Ego. That’s the only word I have for it, for the so-called religious leaders that are gathering their congregations against the advice of medical professionals and the orders of governmental leaders doing their best to contain COVID-19. Ego, the word for those setting up the false choice of “faith over fear.”

To those people I say, your belief in a greater power does not immunize you from the consequences—to yourself and the people you lead—of your reckless behavior. Faith does not endow you with superpowers. Faith is not a shield from the frailties of being human. Faith is not magic.

I’m a practicing Catholic, although I struggle with my faith. If I were to be offered the protection of a personal patron saint, I would choose St. Thomas. Doubting Thomas, whom, I’ve always felt, gets a bad rap. The other apostles are present when Christ, risen from the dead, appears in the locked room. They don’t need faith. Poor Thomas, because he understandably demands proof, is chastised for not having faith. But it is Thomas who reminds us that one of God’s gifts is common sense. It is Thomas who warns us to doubt the charlatans that plague every generation. Thomas demonstrates for us the importance of questioning, and it is questioning that leads to understanding.

So I admit to not really knowing what faith is. The definition I think of most often is that faith is belief in that which can’t be seen. But how do we choose which of what can’t be seen we should believe in? Because lots of things masquerade as faith: indoctrination, superstition, wishful thinking, fear.

The definition I hold on to is from a line in a television show from the late 1990s that the Catholic Church—well, maybe not the whole Church but someone within it—disapproved of. It is about an urban priest who, living in the messy real world, bends the rules a bit. A young religious sister brings her questions about faith to an older, and one assumes wiser, sister. The older sister says. “Faith is going forward one step at a time as if it were true.” And that’s the best I can do.

But back to these people who seem to think they have a direct line to God and therefore will be protected from COVID-19. I’ve got news for you: You’re not that special. Does God protect us? If so, why is there pain in the world? It’s a question as old as belief itself. If theologians throughout time haven’t be able to figure it out, who am I to try? In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times, Fr. James Martin, a Jesuit priest and editor-at-large of America Magazine said: “In the end, the most honest answer to the question of why the Covid-19 virus is killing thousands of people, why infectious diseases ravage humanity and why there is suffering at all is: We don’t know. For me, this is the most honest and accurate answer.”

So no, you’re not going to find the answers to the mysteries of the Almighty here. But I do have a personal opinion about how God protects us:

• God protects us by giving us the good sense to know we need to listen to the medical professionals guiding us.
• God protects us by bestowing upon medical professionals the gifts that allow them to treat us.
• God protects us by instilling in the 40,000 retired doctors and nurses who answered Governor Cuomo’s call a sense of commitment and responsibility that has them putting themselves at risk to help others.
• God protects us by giving pharmacists the skills to provide medication that prolongs our lives and grocery-store owners the ability to manage a supply chain under duress because of public demand.
• God protects us by giving to those people who are delivering our medications and groceries the courage to venture out into a scary world so that more of us don’t have to.

St. Teresa of Ávila said, “Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world.”

God protects us by giving us all whatever gifts we have to support one another. Those who, in the name of faith, are defying the medical professionals and governmental authorities working so hard to manage this crisis are dismissing the value of God’s gifts.

I may not know exactly what faith is, but I do know what it is not: Faith is not magic. Treating it as such is dangerous.

©Elaine L. Ricci 2020

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