The end of the long Covid19 lockdown appears to be in sight and most of us are making plans for when full freedom of movement is finally restored. It would be a lost opportunity if we were to return to “business as usual” with nothing learnt from these three unique months of our lives. The pandemic has caused for some the greatest of moral and physical sufferings, for others immense workloads and financial reverses, and for all at least significant upset to personal plans. And yet it has also brought blessings with it: the recognition of the importance of time spent with family, delight in simpler forms of entertainment, time for deep study and reflection, the discovery of the feasibility of working from home, etc. Perhaps we should see the providential design of God at work in all this; has not God been teaching us lessons which could never have been learnt outside of such an extraordinary scenario? Briefly our lives have emerged from a frenzy well identified by Josef Pieper:
The more the absolute claim of the merely utilitarian threatens to coat all of existence with a film, the more man needs every once in a while, for the sake of a truly human life, this chance to be able to emerge from the frenzy of sights and sounds (buy this, drink that, eat this, amuse yourself here, demonstrate for or against) that incessantly cries out to him and to step into a space in which silence reigns and thus true listening becomes possible, listening to the reality on which our existence is based and by which it is constantly nourished and renewed (Problems of Modern Faith).
The word frenzy goes back to the Latin phreneticus “delirious”. It is an apt description of the kind of madness manifested in a craving for the incessant stimulation of new products and new experiences. For a while divine providence has done us the great favour of halting our merry-go-round, allowing us to glimpse the possibility of an interior life:
A change! You say you need a change!… opening your eyes wide so as to take in better the images of things, or almost closing them because you are short-sighted. Close them altogether! Have interior life, and you will see, in undreamt-of colour and relief, the wonders of a better world, of a new world: and you will draw close to God …, and know your weakness …, and be deified … with a deification which, by bringing you nearer to your Father, will make you more a brother of your fellow-men (St Josemaria Escriva, The Way, 283).