Article May 26, 2003 Issue

SARS a new name need not scare us

By Neera Kapur

IT SEEMS EVERYONE HAS BEEN TALKING about SARS, especially in India. Neighboring China, after all, has had the greatest number of cases. My response to the increased concerns has been to pray. My prayer is based on the facts that God, who is a loving Creator, is not the cause of disease, and that it is certainly not God's will that any of Her children should suffer. These facts have been proved to me time and again.

At one time, I was feeling very resentful and angry about a situation. At the same time, there was a lot of talk about flu going around. I began to find it difficult to breathe normally and soon developed the symptoms of a very bad cold.

I talked by phone with a friend who earlier had invited me over. When she realized I wasn't feeling well, she asked if we could cancel the meeting—she did not want to catch this terrible cold I had. Yet even though we never got together, she soon caught "my cold." On learning that, I realized I needed to pray about tacitly accepting contagion as unavoidable—as a law. Otherwise, I was contributing to the general fear that one creation of God could pass along something harmful to another.