these are real people suffering tremendous loss. A story like this, though, might also make readers more anxious than they ought to be. After all, the likelihood of it is very small. The death rate for people under 70, especially those who don’t have other risk factors, is tiny. At the same time, who cares about rates and percentages when it’s your family that is bereaved? My friend Angela had just turned 52 a couple of weeks before she died.
I read from one author early in the pandemic, who made two points that have stuck with me. Rusty Reno, the editor of the magazine First Things, observes that triage is “a sign of finitude, not moral failure.” Triage is familiar to us from our trips to the emergency room, where a nurse assesses people as they come in, deciding which cases are most urgent and which can wait. (Before the word was common to ERs, it described what soldiers did on battlefields when they evaluated the wounded.) Reno implies that this also happens outside of ERs and warzones, and for him this is simply a matter of being limited, finite human beings, who can only do so much. We only have so many resources. We only have so much energy, so much time. This means making difficult decisions, and hopefully our leaders can make those decisions with wisdom. Making those decisions is a matter of reckoning with our limitations, of being responsible, and of being human.
Triage is an undertaking where statistics are especially helpful. The death rate is essential for knowing how dangerous this virus really is, so that we can weigh it against other threats. The infection rate (and relatedly, the positivity rate) is essential for knowing how different practices either increase or decrease people’s risk of catching the virus. But then we also have to pay attention to economic realities, rates of unemployment, rates of depression, and crime rates, especially spikes in domestic violence. All of that is involved in the effort to make wise decisions about the different risks and dangers facing us. Our leaders may not make the best decisions. That can happen with nurses as well, especially if someone comes in with a problem that is much more dire than it first appears. So I would add that bearing with the people who are charged with the very difficult task of making these decisions is also part of living with the limitations of our frail humanity.
But there’s a danger related to the difficult challenge of triage, which is connected to another point made by Reno. Reflecting on the nature of death, he suggests that human beings should wrestle away from death “what we can of our humanity, which is made for more than death.” This observation points to something that, to my mind, is extremely helpful if we want to wisely evaluate risk. Death threatens to rob us of our humanity. That can happen in at least two ways. One, we can be so terrified of death that we sacrifice too much in order to evade it. Two, we can become callous and accept death too easily, care too little when life is lost, and whitewash the reality of death with a thin coat of statistics.
Part of what has been so powerful about Christianity, especially in its early days, is that the world beheld in the Christian an intact human being. God took our broken nature upon himself in order to heal and restore our humanity. Jesus is at work in the Church through the power of his Spirit and the life-giving Sacraments to raise up what's fallen. Real live human beings are the result. This was especially clear to the world in the martyrs, who died for being Christians. Laurence, a deacon in Rome in 258, was ordered to hand over the Church’s treasure to the governor, and he went and rounded up the poor, the sick, and other outcasts: “These are the treasures of the Church.” Perpetua was a young mother from a good family in her early 20s when she died in the ancient Mediterranean city of Carthage on the north coast of Africa. Despite the tormented pleas of her father and the cries of her nursing child, she refused to lie and say she wasn’t a Christian. Blandina was a slave woman in Lyons, France, when she was martyred in 177. After extensive torture, she never buckled: “I am a Christian, and nothing vile is done among us.” Agnes died in Rome in 304 when even in the face of torture she refused to take part in non-Christian worship. She was twelve years old. In the martyrs it is especially clear that Jesus has wrought in these people a humanity that is so sturdy, so unwaveringly human, that the world can’t take it from them even when it tries its hardest.
Nothing nearly so costly is being asked of us today, thanks be to God. But part of the point is that we hold onto our humanity regardless of our circumstances. For those of us who are Christians, who know how much Jesus loves us, we hold onto our renewed humanity as a cherished gift from our Lord—a gift that no one can prevent him from imparting, if only we’re willing to receive it. In our circumstances today, the sacrifices asked of us are mostly small. Putting a mask on does not mean you’re being inhuman. Letting someone die alone in a hospital room is a different story. (I would add that refusing to allow a priest to minister to the body of a person who has died imperils our humanity, but it wouldn’t surprise me if others disagreed.) On the other hand, casually dismissing the deaths of the elderly is another way of losing hold of our humanity.
The task of triage is very difficult and will often be painful. My hope is that we can learn to make wise decisions without losing either our nerve or our conscience. Both are essential parts of the glorious creatures Jesus is making us to be.
Please pray for Angela, that she might rest in peace and rise in glory.
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