Shut down competing visions

I'm stuck here in Plan Grande - which is really not all that bad - especially with a view like this.

The municipal centers of Dulce Nombre de Copán and San Agustín Copán have shut the entrances to the cities. As I read it, that means no one can enter or leave.

I am fine – with water, electricity, internet, and enough food for at least a week. Two days ago I washed clothes. I will probably have to bake bread today tomorrow, but that would be a good use of time.

I have neighbors that I can talk with and I can even walk through Plan Grande without meeting many people and thus being able to maintain “social distancing,” which is a concept almost totally alien to Latin Americans.

Yesterday, I walked to the parish coffee fields which are here in Plan Grande. They are flowering, promising a crop at the end of the year. The beauty and the sweet perfume of the flowers are life-giving.

I’m trying to pray, begin a few writing projects, and clean up the house. I'm reading. I'm finishing up Jesuit Father Joe Laramie's Abide in the Heart of Christ: a 10-Day Personal Retreat, which I, providentially, began about 12 days ago. I am about halfway through Ann Garrido's Let's Talk about Truth.

But it’s hard to read or do intellectual work when I feel so distracted. (I have to cut down on internet time.) And so today I decided to do something a bit different.

A few days ago I pulled out Albert Camus' THE PLAGUE, an important novel for me that I read in the 1960s and brought along with me to Honduras. This novel and some of Camus's essays in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death have challenged me in how I live my faith. ButI never thought the challenge would be this real. So this morning I decided that it was time to start reading it again.

In the first three pages Albert Camus describes Oran in terms of its "ordinariness," its "banality," where "everyone is bored." It is a town without "intimations," without "an inkling of something different." "Their chief interest is in commerce, and their chief aim in life is, as they call it, 'doing business'."

Is that what the world has become, even before the corona virus, at least the developed world?

The stock market crash seems to be more important than the lives of persons threatened throughout the world. The lack of toilet paper in US stores seems more a crisis than the lack of respiratory equipment in places like Honduras. Access to internet as a platform to blame others is more important than disseminating the truth about what is happened.

One remark of the narrator struck me: “What is more exceptional in our town is the difficulty that one may experience there in dying.”

And then he remarks, “Being ill is never agreeable, but there are towns that stand by you, so to speak, when you are sick; in which you can after a fashion. Let yourself go. An invalid needs small attentions, he likes to have something to rely on, and that’s natural enough.”

What type of town am I living in? In what way am I responding to the small attentions of the invalids?

Maybe it’s too early to say exactly what we can and should do. I have read of places where the elderly and the sick are getting attention – a meal, a greeting, and, even, pastoral attention. But here? What can I do?

In this meantime, I will be praying and trying to imagine ways to “stand by” people. I have offered to drive people in emergencies. I haven’t received any calls yet – but I am ready – prepared in heart and spirit.