Commentary

I can’t find the passage now, but I know it’s there. Sometime in the late fall or early winter of 1853, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal that nature now has Quaker colors.

The fact that God is the God of Love doesn’t mean He’s not also the God of Hate. The opposite of love isn’t hate but indifference. Your Bible doesn’t teach a Zoroastrian-style dualism. Satan is a fallen angel, and we don’t need to make him a god. Don’t you see? None of us understands how to love properly, and we always hate far worse.

I believe I’m seeing far more evil in the world than ever before in my lifetime. There’s a constant barrage of antisemitism, gun violence, racism and homophobia. And not only is there a lack of empathy, but there’s a gleeful viciousness about it from perpetrators. However, for this piece, I’m going to focus specifically on the evil I’m seeing in response to COVID.

David Crosby died last week. That will not mean much to young people. But to people of a certain age, my age, the loss was significant. And emotional. I felt it in ways I did not expect.

This winter, on our first day in Kauai, we needed to take a bus to get our rental car, which was an hour away. Luggages beside us, we waited for the bus to arrive. It was a 30-minute wait, and we got to enjoy some warm weather that contrasted greatly to the -4 weather in Pullman.

I had this sense that I was participating in making the world into a place that was not shaped by Doug, that would continue without him. That I was undoing the evidence of his life. That undoing felt like betrayal. This has been a theme for me in grief and loss, the sense that moving or changing or getting rid of a loved one's possessions is transgressive.