What insights can process provide into the pain caused by social distancing?

Now, I am well aware there are theologians, such as NT Wright, who are quite verbal in their insistence this is a time for lamentation, not explanation or insight. In a way, I agree. An important step in healing is verbalizing ones pain and suffering to a sympathetic listener. But I don't agree that this negates all insight. In moments of intense experience, we can become easily overwhelmed and confused. A kind of time-out where we can reflect on matters, gain insight is also essential to our healing. Otherwise, we end up but a flock of chickens with out heads cut off, running around, getting nowhere. So now is precisely the time to gain insight into pain and problems we all face with social distancing.

How is it that something intended as a cure can be as devastating as the disease? My process response is that social distancing can be devastating right down to our core, for we are social-relational beings. All of reality is social, is interconnected. Quantum mechanics, for example, speaks of quantum entanglement, whereby entities separated by vast distances are still capable of communicating, of maintaining a relationship faster than the speed of light. That alone tells us we are part of a social matrix far more sensitive that we ever imagined. And then massive isolation represents a major threat to our existence and fundamental nature.

Centuries ago, John Donne, a major English poet of the metaphysical school. Anticipated our modern, process understanding of reality as relational, when he wrote, in “Meditation 17” of his “Emergent Occasions” 1624, that “no man is an island intire of it selfe; every man is part of the maine; if a clod bee washed away the sea, Europe is the lesse as well...as well as if a mannor of thy friends or of thy own were; any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in man kind. And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee....”

Of historic note, is the fact that it is only recent years that we have begun to appreciate the sensitive communal of our existence. In the past, we championed a rugged individualism and independence. We wrote the “Declaration of Independence” when we should have written the “Declaration of Interdependence.” So it is no surprise that Donne's poem lapsed into obscurity until the latter half of the 20th century, due to the fact his emphasis on reality as social was written off an unwanted intrusion of Buddhist thought.

Now, I don't want to be misunderstood as saying all forms of social distancing are a real threat. Some degree of social distancing is essential to our self-formulation. Whitehead speaks of “negative prehensions,” of the fact we cab and must build walls between our selves and others, exclude dimensions of others we find incompatible with our goals for self-formation. There is an old saying that “people are like porcupines; they want to stay close enough together to stay warm, but far enough apart that they don't jab one another” The walls we must build are not something set in cement; they are porous and flexible.

So our dilemma is maintaining a balance between social distancing and our needs for affiliation. That is not easy and calls upon us to actualize another major process principle, creativity, such as church online, whatever original ideas you can think up.