Photo by David Smith.

I am in isolation for 14 days. No virus problems, but we switched to online work and encouraged to stay home. I’m almost thankful for it. I was increasingly worried that I may become the one through whom others would get the disease. Now, with the isolation, it feels as if I were given the gift of the freedom to not get others sick.

This makes me wonder about my other problems: the “viruses” that I often carry with me into the world. My anger, my judgments, my lack of patience, my passions… Those aspects about me get others sick, often without me knowing. Words that I carelessly say, phrases expressed in anger or out of a perceived harm, eat at the goodness and positivity of others. Contrary to Corona or other viruses, these other “spiritual” viruses don’t murder people physically, but don’t they contribute to their spiritual death?

Still, I am given the freedom to carry them with me into the world. I, part of God’s creation, am placed within His larger creation with the power to murder it. Terrible situation: to be called to love the world while being allowed to uglify it. This seems to mean that if I truly love this world, if I am called to love God’s creation by affirming its beauty within me, I am called to personal purification not for my sake, but for the sake of Beauty: creation itself. I need to work towards curing my “viruses” not for my sake, but for the sake of the constellations in which I participate.

So I am thankful for isolation. But even in this isolation, I am not isolated: I can harm the ones I love the most: those who are isolated together with me, my family. Isolation is not then a break, but a reminder of how I need to change for the sake of everyone in my life, and thus for the sake of the beauty of God’s creation.

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In the Orthodox Church, we are during Great Lent, a period in which one is faced with one’s own shortcomings. It is a period of renewal of the entire creation, for it ends on the Sunday of the Resurrection. We are required to separate a bit from the world, so that we can remember we have the power to harm it without even realizing and also the responsibility to love its beauty. And we look into ourselves so that we can fully and authentically be with all others.

The Friday of the Crucifixion and the Sunday of the Resurrection: there is no one without the other.