The inevitably futile attempt to somehow square the coronavirus with God:
nytimes.com/2020/04/11/opin … e=Homepage
[b]'Still, the turn to Easter is an appropriate time to ponder questions of meaning amid the welter of death and suffering worldwide. A pandemic sharpens the permanent questions of theodicy, the debates over whether it’s reasonable to believe in a good and loving God in a world so rife with misery. But because any justification of God’s ways can seem smug and abstract when set against the awful particularities of sorrow, believers often eschew frontal debate in these moments, emphasizing solidarity and mystery rather than burdening the suffering with our moral speculations.
‘In these pages, for instance, the famous Jesuit, Father James Martin, recently argued that “the mystery of suffering is unanswerable,” that no explanation suffices for all the diversities of human pain, and therefore what Christians must offer instead of argument is the person of Jesus — whose ministry of healing both reveals a loving God and shows us where to find his presence today, among people caring for the grieving, the dying and the sick.’
'Writing in Time magazine, the famous Anglican theologian N.T. Wright offered a similar conclusion: Instead of seeking explanations for our present disaster, we should “recover the biblical tradition of lament,” an expression of solidarity both with our fellow humans and with God himself, who in the Old Testament grieves for his people’s infidelity and in the person of Jesus weeps for Lazarus. The Christian tradition, Wright argues, doesn’t require us to “explain what’s happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation not to be able to explain — and to lament instead.”[/b]
And on and on with many additional such rationalizations.
In other words, unless, of course, as far as you are concerned, it is not futile at all.
And, sure, to the extent your own understanding of it all manages to work for you, that need be as far as you go.
From my own frame of mind, whether someone pulls away from God here or is drawn in closer, it all revolves around recognizing that there is really no other alternative.
You either accept that it is all somehow part of an ultimately loving, just and merciful God’s plan, or…or what?
No God and you have to endure the pain of it all with no ultimate meaning; and then accept that, if the virus fells you or someone you love, there is only oblivion in the end.
On the other hand, what of the pantheists? Or Buddhists? Or even Scientologists? How on earth do they react to something like the covid-19 pandemic?