Podcast on NCSC's response to Covid-19
Executive Director Madison Perry was recently interviewed about the Study Center’s ongoing work during the coronavirus crisis. The interview was just released on the NoCampusLeft podcast. You can listen to it here.
COVID-19: Ways to Help
Are you a student or community member looking for ways to support those around you in the midst COVID-19? Below is a list of researched and tested ways to help if you are able!
1. Stay as physically distant as possible.
If you don't absolutely need to go somewhere, don't. Here is a cool graphic visualization of how important social distancing is from The Washington Post.
2. Donate blood.
Fear about COVID-19 and social distancing has led to a national shortage of blood. Donating blood is a tangible way to help meet this need and a good reason to get out of the house for a bit! Learn more here on the American Red Cross’ website.
3. Help meet the food needs in your community.
Donate food. Some organizations, such as TABLE in Chapel Hill, are discouraging in-person drop-offs of food and instead encouraging orders through Amazon or monetary donations.
Volunteer. Other organizations such as Meals on Wheels are seeking volunteers to help stay in operation. Learn more about volunteering with your local Meals on Wheels here.
Check to see if your local school system needs support distributing food to kids who are out of school.
Offer to bring groceries to older or more at-risk members of your community.
4. Stay in touch.
Social distancing is especially hard on those who live alone or who feel especially scared by or at risk from the virus. Call your other favorite older adults! Get in touch with your pastor or local senior center to see if they know of anyone who is lonely and would like a phone call or who needs groceries delivered. Remind the people you love what you love about them.
A Prayer for Uncertain Times
God over all,
Master of history,
Sustainer of the world,
You who knows what is in the heart of every person,
we ask You now to give to each heart what it needs
that we might know You better,
and so live Godward in uncertain times.
For those of us gripped by fear,
grant us comfort, Holy Spirit.
Let us remember:
no sparrow falls unseen,
the lilies are clothed in splendor,
and our Creator God cares most
for his dearly bought image-bearers.
Grant us the courage to know
You will never forget your people,
and your grace intersects,
always,
this present moment.
Meet us who are fear-bound with the freeing peace of Christ,
which transcends our understanding,
and is firmer than all our circumstances.
For those of us gripped by anger and impatience
at the response of others or the swirling complications in this time,
grant us stronger compassion for the weak, the vulnerable,
and for those whose hearts are bent at different angles than our own.
Let us remember:
You stoop low to heal the sick, fill the needy, and bless the humble.
You call us to love as You have loved,
and You will empower what you command.
Dig in us deeper wells of empathy and grace,
so that we may better taste and better tell
of the love of an ever-close God.
For those of us gripped by sickness,
grant us perseverance, deep-rooted joy, and hope
in a God who won’t leave the world this way forever.
As we sense in our own bodies
the bone-deep cracks at the heart of creation,
give us, your children, the assurance that this too shall pass,
and we will one day put on incorruptibility.
We ask You for our protection and our healing.
Christ, let us all
rest in your abiding love,
be constrained by your grace,
and hope in your return.
Amen.
Cancellations and Adjustments Due to Coronavirus
Dear Friends,
I write to tell you how the North Carolina Study Center is adjusting to the COVID-19 crisis as an organization and to provide a few thoughts on how we may respond as a community.
Over one week ago, we canceled a spring break trip to Israel for 40 UNC students and two of our staff out of concerns our travelers would end up quarantined. Going forward, the Study Center will be looking to UNC’s policies for guidance regarding public spaces, educational activities, and large group gatherings. Accordingly, we are canceling our events for the next three weeks (hopefully to be scheduled again next year) and plan to continue discussion seminars and our Fellows classes online.
In terms of our general hospitality, we will be closed for the rest of UNC’s extended spring break (3/16-20). To the extent that UNC prioritizes social distancing and encourages students to remain away from campus for the common good, our hospitality will follow suit. You can see UNC’s most recent statements here. We are considering remaining closed to general traffic after 3/20, and will make further announcements next week on our news page.
How do we best honor our mission and serve Christ in our current situation? As Dr. Luke Bretherton recently noted in a letter to his students at Duke Divinity School, our concern is to ensure the medical system is not overwhelmed by rapidly increasing demand. So, out of care for the wider community and in solidarity with those who care for the sick, we must adjust.
This introduces a thought for our many students. Although you are in a low-risk demographic, you come from somewhere. I encourage you to reach out to those you know who are likely afraid. Let your parents and grandparents know you love them. Tell your aunts and uncles what their past care has meant to you. Remember your Sunday school teachers, sports coaches, and the many others who have supported you.
In light of these changed circumstances, we at the Study Center are discerning new ways to offer Christian life, education, and formation to members of the UNC community. For now, our staff will be available to students for conversation and care by phone, email, and video conference. And we will be announcing opportunities to continue our theological educational programs.
As we make strategic adjustments and prepare, our hearts cannot be set on the news cycle. God’s grace is sufficient and doesn’t change. We are invited to live in the world of Scripture, where death is expected around the corner but God’s kingdom presses in more urgently with a deeper peace. “In peace I will both lie down and sleep; for you alone, O LORD, make me dwell in safety.” (Ps. 4:8)
We are sad to think of a spring with an empty living room. Yet, this period of hardship can be deeply formative if we let it teach us a lasting humility and awareness of our true everyday state. Every day Jesus Christ comes for the sick, not for the healthy, and his eternal riches are on offer. He will give them to us if we will ask.
In Christ,
Madison Perry
Executive Director
Five Novels to Deepen the Soul
Students and staff reading Augustine’s Confessions together in one of our seminars this spring.
Writer and teacher Jonathan Rogers once said that “good stories make us feel differently and more deeply about the things we’ve known all along.”
In light of his thought on how a great book can enlarge our souls, I wanted to share quotes from five of my favorite novels. Each story can help you feel more deeply about something that perhaps you’ve known all along.
1. How to feel deeper about the hard right choice: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
“I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man…Laws and principles are not for times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth?”
2. How to feel deeper about loving your enemy: Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.”
3. How to feel deeper about the world to come: Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
“I moved ever higher on the land, here entering an orchard of immense and archaic beauty. I say orchard: The trees were dense in one place, scattered in another, as though planted by random throw, but all were heavy trunked and capaciously limbed, and they were fruit trees, every one of them. Apples, gold-skinned apricots, immaculate pears. The leaves about them were thick and cool and stirred at my approach; touched with a finger, they imparted a palpable rhythm…
The place had a master! Realizing this, I knew he was already aware of me—comforting and fearful knowledge. Still I wanted to see him. The farther I went the more I seemed to know or remember about him—the way he'd planted this orchard, walking over the hills, casting seed from his hand.”
4. How to feel deeper about ordinary, well-lived lives: Middlemarch by George Eliot
“…the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
5. How to feel deeper about loving your neighbor: Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
“There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal.”
Kari
In Everything Give Thanks
You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn't want to be somebody else. What you must do is this: 'Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In everything give thanks.' I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.
– Hannah Coulter, Wendell Berry
I’ve had a new way of looking at the commands of God lately. Commands like the one in Wendell Berry’s quote, in everything give thanks. We can be tempted to see God’s decrees as arbitrary or constraining. But if God is who He says He is, Creator of the world, source of living Truth, then perhaps we should see his commands as the most solemn secrets. He leans down and whispers to us, live like this because I’ve made the world like this.
His decrees are windows into the workings of the universe. The more we walk in them, the more we’ll see the true nature of things and grow into the people He first willed us to be, when he breathed life into fine-crafted dust and awoke the pinnacle of his creativity.
If God tells us to give thanks in everything, might He be trying to show us that all of life is worth our gratitude? It would make no sense, after all, to be thankful for something of no value. If He commands appreciation for our days, it is because those days, particularly this one right in front of you, is brimming full of goodness.
But that goodness is not a light thing, nor a thing often easily perceived. Today, it may be at the back of boredom or pain or anxiety or loneliness. We certainly walk in shadowed lands, and perhaps for you, those shadows are looming large and blocking any errant ray of light.
There are sleepless nights and spilled coffee. There are severed friendships, unanswered longings, and deep grooves of injustice. There is despair welling up on a Monday morning. There are the unheeded cries of the innocent and those who live in bondage to the opinions of their neighbors.
And yet.
Gratitude isn’t blindness or a lie. It is not a blatant denial of reality.
Gratitude is grasping hold of that second sight, the inheritance lost by our first parents and reclaimed by the new Adam.
It is a constant turning toward our lives, opening ourselves up to both the surprising moments of grace glimpsed clearly and to the hardships where grace is working out our transformation just outside the reach of our senses.
It is a trust in the goodness of our Creator, who speaks in everything give thanks as a promise, pulling us ever onward toward resurrection.
And while none of us are all the way capable of so much, the first step is to believe these are the right instructions.
Kari