Rev. Streets Lays Down The Covid-19 Spiritual Challenge

Covid-19 has not just challenged our ability to move safely in the physical world. It has also challenged our ability to navigate through the spiritual world — to figure out how to best to survive, and live.

The Rev. Frederick ​“Jerry” Streets preached on that challenge Friday — not from his usual pulpit at the 200-year-old Dixwell Avenue Congregational United Church of Christ, New Haven’s oldest African-American congregation. He laid down the challenge on WNHH FM’s ​“Dateline New Haven” program.

Covid-19 is a physical crisis — challenging society to limit the loss of life, eliminate a specific coronavirus, and return safely to jobs and stores and social gathering places.

“This is also a spiritual crisis,” noted Streets, who is also a Yale Divinity School faculty member.

“How we handle this will determine whether there will really be a future” for our individual lives and for the planet, he argued. ​“If we respond to this right, it will advance human flourishing for 100 years. If we go back to where we were …” Well, we may eliminate Covid-19. But we won’t be ready to eliminate subsequent threats to our way of life.

By that, Streets meant the way ​“nature is sending a message,” through the cleaning of the air, about how we need to slow down and save the environment from global climate change.

He meant the way that his congregants are hearing more from friends and loved ones in just a few months than they have for 30 years — even if that has meant connecting via phone or Skype or Zoom rather than in person.

He meant the way that, forced into isolation or home-based pods, so many people are ​“wrestling with life assessments and mortality,” ​“reexamining the fundamental values of how we’re living.”

The ascendancy of consumerism, materialism, and rugged individualization just might give way to a greater embrace of community and ​“a different sense of global connectivity.” To a sense that we are part of something larger than ourselves.

“We have to take care our ourselves and each other. We can no longer live as though we are individual cyclones,” he said.

Crises have a way of ​“rattling and shaking the foundations of faith,” Streets noted.

He quoted the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. on this subject: ​“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

He quoted Albert Einstein on the subject: ​“A human being is part of a whole, called by us the ​‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

He cited concentration camp inmate Viktor Frankl’s wrestling with the question of how one an find meaning in living amidst the negation of life.

African-Americans and Jews, to name two groups, have wrestled with that question in much darker days, and found a reason to say yes to life, Streets noted. He’s confident we can all wrestle with it amid Covid-19 — and emerge stronger.

We can’t go to church or the masjid or synagogue in person this Sabbath. But we can still hear Rev. Streets offer his spiritual take on this moment of challenge — by clicking on the below video. And, if the spirit moves you, responding, ​“Amen!”