“Jesus Loves You. Jesus is there for you when you need him,” reads a children book at the Barnes & Noble bookstore almost four years after lockdowns descended. With what children and teens endured, the book might as well say, “A Martian spaceship will land on your lawn, and a door will open for you.”
“Jesus is always with you. Jesus is there when you need him. God will never leave you or forsake you,” reads page after page of this picture book in the religious books section. When you are lonely and sad, he is with you. When you are afraid, he is with you. When you don’t know what to do, he is with you. What are children to do with this message after institutions — including the churches — failed them in spring 2020? And, yet, Amazon was held sacred, with deliveries never ceasing.
To a child shut in his room, trying to make sense of computer school, where was Jesus? Where was God, he may ask? School left. Church left. Friends left. Family was too scared to do anything outside the house. Where did all the adults go, for that matter? They all left with Jesus.
After horrific harms of lockdowns — lost jobs and education, fractured families, overdoses and suicides, deaths of loneliness and despair, increases in child sexual abuse and child trafficking after social services shut down — religious slogans such as these appear more like marketing language, nudging us to pull out our checkbooks.
How might an 11- or 14-year-old, alone in his room, view Jesus when a parent once told him he couldn’t see his friends until a vaccine was released? Instead, he stared at a computer screen in a new bizarre world, at other teens’ faces stacked in little boxes. Teens are naturally self-conscious, some painfully so; and yet, suddenly we expected them to endure being on camera for hours, video and audio recorded from their rooms, in order to go to school.
Webs of communities with violin lessons and play dates, soccer practices and orchestra rehearsals, math tutoring and church camps — woven since birth for our children’s mental, emotional, and academic health and well-being — ended abruptly. Vaccines came out, children may’ve been injected multiple times, and yet everyone around seemed to get COVID anyway. What sense are we to make of all this? How will we help children make sense of this? (READ MORE: School’s Out Forever)
Computer meetings were a bereft substitute for hearing a friend’s lively laugh in person in school or at church youth group. When school buildings finally reopened, fear and paranoid practices depressed even the heartiest students. Children saw only their friends’ covered faces, had to sit 6 feet from each other to eat lunch, and had no after school activities — or were limited to ones with shots required to attend.
“Amazon will never leave you or forsake you” seems a truer message after March 2020. Deliveries never stopped, with the company’s billions ballooning as people clicked on everything from gourmet-baked goods, sweaters, makeup, and power tools to computer equipment, movies, and video games — and boxes appeared on porches. My best friend gone. My school and clubs closed. Jesus gone. Parents gone. But Amazon will never leave you or forsake you. Is this the lesson we want to leave our children?
At Barnes & Noble, I look around the children, teen, and adult sections for displayed books that may help us gain meaning from what happened. I know these books exist; I’ve bought them from dissident writers and independent thinkers. Two excellent ones are Justin Hart’s Gone Viral and Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others, but those books are not featured in this major bookstore in a busy town. Recent emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee reveal that Amazon yielded to White House pressure to censor books critical of the administration’s COVID policy.
If religious language and slogans in a post-COVID-lockdown world are to be more than alien-speak or marketing ploys, then we must grapple with confusion, heartbreak, and hard effort at meaning-making. We survive by making meaning with and for others. And we may learn about the presence of the divine through fellowship and by serving others.
In many stories, Jesus walked among the diseased and downtrodden, touched those whom no one else would touch, and laid his bare hands — so that they would feel his warmth — on the bodies of the sickest, the loneliest, the most desperate among us. They saw his open face — as faces of compassion, faces of recognition, heal us. Where is this picture book in our post-lockdown time?
After my article on church closures, “The Speakeasy Churches of 2020,” people wrote to me from all over the country with angry and heartbroken stories of how their long-time churches closed permanently because of declining membership during shutdowns and Zoom services. Some wrote of excess deaths, not COVID deaths, among church members. They mourned the absence of funerals. When he learned I was a Quaker, a long-time attender at a New England Quaker meeting wrote to me about his meeting’s “separate but equal” policy. The meeting installed a sign stating that vaccinated people may worship together in a main room while the unvaccinated had to worship in a separate room. (RELATED: Travis Kelce, COVID ‘Variants,’ and the CDC Vaccine Machine)
“If ye love not each other in daily communion / How can ye love God / Whom we hath not seen?” goes the Shaker hymn. “More love, more love.” It continues:
If ye love one another
Then God dwelleth within you
And ye are made strong
To live by his word
What does “daily communion” mean? It means being together to work, learn, eat, talk, listen, laugh, sing, play — the beauty of live communities that spark surprises and miracles, new ideas and alliances that strengthen and inspire us.
Christine E. Black has published work in Sojourners Magazine, Friends Journal, Dappled Things, Cold Type, Brownstone, Dissident Voice, the American Journal of Poetry, English Journal, the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, and other publications.