Foreword

Abstract

As the scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic continues to lash its curse upon us, we are humbled to survive on bended knees hoping, imploring, praying, even to the point of despair, that this will finally end. No one expected the dire consequences of the virus. Businesses that have thrived for generations closed, employment that has supported families for years obliterated, cademic institutions that has educated and ceaselessly formed generation after generation of students terminated its operations, and even churches, the last bulwark of hope in a seemingly pointless world, can no longer exercise her divine mission to teach, admonish, and sanctify her congregation in spaces made holy by praise and adoration. Alas, we have been almost reduced into nothing by the virus. It is as if we are standing at the precipice of annihilation gazing towards the oblivion that is about to engulf  us, or are we?

For so long, we have assumed the idea that “man is the master of creation” as bearing the stamp of an indubitable truth. Such idea has given birth to the notion that products of nature are our tools to utilize to make our lives more convenient and more efficient. But man’s greed recognizes no boundaries. That gentle balance between the concern for the welfare of the environment and the genuine needs of human existence was disturbed by man’s limitless desire to impose his lordship and dominance over everything and every thing. It has created a conundrum of illusions that we have failed to realize that we ourselves are part of created nature; that we are not really “masters of creation”. The COVID-19 pandemic only proves how an infinitesimal virus could easily wipe out human existence together with everything that humanity has ever built. Greatness indeed, as the Psalmist said, is only an illusion. (Psalm 62:9) It is nothing more but a mere narrative to bolster our claim for the created world so much so that we have created gods and idols of ourselves in an attempt to lord over this desolate and wretched land.