I ended that post by pointing to an article I came across recently in The Guardian, which can be found here. The writer spent two decades in prison. She shares here what that isolation taught her about life, and writes:
Solitude challenges you to look at things differently. Before prison, my worldview had been rather limited and selfish. I was known to throw terrible tantrums as I tried to bend reality to my will, but peace depended on my bending to reality. Life wasn’t all about me. I had to learn what was within my control and what wasn’t. I also discovered that time exists in relation to an emotion or experience, and it slowed or sped according to my ability to be present. So, I learned how to flow with it, not rushing nor procrastinating, but fully engaged in whatever was before me…What did that look like? It was as simple as just paying attention. I read books carefully. I listened to others deeply. I stopped mindlessly flipping through the channels of my mind. I gave my full attention to every activity, no matter how small it might be. Full engagement strengthened my gratitude, and gratitude strengthened my will.That has implications for church folk like me, but it's really about navigating life. And it provides a good segue to this follow-up post. Here is my alternative Top Ten list, intended to take a broader view, and for a wider audience.
1. We need to acknowledge that grief is real. We have all experienced loss in the past month and that needs to be named. Adrenaline will kick in for a while but eventually it brings us back to loss. What we are living through, as a planet and as local communities is really hard. We move through loss differently - based on our own biographies and capacities. For a time we can focus on the tasks at hand. But denial is not just a river in Egypt. We need to allow ourselves to feel our way beyond "this isn't happening" to those stages of grief that include sadness and anger and fear and isolation. And then, try not to get stuck there. Richard Rohr (and many others) have noticed that pain that is not transformed is transmitted. So we need to pay attention to the pain that we and others are experiencing. It's real.
2. We will all die. How is that for a cheery segue?! Yet it is even more certain than taxes. Yet we all swim in the water of a culture that acts as if death is a failure. We say that so and so "lost their battle to cancer," suggesting that death won! Death always wins! At least penultimately. (This is my "real world" edition so I won't preach an Easter sermon here but the point is that even in my faith tradition there is no Easter without Good Friday!) The point is that when people live a good and long life we often feel it is not enough - if only they'd eaten less red meat! Then what? They might have gotten another month or two? It is, of course, a far more bitter pill to swallow when someone dies before their time. Billy Joel may have been overstating it when he sang that only the good die young, but we all know that plenty of good and even great people die young. So a global pandemic - a plague, if you will, is as good a time as any to remember that we are mortal. We are creatures, not Creator. We are dust. We breathe in and we breathe out. Until we don't.
3. We therefore only have today to live. This is the good news we discover once we face our own mortality; that living is a gift. Over the past twenty-five years I have had exactly two spiritual directors, both of them very talented and wise Episcopal priests. The first, Pierre, was a former Jesuit (Roman Catholic) who had become an Episcopalian. The second, Curtis, is a monk with the Society of St. John the Evangelist, an Episcopal monastic order. When I say this, I don't mean to minimize their incredible giftedness. But essentially there is just one theme to which each of them in his own way has constantly brought me back. Now. So far as I can tell, this is the wisdom at the heart of every great spiritual tradition. It is also at the heart of twelve-step programs. We cannot change what happened yesterday, or last year, or when we were growing up. Nor can we control what will happen tomorrow, or next year, or when we die. There are some more and less healthy ways to learn from the past and to anticipate tomorrow. But as we breathe in and breathe out, on this day, that is real. And the more we are able to be in touch with that, the more we can give thanks for "the sacramentality of the present moment." (Jean-Pierre de Caussaude.)
4. Slow down, you move too fast. Again this is not a new learning for me but it's one I forget too often. I have mostly been a driven person, most of my life, and that's a part of my make-up. (Although I do find in the latter part of my fifties has made this way less true than it was when I was thirty. Another post,for another time...) Driven people have "places to go." Fast. I became a father at twenty-seven years old. I can remember walking with my son, Graham, who never wanted to go in a straight line or get to where we were going fast. I might have felt like the goal was to walk to a park where there was a swing and Graham would be happy when we did that but he was just as happy seeing all there was to see "on the way." He, and later his younger brother James, became teachers of mine because they slowed down my pace. And I saw things I would otherwise have missed. That has been happening for me again on daily walks. My pace has moved from driving on the Mass Pike speeds to walking, and I don't move as fast as I once did. It's amazing what you notice when you slow down.
6. There is beauty all around us. When you do slow down (especially in April in New England) you notice signs of new life. Certainly in nature. You hear the birds of the air, and you see the green blade rising as the earth comes back to life again. But it's also in people. We have some neighborhood kids who have taken to writing inspirational messages in chalk on the sidewalk, and painting stones and leaving them around with one word messages like joy, and hope, and love, and peace. New England is not known for it's southern hospitality. Normally, if you walk past someone who is coming the other way it is not considered (too) rude to look away. Really warm outgoing people look up, and smile. I'm only kidding a little bit. I always experience culture shock in the south. But that's been different lately. A lot of people are out there walking and slowing down and I think craving human interaction. And so people smile even if you only see it in their eyes since they are wearing a mask. People say "hello in there" even if it's from a safe, responsible distance. Life really is beautiful.
6. My life can be even simpler. Anyone who knows me knows I'm not really into "stuff." We have a nice home but we still mostly have the furniture we bought when we were newlyweds. I drive a Hybrid RAV-4; I love that car but it's quite practical. I only buy new clothes when the old ones wear out or don't fit any more. We do love to travel, and being in seclusion has not taken away my desire to travel more. In fact, I can't wait to go somewhere. My passions are good wine and good food and I'm happy to go out for those, but more often it's home-cooked for us. I do still believe, more than a month into being secluded and more than ever, that life is too short to drink cheap wine. During this time I've resumed a very old habit (going back to seminary) of baking bread. In other words, I don't feel a call to Franciscan poverty but I do feel a rekindled awareness to commit, or recommit, to living simply so that others may simply live. I am even more aware than ever that I don't live on the edge of poverty, and therefore even more grateful for daily bread. It is enough.
7. Ayn Rand was an idiot (and so is Rand Paul.) Every political and social theory has something to teach us, I suppose. But libertarianism is for selfish juvenile narcissists. John Donne got it right: no man is an island. No woman either. We need more than individual rights and this pandemic reminds us just why public health and good social policy and the greater good matter. Should we worry when individual rights are restricted? Of course. But individual rights are not the only good. We rely on one another and there really are "essential" workers out there to whom we all owe a huge debt of gratitude now and when this is behind us. And when we don't pay those essential workers a livable wage; shame on us. We have to have a serious conversation in our neighborhoods and in this nation about our core values. And that's got to be about more than a distortion of the second amendment that leads to a fetishization of guns and a fixation on individual liberties over the common good. That is never what made this country great. Not even close.
8. Leadership matters. I'm not talking about partisan politics here but this does follow from number seven. Politics is one place where leadership can be exercised, or abused. It is not the president's fault that COVID-19 exists or even that it has spread. But it is his fault that he failed to listen to the scientists and it is his fault that he failed to act, and it is his fault that he has used his briefings to replace his rallies, to berate and belittle the press who are trying to do their jobs. He seems to be immune from learning from his mistakes. In contrast, I would offer two governors from two different parties and with two different styles: Andrew Cuomo of New York and Charlie Baker of Massachussetts. Neither one is perfect. But both are smart enough, and both understand, either by who they are or by what they have learned to be non-anxious in the midst of a crisis: to listen, to learn, to lead. Of course there are many others in less visible places. And there are other governors out there - again from both parties. But I offer these two as examples of what it looks like. We can argue policy after this is all over but the thing is that you could sit down in a room with Andrew Cuomo and Charlie Baker and have an intelligent conversation about policy because both of them are leaders. As a nation we need to have that again in Washington.
9. It is indeed a small world, after all. We need bridges, not walls, to survive together. Even if you shut down flights from China to the United States, viruses can come in from Europe. Even if you shut down Europe, viruses can travel from coast to coast. We can get through this time of flattening the curve, but when it's all over we need to find ways to be more committed to global health and the work of the World Health Organization, not less. We need to be more committed to the work of the United Nations, not America first. What happens halfway around the world has the potential to affect the whole planet and this includes climate change, pandemics, the economy and just about everything else. We are connected. No man or woman is an island; no nation, either.
10. Simple acts of kindness bring meaning to our days. No one reading this needs me to tell you this, I'm sure. But we can all do with reminders. We need to be gentle with each other - always but especially now. Everything feels "magnified"- both good and bad. If someone is really struggling but can't get their stuff together and takes it out on someone else, that spreads as surely as COVID-19. And if someone offers a kind word, a smile, a roll of toilet paper, that spreads too. In the midst of big challenges, it is still the little things that make all the difference. In the midst of physical distancing we can all find ways to reconnect socially. Not too long ago I walked into a virtual bar with three high school friend on Zoom. We toasted each other and had a drink together and we told old stories. Would we have preferred to meet up in person? Of course. But even in normal times the logistics of that happening when we live in Virginia and New Jersey and Massachusetts and Vermont. So we carved out forty minutes or so and we had a beer together. Simple and powerful. For me there have been similar stories with extended family at Easter; I thought our table was shrunk down to two but in fact we "saw" more family than we ever could have fit in our dining room. Finding ways to connect with family, friends, and strangers doesn't negate hardship but it does begin to make meaning.
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