Reading The Plague in a time of pandemic

Last  night I finished reading Albert Camus’s The Plague. I wouldn’t recommend it for everyone, but it deeply touched me.

On the last page, the fictional narrator states why he wrote:

“[he] resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people; so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done them might endure; and to state quite simply what we learn in time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” (p, 308)

Camus presents some stunning portraits of the people involved, with little commentary. If you haven’t read the book, you might want to put off reading this post. I will be revealing some important parts of the plot.

There are scenes that seemed almost sacramental – something one might not expect of the atheist Camus, but I guess he was so imbued by the Catholic culture of France that he could not fail to reflect them.  The discussion between Tarrou and Dr. Rieux seemed like a confession. After it was over, they went had swam in the sea. Confession and baptism?

Dr. Rieux is central to the account. But I found the smuggler Cottard and the journalist Rambert an interesting contrast.

Rambert keeps trying to find a way to leave the city and return to his love. With the help of Cottard, he waits for two guards who will get him out. Nothing works. Then he gets word that he can leave at midnight. But then he demurs and joins Rieux in the battle against the plague.

What happened?

He comes to feel that “It may be shameful to be happy by oneself.” (p. 209) And then, to explain himself more fully, he notes,

“Until now I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I’d no concern with you people. But now that I’ve seen what I’ve seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business.” (pp. 209-210)

He has been moved from the position of the outsider to one who is part of the others. He has come to see their communality.

Cottard, on the other hand, was an outsider. He was always fearful that the authorities would find out about his past and come to arrest him. He is a smuggler and who knows what else. He is an outsider, in fear. In some way, he seems to have rejoiced in the plague, because everyone, he thought, had become fearful of being caught, just like himself. His was not a solidarity of being together, but a feeling of a share commonness of being pursued. What a contrast with Rambert.

In the midst of the corona virus, who are we like? Rambert or Cottard?

Do we share the conviction that moves Dr. Bernard Rieux who oversees much of the work of resisting the plague? He tells Tarrou that, though he became more modest in his hopes for his work, “Only, I’ve never managed to get used to seeing people die.” Later the doctor tells Father Paneloux, “I refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” (p. 218)

Do we see, as Tarrou does, that the path to peace in the midst of the plague is “the path of sympathy”? (p. 254) I suspect, though, that he really means what we call “empathy.”

This book could stand as an examination of conscience in terms of how we respond to the plagues of our time.

Albert Camus wrote part of this novel in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon where he had gone in response to a bout of tuberculosis in 1942.

Le Chambon-sur-Lignon was a center of rescue for Jews, led by the Reformed Church pastor, André Trocmé and his wife Magda. I don’t know if Camus knew of this effort, but I’m sure he would approve. Pastor Trocmé would fit his description of a religious leader in tune with his people and the needs of the suffering. Camus’ Dr. Rieux remarks about the erudite Jesuit father Paneloux who seems to have given a justification for suffering: “He hasn’t come into contact with death….” But, Dr. Rieux notes “every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He’d try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence.” (p. 126) To his credit, Paneloux later joins Rieux’s efforts and risks his life and health.

When I first read about Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in Philipp Hallie’s Lest Innocent Blood Was Shed, I was fascinated by the efforts of Pastor Trocmé and his flock. But one incident still stirs me. His wife, Magda, heard a knock at the door of the vestry and opened the door to find a family of Jews at their doorstep. As I remember it, the family was a little reluctant to ask for shelter, but Magda, with all the naiveté of a simple believer, told them, “Come in. Come in.” For her it was natural and fundamentally human to welcome someone at the door. In  The Plague,  Grand agrees to stay with Cottard; “I can’t say that I really know him, but one’s got to help a neighbor, hasn’t one?” (p. 20)

That seems to me to be central to The Plague. One must be true to oneself and one’s humanity. As Dr. Rieux says to Rambert,

“It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fight a plague is — common decency.” (p, 163)

I cannot help recall the speech Camus made in 1948, a year or so after he finished The Plague, to a group of Dominicans at Latour-Maubourg. Fragments are found in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, an amazing collection of Camus’s articles.

I close this blog with a few citations from that speech, citations that have inspired me since I first read them, during the Viet Nam War.

“Perhaps we cannot prevent the world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.” (p. 73)

“What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest man. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.” (p, 71)

“And what I know—which sometimes creates a deep longing in me— is that if Christians made up their minds to it, millions of voices–millions, I say—throughout the world would be added to the appeal of a handful of isolated individuals who, without any sort of affiliation, today intercede almost everywhere and ceaselessly for children and for [humans].” (p, 74)

How will we respond to the plagues around us? Not only the corona virus pandemic, but the plagues of violence, poverty, racism, and more.

When the pandemic is over, will be return to the “normal” beforehand. Or will we seek, together with all people of good will, to begin to forge a civilization of solidarity, where the least are welcomed and the Magnificat (Luke 1: 46-55) of the Mother of the Lord becomes a reality, a God who has “lifted up the lowly” and “filled the hungry with good things.”

Albert Camus, The Plague. Vintage International, 1991. (© 1948)

Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death. Vintage Books, 1974 (© 1960)

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.

Violence, insurrection, Honduras

Lest anyone misunderstand what I am writing, I want to make it clear that I am a Christian pacifist, rooted in the witness of the early martyrs Marcellus and Maximilian, of Saint Martin of Tours, of Saint Francis of Assisi, and, in our days, Dorothy Day.

Lest anyone think that I believe in a passive pacifism, my heroes include Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the many people who peacefully risked their lives in campaigns for justice and the poor throughout the world.

Lest anyone think I am a hypocrite, my evidence is that I am prone to impatience and anger and have a hard time forgiving others. (Call that hypocrisy, if you will.) For these and other sins that are at the root of violence and are still in my life, I beg God’s forgiveness and help to

Lest anyone think I speak from an ivory tower, they should know that I speak from a nice house in a village in Honduras, a country with a reputation for violence, trying to accompany the people as a deacon, a servant.  I also spent time accompanying people in El Salvador during and after their civil war.

I condemn all sorts of violence. But I have to say that the most pernicious violence that I see finds its roots in the structures of power, domination, and institutionalized violence, that many states use to consolidate their power and to protect the interests of the moneyed few.

I understand why people may resort to violence but I do not justify it. I understand it, partly with the help of the word f Pope Saint Paul VI, in Progresio Populorum – The Development of the Peoples (30-31):

30. There are certainly situations whose injustice cries to heaven. When whole populations destitute of necessities live in a state of dependence barring them from all initiative and responsibility, and all opportunity to advance culturally and share in social and political life, recourse to violence, as a means to right these wrongs to human dignity, is a grave temptation.
31. We know, however, that a revolutionary uprising--save where there is manifest, long-standing tyranny which would do great damage to fundamental personal rights and dangerous harm to the common good of the country--produces new injustices, throws more elements out of balance and brings on new disasters. A real evil should not be fought against at the cost of greater misery.

For this reason, I am disturbed about the recent meeting in La Ceiba, Atlántida, Honduras. of LIBRE, the opposition part formed after the 2009 coup.

As reported in Noti Bomba, Former president, Mel Zelaya, stated: ““Tenemos derecho a la violencia, a la guerra y a la insurrección”- “We have the right to violence, war, and insurrection.”

He has called before for a peaceful insurrection – and I have few reservations about that. I do believe, however, that this must be the initiative of the people and not of political leaders and needs to be the fruit of grass-roots efforts of organizing and solidarity.

But I fear that Honduras is suffering from efforts of the elite to control the people and use them for their gain.

For me, it is obvious that the party in power, the National Party, is expert at this. Their consolidation of power in the three branches of government, their use of government jobs and services to assure (to buy off) their power base, their demonization of their foes, the massive militarization are way they “instrumentalize” their supporters, using them as pawns to maintain their party in power. And I won’t detail the variety of attacks on human rights supporters, environmental activists, and opposition journalists – including deaths – that have happened during their years in power.

But to call for insurrection, without facilitating the development of a critical consciousness in the people, can be another way for political parties to “use” their supporters. It can also be a way of putting them in danger for their lives.

What then?

Gandhi started with purifying and strengthening the people in the villages. Martin Luther King worked in the light of years of organizing and consciousness raising in the African-American communities.

Central to Gandhi’s protests was the constructive program, the efforts at the village level to make changes. This is empowerment from the base.

But what is also needed is a voice from the church that speaks from the side of the poor, that speaks clearly against all the forces that degrade the other, that resists all forms of violence while placing itself against all the forces of injustice.

In 1948, Albert Camus spoke to a group of Dominicans in France. When I first read his words when I was in college during the Vietnam War, they challenged me and I pray that they may still challenge me:

“What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnation in such a way that never a doubt, never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest [person]. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.”

And thus I reject all violence as I will try, in many small ways, to do what I can. As Camus said in the same speech:

“Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.”

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The photo is not of Honduras, but of Bethlehem from a house in a Palestinian refugee camp that had been blown up by Israeli forces about December 1, 2004.

Concerns about Honduras

It rained last night. Friday night we had a long hard rain. The drain on my terrace is too small and so the water backs up. A little after midnight I was sweeping the water over the side of the terrace so that the water wouldn’t get into my bedroom! But I was glad that it was raining.

I work up Saturday to a beautiful fresh morning, with a view of mountains and clouds that filled my heart with joy.

But I am worried about Honduras. Here are a few of my concerns.

The drought

I looked up Wunderground Friday afternoon to check on the weather and the rainfall. The rainfall so far in August has only been 26.16 mm whereas the average to this date is 140.3 mm. That’s about 1 inch instead of 9 inches!

Some farmers have not planted. Some have planted but the crop dried up for lack of rain. Others have had reduced yield of corn and beans, the staples of the Honduran diet. One farmer reported that a noxious bug is attacking coffee plants and the chemical which would kill them doesn’t work in the heat and lack of rain.

Whether the last two rains are a sign that the rainy season has really begun waits to be seen. But damage has already been done. The critical questions are if people will have enough beans and corn and if the prices for these basics will be beyond the reach of many.

The militarization of the country

Visiting a rural village for a catechists workshop this past week I was surprised to hear some of the catechists talking about a march the school kids were having that day. Marches are not uncommon here – there’s always an occasion: Arbor Day, Independence Day, Children’s Day, Day of the Flag, and so on. But what struck me was that several were incensed that the kids were told to bring toy weapons – pistols and rifles. They said that the teachers had demanded they do this. Some thought the police or military had pressured the teachers. I told them to investigate this well and that they should bring it up in a meeting of the Parents School Association.

It has not been uncommon to see soldiers, the police, and the militarized police on the major highways and even on the back roads here in the Dulce Nombre parish.

I have read of the massive presence of police and military at the march of the indignados who are calling for a commission to investigate the corruption and the pilferage of money from the Honduran Social Security Institute (which is responsible for medical attention to workers). Some of this money went into political campaigns of the governing party. People are marching on Friday evenings in many cities calling for an end to this and to an end to the impunity which has protected those who have done this. An analysis in Spanish by the Honduran Jesuit priest Ismael Moreno is found here. 

I have also heard of some police and military stopping and frisking people driving late at night, even after the drivers had handed over their license and car registration.

This militarization is truly disturbing – from the local school to the highest echelons of the political realm.

The efforts to silence the press

The indignados came to the fore in May when a journalist released information on the pilferage of two hundred million dollars from the Social Security Institute. A director has been jailed and others are being investigated.

Then information was shared that some of this money ended up in the coffers of the National Party’s election campaign that led to the election of the current president, Juan Orlando Hernández. There is, at this point, no proven direct link of the scandal to the president.

The president and others have complained about the divisions that these reports have generated – blaming the messenger.

The silence of many voices

In the face of this it is hard to see how little has been said by people who know better and how easily some sectors of the society have been manipulated by the Honduran government.

Yet there have been some points of light. The priests of the diocese of Trujillo have released a communiqué which can be found here in translation.

Also recently they have released a communiqué about mining, found here in Spanish: 

The priests and the bishop have also  taken part in a public march against "irrational" mining, as reported here in Spanish. What is encouraging is that the bishop explains their actions in terms of the recent encyclical on the environment of Pope Francis.

Caritas Honduras has also released a few analyses of the situation in their online publication Apuntes – on the hunger strike here and on the call for a national dialogue here.

But I long for more voices that speak out clearly.

In this I recall an essay by Albert Camus that I read in the 1960s that has continued to motivate me in my calling to be a voice for justice. 

"The Unbeliever and the Christian" is part of a statement that Camus made before a group of Dominicans in 1948. Here is a quote from that essay that still challenges me:

What the world expects of Christians is that Christians should speak out, loud and clear, and that they should voice their condemnations in such a way that never a doubt., never the slightest doubt, could rise in the heart of the simplest [person]. That they should get away from abstraction and confront the blood-stained face history has taken on today.

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The citation from Albert Camus can be found in the collection of his essays  Resistance, Rebellion and Death.

I wrote about the call for dialogue and the marches of the indignant in an earlier post here.