I’ve spent this week reflecting on three things—Sabbath, capitalism, and COVID-19 (or at least this pandemic’s social impacts in my corner of the US)—and I figure I can wrap up by saying a bit about how I’m understanding each of these things at this point.
Maybe I should have started there, but I’m really trying more to display a thought process in motion, rather than present a perfectly well-ordered argument. Let me know how it’s gone, if you’d like.
Sabbath
Sabbath is a practice that sets aside a time as holy, as a time in which we can be reoriented toward God. In Sabbath time, we can get in touch with what God created and its goodness, including ourselves and the beauty with which God blesses each of us. It’s a time when we can compare what God created to what human hands have wrought in this world. And it’s a time when we can gather our strength, that we might use our human hands to struggle against the distortion creation driven by greed and insecurity.
Capitalism
Capitalism is the network of consumption and exploitation that facilitates the ongoing devastation of all creation and the degradation of human and nonhuman life. Capitalism is a corrosive force in communities. Capitalism undermines communities’ capacity to offer care to the vulnerable and connection to the many beautiful people who make up those communities. Capitalism is a corrupting influence on the basic moral fabric of individuals. It erodes our integrity, twists our desires, captures our sense of gratitude, and leaves us feeling helpless to do anything other than serve the desire for profit of the most wealthy, in hopes that we’ll somehow outpace the growing pit of poverty into which more and more people are being shoved.
COVID-19
COVID-19 is a deadly disease, endangering the lives of almost every human on the planet. But as we witness the inability of corporate and political agents to prioritize lives over profits and investment returns, COVID-19 is rapidly becoming an existential threat to capitalism.
These weeks of terror and desperation are revealing the complete inability of this economic system to provide for communities’ basic needs without compelling “essential workers” to endanger themselves for demeaning wages, with little promise they’ll be properly cared for should they fall ill. This time is raising the possibility that we should be cared for whether or not we can work, and that this might not only be true in global emergencies. This Sabbath time is making clearer than ever the extent to which those with political power are beholden to capitalism and are willing to sacrifice the lives of millions that the institutions which represent the power of the wealthy might emerge unscathed.
Final Exhortation
Whoever’s reading this, there are people you could contact right now who are already working to build a better way to be together, to be able to care for one another, to be able to live and work with dignity and pride that haven’t been hijacked by the manipulation of the obscenely wealthy. If you know who they are, get in touch with them. If you don’t know who they are, ask your angry friends.
If you don’t have any angry friends, then who are you hanging around?
The world, and nearly every human and nonhuman creature on it, is crying out. You should be hanging out with people who can feel that in their bones.
Peace.