Pandemic Exposure Single
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Hey, John Dixon here with another Undeception single between our Monday episodes. I hope you're keeping well. In the body, of course, but also in the mind. My daughter said to me just this morning, Dad, you're being a bit grumpy with us all. Have you got cabin fever? Naughty girl. But she was kind of right.

She put her finger on something that is a very real part of the coronavirus pandemic. As well as being a physical and emotional trial, it's also a bit of a moral test. Crises tend to shed light on us. They bring out of us what's lurking beneath the surface, good and bad.

You think of those normal people that might ordinarily be neighbours, fighting each other in supermarkets over rolls of toilet paper. On the other hand, I've heard of people dropping off free toilet rolls to their neighbours, hopefully with sanitised hands. Here in Sydney the other night, two blokes held up a warehouse at Knife Point, again, just for giant quantities of toilet paper to sell on the black market.

And then you hear of that priest in Italy the other day who insisted that his respirator should go to the woman next to him. She lived. He died. At the same time internet scammers are taking advantage of how many people are stressed online, you've got streaming services offering additional free packages and audio book providers like Audible throwing away free audio books.

Dads are being grumpier than usual. Others are making the most of family time. It's really mixed. And my point is there's a moral dimension to this crisis, but that's not a new insight.

The other day I mentioned the Cyprian pandemic in the middle of the 3rd century. I read to you from the treatise of Cyprian, the Bishop of Carthage who wrote a series of letters and pamphlets in the middle of the pandemic, which is why historians call it the Cyprian pandemic, because he's our best source for exactly what happened. The descriptions he provides are shocking, worse than what we're seeing on the news each night, at the moment anyway.

Before I read to you what he says about the moral clarity a pandemic brings, here's his awful physical description of what was happening. And I must warn you, if you're feeling anxious at the moment,

perhaps I should suggest you press that little button that skips the pod forward 30 seconds. Anyway, here's Cyprian writing around the year 250, about 12 months into the pandemic. The strength of the body is dissolved. The bowels dissipate in a flow. A fire that begins in the inmost depths burns up into wounds in the throat.

The intestines are shaken with continuous vomiting. The eyes are set on fire from the force of the blood. The infection of the deadly putrefaction cuts off the feet or other extremities of some. And as weakness prevails through the failures and losses of the bodies, the gait is crippled, or the hearing is blocked, or the vision is blinded. And I'm going to stop there.

Actually, I read an article the other day in The Atlantic that makes the case that Cyprian's description here suggests a filovirus like Ebola.

Anyway, that's above my pay grade. Cyprian goes on to make a bunch of spiritual points, loads of them actually. He talks about how to face this horror with heroic spiritual confidence. I don't want to depress you with his relentless spiritual discipline. Cyprian's not for the faint-hearted.

He survived the plague himself, but he ended up being exiled for his faith and then martyred a couple of years later. He is one hardcore Christian leader. Anyway, what I do want to read to you is his section on the moral clarity that the pandemic brought. It's a test, he says. It finds us out. Have a listen. What significance all this has?

This plague and pestilence, which seems horrible and deadly, searches out the justice of each and every one and examines the minds of the human race, whether the well care for the sick.

Whether relatives dutifully love their kinsmen as they should, whether masters show compassion to their ailing slaves, whether physicians do not desert the afflicted begging their help, whether the greedy quench the insatiable fire of their avarice, whether the proud bend their necks, whether the rich bestow and give something,

Although this mortal crisis has contributed nothing else, it has certainly accomplished this. Now the situation for most of us is nowhere near that of ancient Carthage. Estimates suggest half the population was wiped out. But our crisis still provides a similar test for families, employers, physicians, the rich, grumpy dads.

One feature of these times I'm noticing a lot in myself as much as society is the way it brings out the best and worst of our humanity, often in the same communities, the same family, the same individuals. Best and worst. I myself can delight in the thought of handing out toilet rolls to neighbours. I haven't, but I've thought about it.

And yet I can just as easily resent customers who get the last roll at the supermarket before I do. Here I am offering this very helpful free podcast and then I turn around and snap at my beautiful daughter. I don't know about you, but I'm going to let this crisis find me out. Undeceive me about myself. Call forth my best humanity and expose me as a grump.

Lord have mercy. See ya.