“Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered am I”

Ella Fitzgerald, Barbara Streisand, and Rod Stewart all sang the song from which these words come.  Why do these particular words drum their way into my head this morning?  What do these particular words mean?  

“To bewitch” is to cast a spell on someone or to capture their attention in some other way.  “To be bewitched is to be controlled or affected by or as if by a magic spell.  If something (or someone) bewitches you, you are so affected or attracted to it or them that you cannot think about anything else.  Synonyms for bewitched include words like beguiled, captivated, and hypnotized.

To be “bothered” is also best defined by its various synonyms:  irked, disturbed, troubled, tormented, annoyed, and vexed.

“Bewildered,” too, is best defined by its synonyms:  befuddled, confounded, worried, perplexed, confused, and baffled.

So, having done my little word study,  I discover that I am truly bewitched—hypnotized and captivated—by this unprecedented coronavirus pandemic.  Aren’t you?  I am controlled and affected by it.  It holds both me, you, and the world captive.  It is a “spell” cast over us, a shadow that hovers, a disaster that has taken 178,000 lives globally, a pathogen that we do not yet know very much about.

I am bothered, annoyed, disturbed, and troubled, not only by those who would ignore the facts and scientific data with reference to Covid-19, but also by the superficial reactions to it from some political  and religious folk.   I wrote a few years ago about “a pastor who sent a message to his congregation asking them to please pray for God to heal him.  He had a toothache!  In the midst of all the suffering, pain, and problems that no doubt plague his people, and most certainly exist in this world of ours, he asks his troubled people to pray for the healing of a toothache?  Such antics give me a headache.  I’m not asking you to pray for God to heal my headache, but I would suggest that if you are going to pray, pray for something more critical than either a toothache or a headache.” (In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says something bigger is here—something bigger than the temple, bigger than Jonah, bigger than Solomon).  It is a mistake to make small what is big.

Baffled I am, confused and perplexed, worried and befuddled, by the misinformation, disinformation, double-talk, partisanship, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories running rampant on social media and elsewhere.  This is a time for rational thinking, even thinking outside the boxes that hold us captive.  We must use our heads—even when we are “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.”