These are challenging times. In ways that we are sick of talking about, our usual touchstones routinely, even silently, counted on to keep us oriented and grounded have been moved - or removed, altogether. Yes, faith communities continue to call the faithful to worship, but on a screen, rather than in a room. Restaurants send their culinary arts out the door in bags rather than into the dining room on trays. Parks are closed. Theaters are closed. Coffee shops are closed. We remain apart. To the extent that we move among each other at all it is behind masks out of an abundance of caution and concern for one another.
It’s changing, I know. Restrictions are gradually being lifted. Businesses are reopening. Orders are expiring. Beaches are crowding. The pretense is filtering out that “life is getting back to normal.”
And yet the "normalcy" is more aspirational than actual. Fear persists. Caution lingers. Disorientation is the new orientation. We’ve long since given up on knowing who to trust. Trust, itself, has become politicized. Those we counted on to have our collective best interests in the foreground have demonstrated a bias toward lesser, more calculated concerns. At the very time we need each other, we feel increasingly alone.
And from the highest office to which we have looked over the decades, in times of war and tragedy, terrorism and natural disaster, for leadership and bearing and a call to our best cultural self we get nothing but nonsensical, self-interested dissembling, perfidy and prevarication.
It is maddeningly sad. At the very time we need a cup of cool water we are routinely handed sand. Or broken glass.
Meanwhile, I’ve found myself keeping interesting intellectual company - brooding over the intersection of 3 pieces of spiritual wisdom that have intruded themselves upon my time of pandemic-imposed physical isolation. One, from Pema Chödrön, Buddhist practitioner, teacher and writer, whose older but suddenly timely book is titled, “When Things Fall Apart”, and whose counsel is that everything does, indeed, fall apart - even that which crumbles the good, inevitably itself falls apart.
Another, from the 14th C. English mystic, Julian of Norwich, to whom was shown the assurance, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”
And finally, a nagging teaching of the Apostle Paul, from 1 Thessalonians 5.
“Be at peace among yourselves. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all. Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances…”
I sit with them all, open-handed; receiving; arguing.
Drinking in.
Chewing.
The words are still settling into my soul. I’m not sure what sense to make - or counsel to take - from the intersection of these three:
An observation;
A confidence;
An instruction.
But the conversation among them, across centuries and geographies and circumstances and devotions - a conversation into which they have now invited me - continues to be both provocative and, strangely, centering.
The facts, of course, remain. The virus still encircles and infects us. Our leaders still disappoint us. Our lifestyles are still in disarray. Things do, indeed, fall apart. It is the nature of things. Entropy and all that.
And yet all shall be well. All manner of things shall be well.
In the meantime, we have work to do:
Rejoicing
Praying
And in all circumstances - even these odd and disorienting ones -
Give thanks.
It's a challenging assignment. And I'm hardly at my best.
But I’ll see what I can do.
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