I see a spiritual trap hiding within the mainstream COVID-19 vaccine narratives. This isn’t about the choices any of us have made for ourselves about the vaccine. What I am challenging are the SPIRITUAL EFFECTS of the narratives on the hearts of many loving, conscientious people of faith.
Those narratives paint a black-and-white, open-and-shut case, and then incite outrage at all who counter it. Certitude mixed with outrage toward people who are “the other”. It’s a poisonous brew.
More than once in my life I’ve run into reasoning that was thoughtful and solid in something I had been opposed to. It was always disconcerting. I learned through those times that when one side of the story is held up as unquestionable truth while the other is belittled, I need to take a closer look. And if you look with me at a bit of the other side of the COVID vaccine story, I’m hoping you might see more than the stupidity and credulity the narratives prime us to find there.
I offer to you the following Canadian Parliamentary press conference from June 17, 2021. It’s about the COVID-19 censorship of doctors and scientists. Yes, it is from Canada and not the USA, but the same story is playing itself out here and around the world.
This video starts with almost 26 minutes of dead time before the press conference begins. If you’re triggered by politicians, I recommend skipping the intro and starting at 35 minutes, where a scientist is introduced. Be sure to watch all the way through the two responses to the first press question. That section is just under 30 minutes long, and 40 minutes with the politician.
If this YouTube video becomes unavailable, try this link:
https://www.gloria.tv/post/xkSHQuCypaKq1Nn34Phoboaj8
This one has trimmed the dead time, so the first scientist starts at 9 minutes (29:45 minutes from the end).
In conclusion, here are my thoughts:
When we can easily find only one narrative…
When we feel uncomfortable with the voicing of the other side of the story…
When mockery and maligning are the only things we ever hear about the other side…
When we are shown only the unpleasant fringe element, with the implication that they are typical of those with that viewpoint…
When we are offered no opportunity to hear both sides in robust, carefully reasoned debate, and when those who do try to offer it are deplatformed so people can’t hear it…
When the sources of our information deliberately silence the thoughtful case made by those who disagree, and then pretend there IS no thoughtful case to be made…
When there is a claim that there is ONE view that is “The Science” on anything…
When any medical treatment is a one-size-fits-every-single-person therapeutic, and worse, is so mandated…
…something is terribly wrong.
And that “something” is now a problem bigger than any natural catastrophe facing us. For what is being targeted for destruction is our agape love: not only dividing us, but pitting in enmity one group of people against the other––accusing, blaming, shaming. This is the trap.
Agape love, God’s kind of love, does not control other people. Instead, it moves us to bear with people who choose other than how we would like them to.
In the end, I don’t see it being about if we, as a community of people, agree or disagree. Because no human knows the whole story. It’s about if we are ALLOWED to disagree, and then allowed to make our own choices with their unknown-to-anyone-but-God outcomes. And it’s about how we treat each other through it all.