Some Basic Thoughts on Basic Stuff

Right here you can read what is, in my opinion, quite possibly the wisest and most prudent* overall assessment of our coronaviral predicament and prospects I've run across so far. Far better than anything I could have managed, in any case. And I'm a pretty regular fellow-traveler of both Rod Dreher and his various sources/correspondents, on just about any topic they choose to wrestle with. In brief, I've read rather on a lot on this subject from both him and his readers, including those rare moments when they've seemed to be either over- or under-reacting to it (though, for the record, let me be the last to accuse Mr Dreher of under-reacting to anything, much less COVID-19). So this one article especially seems to me, more than anything else I've yet read, to get the whole issue about just right.

* Prudent - now there's a word that seems quaint enough in this boldly-confident (1995-?) Age.

But what I like in particular about this quite recent post is the way it seems to address both certain natural - including the merely human - and supernatural ramifications of the current crisis. The former are tackled in Mr Dreher's usual rather dead-on, direct fashion, the latter somewhat more obliquely. In fact, I find their treatment - both his and his readers' - of the epidemic's supernatural "side" a mite too oblique and indirect for my tastes. I was especially disappointed (and here I'm open to correction, since I may well have read it too quickly) at what I found to be their general avoidance of a certain very familiar p-word.

The way I figure it is this: God created all beings. And therefore He quite simply knows all these things, and everything about them - backwards and forwards, inside and out - as no one and nothing else can.* Think what a comfort it is, then, that the only Way we humans can be ushered into the Real Presence of any creature, including ourselves - and thereby safeguarded against our own mere ideas, abstractions and reductions, pigeonholes and stereotypes of these creatures - is:
         
        1) through prayer;
        2) through that apart from which any prayer is dead or delusional, the grace and love of God.

Think, too, what a blessing it is that the latter should include both His love of us, and our love of Him, and each other.  So that even we presumptuous humans can literally, prayerfully love our way into, not a perfect or comprehensive knowledge - but surely the "one thing necessary" to such knowledge? - of any creature, any situation, any problem.

* Think of it! Nothing else: not even the prodigious talents of Man Almighty, as expounded by our - at least until quite recently? - all-sufficient Global Business, in concert with that Master-Civilization of them all which has its center in, and emanates from, Beijing (and of which Washington has been at best a partly-owned subsidiary).

And so naturally, even in non-routine, highly unexpected times like these, we mere humans rightly continue to do our best to seek out the appropriate precautions, and to respect and defer to the appropriate expertise. And (one can only hope) in ways that are free as possible from political bitterness and ideological preconception. But even here, what a comfort and a joy it is to know that the Ultimate Precaution is prayer, and that the One to whom our prayer is directed is also the Ultimate Expert.

(Edited.)