Covid Boats

Since Covid hit a year ago lots of folks have observed that while we’re all in the same sea, we’re not in the same boat. The church I’m serving these days had a Zoom gathering over the weekend focused on the self care challenges presented by the pandemic.

It was fascinating to hear the vast array of responses to the basic “how are you doing” question. As one introverted person noted, “I’ve discovered that I could be quite happy as a hermit.” An extrovert, on the other hand, spoke of how deeply they missed random conversations with complete strangers at the grocery store.

Working families with school-age kids at home are experiencing these days completely differently than retirees or older workers whose children are grown. People in overall good health tend to feel less anxious than those whose health is compromised. Adults with aging parents have their own set of concerns.

Add on layers of economic concerns, job losses, career interruptions, graduating into a pandemic economy, and so on, and it is clear that our sea craft ranges from inner tubes to cruise ships. We see the overall picture of the pandemic from the point of view of the boat we’re getting by in.

Even though we only have the perspective shaped by our own experience, personality, and situation, we are still all seeing the water roll by. That amazes me. Other than the rise and setting of the sun and the moon, I’m hard pressed to think of any experience that is truly universal. 

It may be true that a billion people watched the Super Bowl over the weekend. It’s undoubtedly true that more than 6 billion people did not. 

But everybody everywhere around the world is experiencing Covid, even if it’s only the awareness that a few isolated locales or extraordinarily effectively organized have of how fortunate they are not to have major outbreaks of the disease. Whatever the current global population is, that’s the number of folks tuned in to Covid for at least some parts of the pandemic.

I don’t think any event in my lifetime comes close, but I wonder if that will remain true. Will future generations deal with such outbreaks from time to time and come to think about it like I think of major snowstorms. I’ve lived through a few. Will we all look back at Covid and say, “ah, yes, I remember my first pandemic” the way folks talk about “the great blizzard of ‘78”?

I’ve been part of lots of discussions about what we want to carry forward from this time. The great deficiency in all of those discussions rests on the great unknowns. We don’t know what the future will look like. What sea will we be sailing on? What boat will suffice? Are we riding out another pandemic or is it just a minor ice storm?

I’ve noticed that our church staff spends a lot more time checking in at the beginning of our daily Zoom meetings than we used to spend at the beginning of our weekly staff meetings. The fact that, almost a year in, we continue to check in daily speaks volumes about the need to connect, to try to bear one another’s burdens and bind one another up, to see each other if only on a computer screen and reassure each other that the waves are not as powerful as our compassion, nor as deep as our faith.

In truth, we don’t know what tomorrow will look like, or even this evening. Which is to acknowledge that not only are we all in different boats, but also we’re not necessarily in the same one we began in or, maybe, not even in the same one we went to bed in last night.

That is to say, our individual responses to the day-to-day realities of living through the pandemic vary wildly. It’s not only the case that my neighbor’s experience is hugely different from mine because he works in a grocery store and I serve a church, but my own experience in February is not what it was in September. In fact, my own experience yesterday is not the one I’m feeling today.

Some days the waves of grief or anxiety rise over the gunwales of our little boat, and it feels like I’m going to be swept away in a torrent I cannot hope to control. Other days, it’s calm and pleasant and cozy in this craft. 

The thing is, as privileged as my beloved and I are with good jobs that are almost entirely on line now, as safe as we may be in our snug small house, we’re still not in the same boat all the time. That potential hermit from the second paragraph above? She’s married to that extravert who misses trips to the grocery store. 

The only way we make it through this whole is to embody the wisdom in the old folk song, somos el barco, somos el mar – we are the boat, we are the sea. If we become the boat that carries us together, perhaps there will be something worth holding on to for the long term on the far side of this ocean.