Yesterday morning, Ed and I rose early to go grocery shopping, for the first time taking advantage of the one early-morning hour our neighborhood grocery store has set aside for seniors to shop before the store opens for the general public. I left the house, grateful for this gift. But from the moment we entered the store, I wished we hadn’t come. The aisles were packed with old people, rushing and in some cases, hobbling around, many with masks and gloves, a lot of them looking utterly panicked. I didn’t want to be among them. And it wasn’t just my fear of the virus that might easily spread with this level of human congestion.

I don’t want to be part of the shared panic, the seemingly desperate clinging to remnants of the world as we knew it – before the collective COVID-19 trauma.

A collective trauma is a cataclysmic event that shatters the basic fabric of society. Much has been written about collective trauma, whether it is caused by colonization, slavery, the Holocaust, or bombings like 9/11 or the Boston marathon. Two factors distinguish our current trauma from these historical events.

 Who’s to Blame?

First, there is no perpetrator group we can blame. Yes, President Trump has taken to calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” while senior Chinese officials and their state media have pushed a theory that the U.S. created the virus and planted it in China last fall. But I think these are simply two reactive powerhouses attempting to lay the blame somewhere else. It’s what we do. When things go wrong, we look for someone else to blame. But in this case, there simply is no obvious perpetrator, at least not any one group on this planet.

Who’s Affected?

And this leads to the second difference between many prior collective traumas and this pandemic. The COVID-19 trauma is not affecting just any one particular group. We are all victims or potential victims. I received a note from my beloved older brother Wesley yesterday. He wrote, “We’re doing our quarantine at the ranch. Amazingly, Corona is a major concern even in our hot summer climate!” His ranch is in the Chaco of west Paraguay, about as far from the civilized world as it gets.

What’s the Deepest Fear?

In addition to the horrific suffering and loss of life the Coronavirus is creating, this collective trauma is bringing about a crisis of meaning. Most of us create and maintain a system of meaning that includes our own self-continuity, and the connection between our self and others in the world around us. The white-knuckled panic I witnessed in the grocery store yesterday reflected a fear much deeper than apprehension about a virus. The world around us, on which we have based our sense of self, is crumbling, taking with it a major ingredient in the construction of who we are.

Is there a Way Out?

How can we construct a new meaning and social identity, a meaning that would give us a sense of purpose and collective worth, rather than white-knuckled terror? A new system of meaning that would allow each of us to redefine who we are individually and as a society?

Yesterday, I spoke with an extraordinarily wise man who described COVID-19 as nature’s gentle way of correcting the excesses of our past and raising our collective consciousness to return to more natural rhythms of life. He pointed out that as a global collective, we’ve gone too far in taking for granted that we can eat raspberries in the dead of winter, that we can fly anywhere on the planet, that our mountains of plastic garbage will somehow magically disappear, and that the growing gap between haves and have-nots can continue without consequences.

I find his message both sobering and encouraging. It requires me, along with you and many others, to not only identify the existence and source of this trauma, but to take on significant personal responsibility for it. If I agree that I have contributed to the cause of this catastrophe by living with irresponsible excess, and thereby assume some moral responsibility for it, and if others around me do the same, we can once again form a group cohesion and group identification that function to recreate meaning and purpose in our lives.

My online teacher, Richard Rohr, tells us that when we carry our suffering in solidarity with those around us, it helps keep us from self-pity or self-preoccupation – and I would add, from panic. We are all in this together. It is just as hard for everybody else as it is for me, and my healing is bound up in yours. It somehow makes us one.

As Etty Hillesum wrote in An Interrupted Life, “I am not alone in my tiredness or sickness or fears, but at one with millions of others from many centuries, and it is all part of life.”