This week, California followed Italy, Spain, Ireland, and a few other nations, ordering it’s entire population to “shelter in place” for the common good, to practice self-imposed isolation, to “flatten the curve” of COVID19 infections, and ease the coming burden on our global medical facilities and personnel, and minimize illness and death. Economies are crumbling, governments are reeling, and people find themselves in an entirely new situation—life radically disrupted, fear more contagious than the novel corona virus, and this isolation terribly unwelcome. Churches like mine, so familiar with providing communities with the social relationships that can sustain us through life’s challenges, cannot meet for worship, and so, many of us preacher are turning to the digital web to offer solace, perspective, and spiritual grounding when people are grasping for something firm to hold on to.
So we’re home bound for an indefinite period of time (or supposed to be).
What do we do? How do we manage the fear, the disruption to our lives, the challenges we face? What are we going to do with and because of this difficult global experience?
Richard Hendrick, an Irish Roman Catholic friar, shared a poem on Facebook on March 13, as Ireland went into nationwide lockdown.
Yes there is fear, he wrote,
Yes there is isolation.
Yes there is panic buying.
Yes there is sickness.
Yes there is even death.
And then, before continuing, he used the word, “But.” “But” is an important word. It is a conjunction joining two thoughts together but in a contrasting way.
It’s a way of saying, “This is true, but there’s something else going on.” It’s a way of signaling that there is some kind of mischief afoot.
Yes there is fear,
Yes there is isolation.
Yes there is panic buying.
Yes there is sickness.
Yes there is even death.
But something else is happening, something else is at work among us despite the suffering (which I do not want to minimize in any way). All this pain and disruption could be, as Jesus once said to his followers at another difficult time, the beginning of birth pangs. If we are wise, if we find creative ways to constructively engage the calamity, we could help the world enter a new era, an experience we could not create on our own; we in our hubris have thought too long that we are more powerful than we are; we have for too long believed we are above nature and can control it; we have forgotten that we are merely participants in the great Web of Life, part of the Web, called to offer our gifts for the wellbeing of the whole; we are never its masters. Humanity is not the goal of nature; nature is it’s own goal and we are merely part of it.
We are being humbled, humiliated in the true sense of the word: brought back down into the humus from which we came, where the dance of life and death take place continually, and where forces always conspire to restore the balance when it’s lost.
This tumult will pass and then we’ll learn if humanity has learned anything at all—if we will participate constructively in the creation of something new for us and for the planet which is our common home.
So, what do we do?
First, comply with the shut down as much as possible and make it a spiritual practice.
A fallow season is being forced upon each of us, upon the human race—a time to regroup, rethink, and recover values, assumptions, habits, and intentional practices.
Every religious tradition values a period of stillness, respite, and focused spiritual practice that reconnects us to what matters most. In Jewish and Christian traditions this is called the Sabbath. I urge you to stop resisting this quiet period that’s been forced upon us. Jesus once said that if God’s Word was silenced, even the stones would cry out. I wonder if we have become so unbalanced in our relationship with the Earth, with each other, and with ourselves that the Earth has called us back to a moment of reassessment. I’m not saying that this pandemic is sent from God. It is not. It is a consequence of life on this planet. Diseases are part of the cycle of nature, what it means to be part of the humus of the Earth.
So practice Sabbath.
There are a lot of us who just won’t stop unless our bodies force us; this time the whole of our humanity, the Body of Christ, is forcing us.
Stop for Christ’s sake—for your sake, for all of us.
Second, look for the beauty that’s all around you. Wonder is a gift to the soul. We cannot live well without wonder. And beauty is the way we wander into wonder.
Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of my rabbis (and every Christian minister ought to have a Jewish rabbi) died in 1972. Several years before he died, he suffered a near fatal heart attack. “When I regained consciousness,” he said, “I felt only gratitude for my life, for every moment I had lived. I realized that what I’d prayed so many years earlier had been answered; I had asked God not for success, but for wonder.”
May these days lead you into wonder—maybe only fleeting moments, but fleeting wonder is better than no wonder at all. And beauty is the way in to wonder.
Watch for beauty. Create beauty. Defend beauty. Cherish beauty. Magnify beauty.
Third, memorialize what you learn during this fallow season, especially the lessons learned through hardship and suffering. What I mean is this: we will all change. Some of these changes need to be permanent, indelible, enduring if you, and the rest of us, are to thrive, let alone survive.
If you will commit yourself to make some permanent changes because of all this, if we all do, we all will have a chance to turn these pains into the pangs of birth, something new for our lives, something new for the Earth.
Yes there is fear,
wrote Richard Hendricks a week ago.
Yes there is isolation.
Yes there is panic buying.
Yes there is sickness.
Yes there is even death.
But,
They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other
Across the empty squares,
Keeping their windows open
So that those who are alone
May hear the sounds of family around them.
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland
Is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know is busy spreading fliers
With her number through the neighbourhood
So that the elders may have someone to call on.
Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples
Are preparing to welcome
And shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting
All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way
All over the world people are waking up to a new reality
To how big we really are.
To how little control we really have.
To what really matters.
To Love.
So we pray and we remember that
Yes there is fear.
But there does not have to be hate.
Yes there is isolation.
But there does not have to be loneliness.
Yes there is panic buying.
But there does not have to be meanness.
Yes there is sickness.
But there does not have to be disease of the soul
Yes there is even death.
But there can always be a rebirth of love.
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now.
Today, breathe.
Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic
The birds are singing again
The sky is clearing,
Spring is coming,
And we are always encompassed by Love.
Open the windows of your soul
And though you may not be able to touch across the empty square,
Sing.
