Visiting the edges of the internet these days, you would think it was the end of the world. One wild story says that COVID-19 is a biological weapon which either accidentally or on purpose escaped a nefarious government laboratory in either China or Washington State or Venice, depending on which Tweet you read.
Such posts remind me of “Chicken Little,” whom I first heard of when I was three years old. You remember her: the little chicken who was picking up corn in the barnyard when all of a sudden an acorn hit her on the head. “Goodness gracious” she exclaimed! “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
The story of this terrified little chicken, the patron saint of conspiracy theorists, goes all the way back to a Dutch collection of children’s fables in 1823. It made its way to Boston thirty years later with the publication of The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little and was promoted by none other than Sarah Josepha Hale, the author of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and the first promoter of the idea of Thanksgiving, but that’s a story for another day.
The story of chicken little took off all on its own and is told to children in almost every language and culture, largely because the idea of conspiracy theories and hysteria exist in every culture and language and land.
Every once in a while you hear conspiracy theories about nearly everything, and no less so in these days epidemic with fear.
There are conspiracy theories that allege that Jesus was married with children, that the Bible is a ruse to cover up the existence of aliens…that the Pope, the Queen and Harry Styles re all shape shifting Reptilians from another dimension. And that’s not even to mention Black helicopters, New Coke, Freemasonry, the illuminati and the New World Order.
As the movie Contagion made so clear a decade ago, it is often the epidemic of conspiracy theories and the fear they spread which are even harder to contain than the virus itself. And the lies are often the more deadly, for they threaten not just the body, but the soul as well.
Perhaps that’s why, from the time of Moses, the ninth commandment forbid false witness again my neighbor: thou shalt not lie.
But we have a witness even greater than Moses here, for in Jesus we have the perfect antidote to chicken little. For Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. The truth that, as Saint John tells us, will set us free. And in an age of pandemic conspiracy theories the truth is more important than ever before.
For, without the truth we are lost in the dark. With the truth and nothing but the truth (so help me God) we can discern the clear path that leads to God, the way of prudence, of wisdom and of love.
Otherwise, whether it’s the origin or transmission or treatment of the latest virus or the meaning and purpose of life, without the truth we are little better little children, or hysterical little chickens running in circles and clucking at the top of our lungs…the sky is falling! the sky is falling!
Not a bad lesson to remember in these sometimes troublesome days.
