Weekday Email to Members and Friends – 2020-05-28
Thursday May 28th 2020
A daily e-mailer from
Matt Matthews
To Members and Friends of
First Presbyterian Church
Champaign, Illinois
Dear Friends,
This from Cousin Tom, who prays for our congregation:
In a London Review of Books essay by Jacqueline Rose discussing Camus’ The Plague, she dwells on the disparate suffering experienced during a pandemic. In New Mexico we have first-hand knowledge of the pandemic’s apparent prejudice, watching the mortality and morbidity numbers of the Navajo nation sky rocket.
For decades Navajos and Mexican-Americans have had intolerable rates of adult-onset diabetes, heart disease and essential hypertension. For more than a century a large segment of Navajos on reservation has lived at the margin, with too little nutritious food, too little good water and with substandard shelter and health care.
Rose delivers a sort of reverse rationale employed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell, who identified AIDS as God’s punishment of gays: the dispossessed suffer for our sins of bigotry and neglect.
Today I opened the June Harper’s and found the Easy Chair in which Thomas Chatterton Williams describes quarantining in Paris and thinking about Camus and The Plague.
Quoting Camus: “There’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea that may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is –common decency.”
Quoting Williams: “For Camus, the question of sickness, of life’s two irreducible teams – pestilences and victims – and of the Sisyphean struggle for meaning in a godless, absurdly indifferent universe, was always quite literal. He worked on the book for six eventful years: first in Oran, then in the French Alpine village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, where he went to treat his tuberculosis, and afterward in Paris, during the Resistance, distilling into fiction his painstaking research on the history of plagues in Europe and Asia…
“A pandemic, if you are fortunate enough not to be hospitalized or killed by it, wears you down by other, more subtle measures. It administers by a thousand cuts, a kind of spiritual and psychological incapacitation… Indeed one of the key insights of The Plague is its emphasis on the fundamental fragility of all human arrangements, and the concomitant inability of most people to acknowledge this tenuousness until it is far too late for meaningful collective action. (Beyond the particular menace of the coronavirus, this is ultimately what is so terrifying about the climate crisis.)”
Yesterday the NY Times reported on the Columbia U study by public health statisticians as they looked back at the beginnings of the pandemic in the United States. Creating elaborate calculations dependent on a list of variables, the researchers were able to estimate that at least 36,000 deaths could have been avoided had federal officials declared the lockdown a week earlier.
That estimate, however, depends on the assumption that Americans would have been willing to accept the need for an earlier sheltering-in-place, an assumption that seems non-sensible given the current rush to have tatoos and hair styling as the disease curve in many states reach record heights in a kurtosis of death.
News:
Wednesday Vespers! Thanks for joining us last night.
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Members in the News:
Lisa Ainsworth elected to the National Academy of Sciences
https://ripe.illinois.edu/
Stretch Ledford receives teaching award!
https://news.illinois.edu/
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John Muirhead invites us to celebrate Louise Allen’s 95th Bday!
Louise Allen
The Bickford
1002 S. Staley Road
Champaign, IL 61822
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Presbyterian Women will gather next week! Plan now.
\For 150 years, the women of this church have faithfully served within the church and the community and world. During the present need for “social distancing”, we’re missing meeting together for study and fellowship, but the ministries continue. So a first step in moving forward is the annual installation of women in the variety of positions in Presbyterian Women. Yes, we’ll Zoom forward, on June 4 at 1:00 p.m. Every woman in the church is invited to log in to her email account and click on the link provided for PW officer installation, thereby joining in support and embracing all that is to come.
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Humor:
What gets wet as it gets dryer? A towel.
When is a door not a door? When it’s ajar.
When the three-legged dog walked into the bar, what did he say? “I’m lookin’ for the man who shot my Pa.”
I know, groan…
New monthly budget: Gas $0 Entertainment $0 Clothes $0 Groceries $2,799.
Breaking News: Wearing a mask inside your home is now highly recommended. Not so much to stop COVID-19, but to stop eating.
Good Word:
Galatians 5:22-23
22 By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.
Let us pray:
Holy God,
today I thank you for the Peony:
the way the heavy-headed buds
bow before you then lift their
heads in that profusion of color.
May I lift my head to you
with such radiance, even
if only for a single day—
for your Son,
for your Spirit,
for your Whole Self
with my whole self.
AMEN
PEACE,
Matt Matthews
Cell: 864.386.9138
Matt@FirstPres.Church
