In a recent email to FMC’s Service & Outreach Committee, committee Chair Janet Guthrie offered this frame of realistic hope from Arundhati Roy:
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. (“The Pandemic is a Portal,” Financial Times, April 3, 2020).
The same question surfaced yesterday in a planning meeting for the 2021 Illinois Interfaith Conference (the next iteration of last fall’s “Cultivating Hope” interfaith project). As we discussed themes and speakers for a program expected in March/April 2021, we found ourselves asking, What will the world be like then? On the heels of a major national election, still dealing with the ongoing effects of COVID-19, how will we speak to the pandemic and political moment – whatever it may be? What lessons are we learning? What new world is emerging?
Likewise, the FMC all-church retreat committee is pressing on with plans for a September 4-6 retreat (although the prospect of an all-church gathering in the early fall looks less and less likely each day). We asked what it will be like to come together again, and we chose a theme, “Lamentation & Joy.” The idea is rooted in the psalms of lament, which are gifts that walk us through the work of naming pain, loss, devastation, and into trust and hope in God’s new future. The psalms of lament are a portal that call on God to make our grief a portal between one world and the next.
Psalm 13 is one of the shortest and simplest. The psalmist sings despair:
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?
How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I bear pain in my soul,
and have sorrow in my heart all day long?
The uncertainty and the grief is heavy. There is no recovering the lost hugs with grandchildren or the missed playdates or the major life events that pass by with so few people to share them with. Every Sunday we don’t sing together is a Sunday we cannot get back. Every Friday night without friends is one less connection made.
The losses are real, and we must name them. Even those things we might ultimately want to lose need to be grieved. I have longed for a world with fewer cars, more local food, and a greater sense of connection to my physically proximate neighbors. Each of these comes with loss, even while it raises the possibility for beauty, health, and joy. Perhaps one of the lessons of pandemic life is that we need to learn to grieve well if we hope to leave behind our baggage and imagine a new world.
The singer of Psalm 13 ends like this:
But I trusted in your steadfast love;
my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
I will sing to the Lord,
because God has dealt bountifully with me.
It’s rare that any one of us aligns all at once with the whole trajectory of a lament psalm: from a desperate plea to a confession of hope to a declaration of trust. But that’s precisely the point. The lament psalms are a communal task. Together we name the pain and the loss and together we raise the banner of hope in God’s steadfast love.
I think this is one of our collective callings in the coming weeks and months. This is how we will imagine what is possible on the other side of the pandemic portal: to be good and honest in our grief so that we are free to embrace what unexpected hope may grow out of the ashes.
Reflecting on grief, Jan Richardson offers “God of the Living: A Blessing“
When the wall
between the worlds
is too firm,
too close.When it seems
all solidity
and sharp edges.When every morning
you wake as if
flattened against it,
its forbidding presence
fairly pressing the breath
from you
all over again.Then may you be given
a glimpse
of how weak the walland how strong what stirs
on the other side,breathing with you
and blessing you
still,
forever bound to you
but freeing you
into this living,
into this world
so much wider
than you ever knew.