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It sounded too good to be true, this Easter Season piece by Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal. Ms. Noonan says that positive social attitudes actually build up during times of imposed isolation.  And when it’s over, she says, you are ready to embrace the world!  She quotes Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, and author of “The Righteous Mind:”

“Hardship generally makes people stronger. Fear, challenge, threat — tend to produce growth, not damage.  We are also reminding ourselves of what we hold high— the selflessness of doctors and nurses, for instance, and how they keep doing their jobs because it’s a calling. This tells us what bravery looks like, and also what a vocation is, and how a vocation is a spiritual event.” 

This is so good, I thought. Imagine coming out of the viral season with a fresh understanding of vocation as a calling!  What could be more beneficial than that?

Then our Dr. Haidt talks about community.  He says social distancing actually creates an appetite for the opposite:

“The crisis has helped us discover the importance of the human face. The explosion of Zoom, FaceTime and Google Hangout-Meetings tells us people crave more than just the voice.  The key insight we’re getting is that video communication is surprisingly satisfying.”

Wonderful!  It brings back that lovely old song: “The first time ever I saw your face I thought the sun rose in your eyes.” 

Not only that, but our Dr. Haidt says something is going on that will leave us less polarised!  Talk about the impossible dream!  What, in this age of dug-in, hardline, shout-it-out non-negotiables? To think that we might emerge with less “us and them?”  Haidt says these viral days will force us off this futile trajectory:  “It’s the end of polarisation, not the end of the world… a shift from ‘me’ to ‘we’… where we more deeply cultivate the virtues we need as a democracy …  the virtues of humility and mercy.” 

Then, something even greater! Dr. Haidt says we will be less judgmental when the virus finally lifts: “We are so quick to judge. We need to be easier on each other.  We can easily tune down the judgment by eighty or ninety per cent” (“Holy Week Amid a National Tribulation,” Apr9/20).  

Needless to say, I was pretty buoyed up by all of this.  All these tedious days and levels of  isolation —  between Noonan and Haidt, it was like these Corona times could be a season of spiritual growth! 

It all seemed too good to be true.  But then I recalled that social isolation has long been prescribed as a stepping stone toward God.  Could this be like the “desert spirituality” of a Henry Nouwen or a Thomas Merton? Why not see these days of social isolation as a slice of desert spirituality?  Imagine experiencing something like what Lawrence of Arabia describes in his “Seven Pillars of Wisdom!” —

“Those who went into the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being.”

Nobel laureate, Nico Kazantzakis describes the spiritual strengths of the desert thus:

“The mind topples here not from fright but from sacred awe; sometimes it collapses downward, losing human stability, sometimes it springs upward, enters heaven, sees God face to face, touches the hem of His blazing garment without being burned, hears what He says, and taking this, slings it into men’s consciousness. Only in the desert do we see the birth of these fierce, indomitable souls who rise up fearlessly, their minds in resplendent consubstantiality with the skirts of the Lord. God sees them and is proud, because in them his breath has not vented its force” (Report to Greco).

And next time you think you cannot endure another viral day, imagine this: the early Desert Fathers actually chose to go through extreme social isolation — for the benefits!

“They did not talk, not because they hated conversation, but because they wanted to listen intently to the voice of God in silence; they did not dislike eating, but were feeding on the Word of God so that they did not have room for earthly food or time to bother with it; they did not avoid company because it bored them, but, as one of them said, ‘I cannot be with you and with God.’  It was not a dislike of sleep that made them keep vigil, but an eager and longing attitude of waiting for the coming of Christ” (Benedicta Ward, The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks).

Put more simply, “God takes everyone he loves through a desert. It is his cure for our wandering hearts, restlessly searching for a new Eden” (Paul Miller, A Praying Life).

And then my favourite, a line from Ella Maillart: “I had to live in the desert before I could understand the full value of grass in a green ditch” (Forbidden Journey).