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EMBED for wordpress. He has his crew bail out safely, but figures it is curtains for himself. He gets on the radio, and talks to June, a young American woman working for the U. Army Air Forces, and they are quite moved by each other's voices.
Then he jumps, preferring this to burning up with his plane. He wakes up in the surf. It was his time to die, but there was a mix-up in heaven. They couldn't find him in all that fog.
And if the constant, cyclical decay of our human life narrates our living on other days, today it must not, because today is about…resurrection. Today we think about life, and all the possibilities that begin to emerge when make a choice that is a matter of life and death…a choice to reject a narrative of fear and choose instead to claim for ourselves and for our world, a new narrative: one that does not keep us chained in steel coffins, allowing the fear of death to rule our lives.
But opens us up, instead, to faith. To resurrection. All of the gospel writers include some version of the resurrection story, and we Easter church attenders have heard all of them over the years.
It had been a harrowing week, filled with fear. First Jesus was betrayed by his dear friend, turned over to the authorities because he wanted the money, but we all know it was really because of fear. Then Jesus was dragged before a sycophant governor, Pilate, who was too concerned with his own reputation, with staying out of trouble, and with making Jerusalem great again, that he washed his hands, quite literally, of the horror around him and gave into arrogance, which was really, as we know, fear.
One by one they fell away, too worried about their own safety, too calculating with regard to their political positions, too mesmerized with death themselves, which was—as we all know—fear. Then, when the sky suddenly went dark, the women stumbled up the hill behind their friend Jesus. He was the one carrying the heavy, heavy cross, his broken body struggling up the hill toward the place of the skull, but as they followed him up the hill they felt as if they, too, were carrying a heavy, punishing burden.
No heavy cross for them; instead, it was fear, dread, really, that was weighing them down, pressing on their shoulders, tripping up their feet. And the women stayed. All of them, kept prisoner by so much fear. And night fell, and the darkness settled, and it seemed that all life had to offer was death and endings, over and over and over. But the next morning, two of them made their way back to the tomb. They came across a gleaming angel sitting on a rock, two guards almost literally scared to death, and an invitation to take a step toward the empty tomb that represented new life.
Would they choose fear, as so many others had? Or will they choose faith? Maybe, just maybe, these women had taken Jesus at his word. In addition, racial- and ethnic-specific data can be incomplete as a result of broader data-collection issues. Long-term care facilities have become the epicenter of this virus, with more than 20, nursing home residents dying. While some states are beginning to release data from long-term care facilities partly in response to public outcry , current information still largely comes from hospital settings.
This is not enough. To capture a full picture of how inequities are playing out during the current pandemic, a commitment to broad collection and reporting of COVID-related data is vital. State and local leaders can then create and deploy robust community-based outreach and education, in-language, about the serious effects of the pandemic on communities of color. Such efforts can go far in helping to mitigate exposure to the virus, and contain its further spread into these vulnerable communities.
AARP is driving many such efforts as local awareness campaigns, virtual roundtables and tele-town halls across the country, in collaboration with state and local governments and other trusted community leaders and organizations.
And over the coming months, AARP will examine structural inequalities , across a range of areas, that likely underpin much of the disparity we see during this current pandemic.
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