*The following is an abridged version of a paper I will present at the ABC-USA Theologians’ Commission in San Juan, Puerto Rico on June 22, 2023.
Of the COVID-19 pandemic perhaps no item is more emblematic than the now world-famous face covering. In 2019, an estimated 12.5 billion face coverings were sold across the globe; in 2020, the number was 379 billion; in 2021, a staggering 402 billion. Google search analytics show that use of the phrase “face covering” on internet web pages increased by 2983% during the period of the pandemic. Even without sales figures and data analytics, however, anyone who set foot in a grocery store, doctor’s office, or classroom over the past three years has witnessed the silent tyranny of the face covering. While medical reasons for encouraging such coverings are plain, the question is still worth asking: what effect might it have on human beings to force them to hide their faces for so long?
One figure qualified to answer this question is Lithuanian-born French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas privileges ethics as the ‘first philosophy’ from which all others derive; and the foundation of ethics for Levinas happens to be: the face. The face is “the situation of discourse,” he writes; it “renders possible and begins all [human] discourse.” “The face... stands for and evokes “the extreme precariousness of the other.” “[The] face facing me... summons me, demands me, requires me: as if the invisible death faced by... the other... were ‘my business.’”
If the face is the site of vulnerability, subjectivity, and agency, then concealing ‘the face’ eliminates the grounds of ethical responsibility. To force human beings to hide their faces is thus to depersonalize human agents into masked objects, and subjects, of violence and control. Not only this but the relentless covering of the face has left human beings bereft of the vulnerability necessary for nurture and love.
As pastors, then, how can we minister in our post-viral moment in a way that responds to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic? Drawing from the insights of Agrarianism and Ecofeminism, and attending closely to our post-pandemic moment, Holy Presence for pastors means particularization.
Agrarianism is neither a movement, nor an idea, but a “set of understandings, commitments, and practices” which seeks the health of land and people together. Perhaps the most fundamental problem as agrarians see it is what Norman Wirzba calls “a refusal of creatureliness.” When human (cf., humus) beings began to dissociate their life and health from that of creation, this began an inexorable spiral toward domination and control. When the land is no longer viewed as the wellspring of life, whose health and fertility is ours to steward, human beings attempt to rise above the land, commodifying it for their own economic gain. Such treatment results from the reduction of distinct ecological neighborhoods into monolithic categories like “nature” or “the environment.” The despoliation of creation, then, is fueled, one could say, by the departicularization of place.
If a refusal of creatureliness and the commodification of land is the problem for agrarians, what do they put forth as a solution? The following statement provided by Wirzba, may be the most apt: “This world is not reducible to a stockpile of... resources or an endless supply of commodities... Things are finally gifts... because they grow out of a world that human beings did not make.” The fact that anything exists is evidence that God wanted it to be so. Viewing creation as a gift, the existence of which is deemed good by God the creator, leads creatures to cherish and honor such gifts as sacred and worthy of care.
Rather than reducing unique ‘things’ into “raw material” or “natural resources,” agrarians practice attunement to the particularity of their creaturely neighbors. This entails seeing things as they are, not as an economic system wants them to be, and entering into patient, enduring relations of creature-specific nurture and love.
The second discourse to consider is that of ecofeminism. Ecofeminism is a term some use to describe “the range of women’s efforts to save the Earth and the transformations of feminism... that have resulted from [a] new view of women and nature.” Rosemary Radford Ruether, a key theological witness in ecofeminist discourse, defines ecofeminism as the “interconnection between the domination of women and the domination of nature.” According to ecofeminists, “the marginalization and abuse of the earth is intrinsically connected to the marginalization and abuse of women.”
The fundamental problem according to most ecofeminists is the division between “the self and the other,” a mentality which alienates (from the self) what or whomever is perceived as “other.” It is this division which makes us perceive women and nature as “other,” leading far too often to a demonization of both. Related to this is what Ruether identifies as the “primal sin” of human civilization: “the effort to escape from mortality, finitude and vulnerability.” The move to dissociate “self” from “other” and the effort to escape our mortality, has led to an endless process of seeking power at the expense of other human beings and the earth.
If the dissociation of “self” from “other” and the refusal of creatureliness stand as core problems identified by ecofeminists, what solutions do they propose? Ruether, for one, suggests that “converting our minds to the earth cannot happen without converting our minds to each other.” Any society-wide solution, then, must begin with an epistemic transformation. Vandana Shiva similarly suggests that, “Life on earth can be preserved only if people... begin to perceive all life forms as sacred and respect them as such.” The marginalization of women, then, just like that of the land, can only be remedied by acknowledging the sanctity and subjectivity of women and committing to the work of healing justice in particular contexts.
Given our post-viral moment, when people of all backgrounds have experienced depersonalization and control, what might pastors do to bring healing to such wounded persons? How, in other words, can pastors minister in this post-pandemic moment in a way that responds to the manifold effects of COVID-19?
Eugene Peterson, in the preface to The Contemplative Pastor, writes: “I enjoy reading the poet-farmer Wendell Berry. He takes a small piece of land in Kentucky... respects it, cares for it, submits himself to it... as an artist submits himself to his materials. I read Berry, and every time he speaks of farm and land, I insert parish [or church].”
The theme of particularity recurs throughout Peterson’s work. As a pastor, he says, “I am responsible for paying attention to the word of God right here in this locale.” Speaking of another (similarly concerned) pastor he writes: “We need more pastors like him... pastors who want to be local, to take seriously a place...” Particularity resists the imposition of a pastor’s will upon the parishioner and instead enters “into sensitive responsiveness to the will of the other.” It entails taking people seriously “where they are in the ordinary and the everyday,” “staying close to the ground, to what is happening with all its down-to-earthness.”
Peterson is not the only exponent of such a vision. M. Craig Barnes, in his book, The Pastor as Minor Poet, encourages a similar mode of pastoral attention: “[The pastor] knows these people. He or she knows their unique struggles, confusions, or yearnings... They have invited the pastor into enough of the mystery of their lives, that it is now possible for him or her to see beyond the constructed identities of smiling faces and freshly pressed dresses that fill the church’s photo directories.” Pastors today, notes Barnes, “are [often] better at knowing the deep passions and pathos of dead people than the ones we have vowed to serve.” “Few new pastors,” in other words, “have been trained in the exegesis of a local culture, a particular congregation, or the human soul.”
In response to the commodification of pandemic-era human beings, what is needed then is “a felt, sympathetic, and practical connection with the liveliness of a place, a connection intimate enough that one becomes attuned to its vitality and possibilities but also its fragility and limits.” Pastors, in other words, in our unique, post-viral moment, can mediate the Holy Presence of God by exercising particularized, context-specific care and love.
“So much hangs,” Peterson writes, “on our taking each soul with a terrible and holy seriousness.” Treating human persons with particularity and dignity is at the heart of what pastoral ministry is all about. “Who else is there in the neighborhood [who] deals with the wounded, the crippled [sic], the children, the lower achievers, the majority of... people? The pastor, that’s who; treating them, not as the world treats them... but with the dignity of souls baptized.”
Treating human persons not as depersonalized objects, raw materials, or commodities, is the countercultural task of the pastor, especially right now. Pastors in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, facing congregations shorn of particularity, dignity, and value, thus, have a vital choice to make. We can either continue to treat parishioners as a uniform mass of depersonalized “human resources,” or we can attend with Holy Presence to each unique, sacred soul we know. It’s up to us.
In this post-pandemic moment then, let us resist the logic of depersonalization and bring healing to our wounded congregations by staying put and being particularly present.
Jonah Bissell
Pastor