We are just leaving behind the heroic phase in our tryst with COVID-19. In history, realism follows heroism. And if realism comes (as Shelley would not have said) can cynicism be far behind? Cynicism is a monstrous birth from misaligned realism. We may ‘learn to live with’ either in realistic engagement or in cynical resignation. To learn to live with is to accept and adjust to required changes. As a rule, we rebel and reform in hope. We merely languish in resignation. But there is, still, a spark of hope. To ‘learn’ is to be humble. To learn to live with the virus is, also, to move from hubris to humility. That could help!

Openness to change is the touchstone of humility. Our first and instinctive preference is to change everyone else so that we may not have to change ourselves. It is when hope sets on this possibility that we grudgingly reckon the need to ‘live with’ a changed scenario. What, then, are the focal points of change we need to face, to the extent that we can recognize them today? It is only natural if a crisis as global and seminal as the COVID-19 pandemic is, compels all-round changes.

Before I begin to cite some of them, I need to note a point of irony. It is easier for a virus to bring about sweeping changes – local and global- than it is for God Himself. There is a reason for it. God speaks the language of life. The virus hisses death. God is patient. The virus is relentless and unforgiving. God respects our freedom of choice; the virus revokes it. Given human nature, we listen more readily to a policeman than to a prophet. We stone prophets because they are armed with truth, not lathis. The day a prophet becomes ‘practical’ and comes armed with a lathi, knife or revolver, stones will fall away from our hands. But this new clout has to be purchased at the cost of his prophetic discipline. Force and truth cannot co-exist.

The three corners of the triangle of human existence, wrote Alfred Adler in Understanding Human Nature (1927) are: work, society and love, experienced through relationships. The virus has invaded all of them. In this corona-age, no individual will be able to disinfect or heal his life-world. We have to purchase our survival at the cost of distorting the three Adlerian cornerstones of life. Which means that ‘quarantine’ could stay as a metaphor of the human predicament. This reverses nearly all of the directions of human achievements and collective pride. Like domesticated animals, individuals are being driven back home from a world of infinite space, mobility and unbridled freedom.

But this has its gains too, provided we are open to them. The evaporation of external props forces us to bank on ourselves. (Even in the banking sector, we know how dangerous it has become to bank on banks! But we did not bother to read the symbolism of it). As the Spartans used to say in ancient days, it is a good thing that man’s sense of security based on external means shatters. It will liberate him from dependence on the world and its illusions. Once the cobwebs of illusion break, individuals will have to dig into themselves and, in the process, may be, as Jesus said, stumble upon many a hidden treasure! We had become almost alien to our inner life, being seduced away to the ‘far country’ of a Saturnalia of pleasures. Now, like the ‘lost son’ in the parable, we have to make the return journey, and come home to home to ourselves.

Secondly the theoretically ‘monogamous’ family now stands a good chance of indeed becoming what has all along pretended to be. Monogamy, coupled with gender-inequality, left men footloose and fancy free in the wider and wilder world; whereas women, barring elite exceptions, were kept home-bound and jealously-guarded. This generated a world a hypocrisy. An invisible enemy has invaded this secretive world and created, as a by-product, an unprecedented scope for genuine monogamy. It is instructive to recall the instance of Jesus’ refusing to condemn the woman ‘taken in adultery’ (Jn:8). In that episode the load of the irony falls on the word ‘taken’ in its double sense. (They ‘took’ her behind scenes for themselves in secret adultery, and then ‘took’ her, on behalf of religion, as a sinner who merits death.) Social scientists argue that adultery is an adjunct to monogamy vitiated by male hypocrisy. The partner-in-adultery provides to the man-of-entitlement what the ‘faithful’ wife, who is trapped in the net of inheritance and succession to authentic successors, fail to supply. All that will now go, or should go. Husband-wife relationship now stands a better chance of being established on gender-equality and emotional reciprocity.

Thirdly, the society is in for a bit of flab-shedding in respect of its consumerist obesity. The pandemic has forced us, in the words of John Major, the former PM of the United Kingdom, ‘to return to basics.’ His statement evoked a massive adverse reaction, and Major had to tender a public apology for sounding so regressive! Now the virus is proving a thousand times more potent that a Prime Minister in forcing humankind to return to basics!

To sail sensibly on the choppy waters of this unchartered waters, we need a loadstar. Fortunately, Jesus has provided it already. Our strategies, if they are to prove spiritually wholesome, need to be guided by the core purpose Jesus has prescribed for it: life in all its fullness.