In the past few weeks, we've seen major disruption in our lives.

Everything is cancelled.

Everyone is bunkering down due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Because part of the pattern of disease, especially infectious disease, is about a breakdown of normal order.

We're seeing this play out at all levels of reality.

Of course, it is a breakdown of the body as people get sick

and some die. It is a breakdown of society as things get shut down, schools, workplace, churches

even. Fragmentation and isolation is happening at all levels. From the quarantine of people to families,

to the stopping of travel and the

shutdown of borders.

But the breakdown is also a breakdown of meaning, which appears as uncertainty, as confusion,

an incapacity to know what is true and what would be panic.

The measurements and predictions, the planning we usually make in our daily

lives, break down as we face something unknown and unprecedented in our experience.

We've seen a lot of crazy things from the talk of bat soup to the hoarding of toilet paper,

but all of it makes sense when we see this event with a basic pattern.

So I want to look at the symbolism of plagues and epidemics using our current crisis as a basis.

But we'll also look at the basic structures, examine and hopefully make sense of the very strange example of epidemics in the Bible

and hopefully we can shine a bit of a light on this moment of uncertainty.

And as you already seen, I will, I have written down this talk.

Usually I've been improvising, but just to make sure that I say everything I need to say

and that I don't misspeak, I decided to write this down.

...