-By Fr. Varghese (Sinto) Chalissery Davis
Each and every country in this world has got varieties of differences in its existence, geography, and location on the planet, economic stability and more. The prosperity, poverty, happiness, religiosity, cultural heritage, and the like different factors made each country unique and developed its own peculiarities. Mental stability and feelings were almost similar for the people of the same country because of its lifestyle and economic stability and instability. Each country with its own culture and uniqueness has individual identity and distinctiveness which had differed entirely from district to district, state to state, nation to nation, and continent to continent.
Though the world is diverse in nature today, here appeared a common issue that originated comparable fear in every country and their citizen. Maybe for the first time the whole world is facing the common enemy that crept into the humankind suddenly irrespective of any part of the world and variations. To analyze from a fear point of view everyone living in this world exactly has identical death facing a situation where everyone was feeling safe all the more. Today the newly developed and unforeseen virus has made one and all more or less equal, a generation with fear of death and insecurity. This system was conceived in the form of a fear factor named COVID-19 to become the study material for the coming generation if humans survive. They will hear in their history books about a tiny virus that endangered the survival of the whole civilization of the present. Today the fear factor which we experience in our minds is matching all throughout the world and this common aspect has made the whole world with a general fear which is not bred in history till now. There is no variation in the density of fear in any realm of life for anyone, in any part of the world. The world is almost locked down, generating lots of terror in the minds.
A kind of vagueness and horror prevails all over the world today. All the governments panic about its citizen’s health and economy of the countries. People fight and struggle for life and economic stability of the future, each human being, irrespective of any differences, now, lives in the anxiety of death. Wherever there is humankind, there exists this fear. Today the crown of creation, mentioned in the bible, have a similar fear factor common to all, maybe for the first time after or before the emergence of the new communication resources, which made everyone common in this world among the dissimilarities in this world, and it is the fear for human existence in this world due to COVID-19. This fear will make the whole world into a social communion having a similar factor that unites every human being at present.
This social communion will help us to witness a unique world and a new method of living, just as the people in Noah’s ark witnessed a new life, after this quarantine period. This fear will take us to an innovative method of living different from the one we assimilated in the past. Along with the way of living, if the fear of this situation helped to increase our faith in God and to overcome our increased overconfidence, resulting from our latest discoveries and developments alone, man is going to realize the ultimate entity. The one who accepts the truth that ‘the fear of COVID-19 made me close to my God’ will surely recover the same fear. We will recognize a Saviour in the boat of our life, asking a question to each one of us personally “why are you afraid you of little faith?” (Mt. 8:26) Let our fear turn into “the fear of the LORD, the beginning of all wisdom and knowledge” (Prov. 9:10). The psalmist sings with lots of conviction, “I sought the LORD, and he answered me and delivered me from all my fears.” (Ps. 34:4)
