Spiritual life and covid: "The pandemic forces us to ask ourselves: what is being present to the other?»»

Dominican religious, Anne Lécu is a doctor in prison in the Paris region.She is particularly interested in questions related to the body and the incarnation.

The pandemic requires a limitation of gestures.How does this affect our practice, our prayer, in a religion where the incarnation is so important?

Praying with others, this is still possible with masks and an open door!Regarding the Catholic celebration par excellence that is the Eucharist, I think that people have been used to being masked.Obviously, we would prefer to be able to touch each other and see our faces.

But personally, I prefer to be masked, vaccinated and the other is doing well, because I find it wiser.This is respect for life ... The presence to the other, as soon as we can come together again, does not seem to me to be endangered in worship.

On the other hand, it is much more damaged in daily life.This involves seeing people less often, not being able to meet or eat together as before, or say that you can contaminate someone.

You mention respect for life.What does the pandemic teach us about it?

It makes us question what it means to be present to the other.Confainment or restrictions could contain us on ourselves and make us forget that there are people who are alone and who need to take news, including by phone.It makes me realize that there are vulnerable people that must be protected, which sometimes consists in not going to see them and sometimes, on the contrary, to go there.It’s a difficult balance.It involves talking to each other, more than ever.

But isn't our sense of incarnation jostled?

The incarnation is a presence, and does not only refer to the body in its materiality.The pandemic forces us to ask us: what is the present to the other?You have to reposition yourself, dig a distance that is not an absence.This year, for example, I wrote long letters to my friends, which I hadn't done for a long time.

However, I understand that for isolated or teleworking people, the absence of others can be a nightmare, because you produce something when you are physically together.Those who really suffer are the parents of young children, the teachers, and not really believers, in themselves.

The sense of touch, too, is injured by the imposed distance ...

More than touch, what is injured in my opinion is breathing, which is more intimate.The air we breathe is potentially carrying the virus, and that's what people most anxious people.Because breathing is living, and the fear of breathing is difficult to live.

We can touch ourselves by being masked, it is not a problem.In families, we can take the children in our arms ... As far as I am concerned, for example, I was very critical at the start on telemedicine, because in prison, we start to repeat ourselves that to ward off the lack of doctors,Video consultations could be a kind of trickery solution.

I am convinced that the other must be present in front of me with his smells, his gestures and all that he is, to understand how precisely his complaint is.Nevertheless, the pandemic has rebatted the cards, and it is sometimes better a distance consultation at home, with a specialist, to have real advice, than waiting for three hours in an icy room.Sometimes, between two ailments, you have to choose the least, and therefore accept to be at a distance.But that does not solve the real problem.

In what ?

The new technical means are increasingly imagining distant solutions ... detainees can live their consultations and their visio trials, and why not their visiting rooms, as is already the case in the United States.There, there is really what going to go crazy.At one point, the physical presence of the other must be essential.

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