Lent in the Time of Coronavirus: Part 2

This piece is the second in a five-part Lenten reflection series written by the staff of CTA. For Part 2, Zach Johnson shares his thoughts on Lent and the Coronavirus. 

Coronavirus has slowed time, allowing all of us to reflect on our world as it is revealed, frame by frame. I’m not the first to point out that this forced slowdown is happening during the season of Lent and that there are lessons in forced quarantine, opportunities to make life better afterwards. Because the fact is, we cannot go back to life as we knew it before. That rhythm is broken. This is an uninvited global 40 day trip in the desert, and we need to emerge with new vision.

Coronavirus and Lent are both calling our attention to the way we experience the passage of time by interrupting its normal rhythm of endless forward progress. The Jewish mystic and Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin calls this forward rhythm “empty time.” The pandemic is breaking rhythms by force, but Lent does it every year as a matter of ritual.

We have an unprecedented chance to study how life before the pandemic forgot people, how it crushed them out of history in the name of progress. But once the world begins to move again, we’ll have the chance to enter what Benjamin calls “messianic time,” where forgotten history is finally remembered in the ways we relate to each other, to ourselves, to the earth, to God. And wherever the hopes of forgotten people are materially reflected in the present moment, it is an act of “resurrection”.

The frozen flow of empty time due to coronavirus means messianic time and acts of resurrection are within reach. There are other ways to explain what’s happening right now. Some Christians might call this a time for kerygma, political leftists see it as a spontaneous revolutionary moment for which we must prepare, and the book Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein describes how capitalists historically figure out how to profit from crises like this. No matter what you call it, we have a responsibility to take this opportunity to see things which would otherwise be mystified by the normal rush of life.

I find Benjamin’s concepts of empty and messianic time especially helpful because this crisis is revealing something we’d otherwise take for granted: most of us spend most of our time at work. School is preparation for work; if we don’t have good or stable work we spend all our time looking for work. Vacations are really just temporary escapes from work and retirement’s main reward, if you’re privileged enough to retire, is freedom from work. Our whole life is work, and its pervasiveness is alarming now that so much work is suspended.

Work stoppage under threat of disease is not a holiday, and only under capitalism would pandemic-induced quarantine serve as an introduction to actual leisure time — that is, time without the threat of work. Yet part of the surreal quality of life in quarantine is indeed that most of us have never stopped working without knowing exactly when we need to go back.

And there is pressure to go back, because no work means no money. Disruptions to work schedules are disorienting; disruptions to pay schedules are destructive. But for Benjamin, time and money are dialectically related, each pushing the other forward. In other words, the crisis is revealing that the constant call to go to work is really the constant call to keep money moving. If you fall outside the flow of empty time, you’ll lose money, and if you don’t have money, the flow of empty time will forget you.

This might feel simple, summarized in an aphorism like “time is money” or something. But the coronavirus is showing exactly how time and money are related. Our paid labor at work transforms one into the other: we measure time with money in the form of wages, and we keep money moving by tracking the hours we work. Of course not all work is stopped, and if it’s not suspended now, it was most likely devalued before the virus hit. For example, pregnancy and childcare are almost always left out the time/money dialectic, and these have not changed at all in quarantine.

Patriarchy and white supremacy hold power by withholding or devaluing the labor time of everyone else. And on the flip side, the most powerful people in the world before the pandemic were Wall Street financiers who traded huge quantities of debt and speculated where value will be created quickest in the future — essentially organizing the future flow of money and therefore controlling how the rest of us spend our time.

It is our duty as Catholics to not go back to this system. We cannot let time and money flow the way they used to, where patterns of paid labor define who has power, who is reflected in our collective structures and systems, and who is remembered by history.

The resurrection available in the pandemic is the same resurrection Lent calls for every year when it ritually interrupts our normal lives: the forgotten people of history and today must be prioritized over the need to get back to life as usual. The coronavirus offers the mere possibility of this resurrection; Lent breaks in calling for that resurrection directly, explicitly, repeatedly as a matter of ritual.