A More Excellent Way: Recovering Mystery in COVID Care
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A More Excellent Way: Recovering Mystery in COVID Care Joshua D. Genig1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This article explores the fundamental role of mystery in the care of patients suffering from COVID-19. Specific attention is paid to the disparity between modern and post-modern approaches to mystery and how medical instruction and care has often been conducted in the vein of the former. However, with post-moderns now being trained as medical clinicians and serving on the frontlines of this pandemic, there is an opportunity to return to a more ancient manner of understanding humanity, one which places mystery on equal footing with chemistry. Keywords COVID-19 · Modern(ism) · Mystery · Post-modern(ism) The modern world, for all its good, has failed us. There is a lot to unpack in that assertion, beginning with the very definition of “modern world.” What is the modern world? What does it mean to be modern? As one might expect, the specific delineation of the modern period is as varying as those who dare to offer a timeline. What tends to be more congruent, however, are some of the key characteristics of this era. Things such as: the belief in progress and the move toward secularization, so prominent in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment; the promotion of individual rights and freedoms, evident in the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen and the overarching thrust of the French Revolution; and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, which laid the groundwork for the singular place of honor shown to rational investigation (Taylor 1996). It is this broad-sweeping, multi-century encompassing way of living and being and thinking that constituted the modern world. The question before us, though, is this: Has this modern world kept its promises? I would suggest that it has not, and that this reality could not be clearer than it is right now, amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
* Joshua D. Genig [email protected]; [email protected] 1
Department of Spiritual Care, University of Michigan Hospital and Health Systems, 1500 E. Medical Center Dr., Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Journal of Religion and Health
The fundamental promise of the modern world was simple: It promised us that science and technology could save us—save our patients, save our jobs and even, at times, save our souls. As noted by Taylor, this way of thinking was prevalent at the time of the Enlightenment, and it remained our common existential hermeneutic throughout much of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Moreover, “by the beginning of the twentieth century, the notion of progress was closely linked with technological development, and that linkage intensified in the following decades” (National Academy of Sciences 1993). Princeton philosopher Diogenes Allen put a finer point on it when he observed that “modern science and technology so improved life that they led to a belief in progress, and in time to a belief in inevitable progress” (19
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