As I begin today I am aware that many in this community are struggling under the weight of sickness, isolation, financial stress, concern for loved ones, exhaustion from working and taking care of children, and much more. I pray that God uses my words to bring hope and encouragement. I pray that my words today help us commune more closely with God and prepare the way for Christ in our midst – who is both already here and coming.
My reflections today are influenced by reading Richard Rohr’s work, beginning to practice Centering Prayer, and learning from mystics who write about unitive consciousness – that all creation and people are interconnected. I am also reading the work of activists, who illuminate new ways of thinking and being in the world. These ideas are newer to me, than they are to many of you, and have been helping me dream… to make space to imagine and to make space for God to speak into the specifics of my life and this historical context. To imagine how God is breaking into our world, taking on smallness, and the particular, in order to become more visible and knowable to us, because God’s love is bigger, deeper, and more passionate than I can imagine.
My Dreams for Advent
In this advent season, my dream is of people making space to grieve and stay with the dark reality of our present moment. I know that this might sound morbid or depressing, but I believe that the process of grief a gift – a means of honoring the Sacred, deepening awareness of the interdependence of all things, and transforming people and communities into the Kingdom of God.
Grief includes deep sorrow over death and loss. It is an emotional and embodied experience. Grief is also an admission of connection and is a statement that the person who suffers and the people who are lost matter. It is an admission of vulnerability. Therefore, grief can be very scary, because losing someone brings up the fact that we are not in control and life is uncertain. We are vulnerable. Grief and mourning, require submission to a process that can feel overwhelming, but when surrendered to, and moved through, grief can change a person’s experience of themselves and their lens on the world. I believe that this could be an important corrective to our present moment and the American way of rugged individualism, competition, consumerism, and commercialism. In fact, grieving lends itself to nonviolence – whereas denying the loss, denying the subjectivity and sacredness of life lends itself to violence.
Grief for This Day
Our culture makes decisions about what lives are grieveable, and people make choices about whether or not to submit to grief (which entails letting go of control and facing vulnerability and loss). During this pandemic, lives are being lost in the hundreds of thousands, with over 2,000 people dying per day recently. American Indians are dying at about 2.6 times the rate of white people and Black and Latinx people are dying at 2.8 times the rate of white people. I don’t know about you, but I have to take time to look for the names of people who have died. I don’t see much national leadership in saying the names, sharing their stories, and expressing sorrow for the people who have died and their families. Instead our country has a history, and present culture, where some lives don’t matter, or only matter to the extent that they lead to wealth for those in the owner class. And as Judith Butler says it, some people are de-realized and de-personalized, such that their lives are made not real, not alive with strength and vulnerabilities. We render people ungrieveable, in order to justify hierarchies, injustice, and cruelty.
“Paradoxically, in naming the loss, we also name the connection; in naming the darkness we declare the light.”
Grief, on the other hand, is an admission that people are connected. And this is a basis for community, ethical responsibility, and nonviolence. Saying the names and examining the inequality, could be a step toward honestly reckoning with and transforming the injustice. We don’t do this well as a nation, and I’m afraid that it leaves people with disenfranchised grief, feeling alone, and unsupported. Like if no one acknowledges this death, did this life matter? But these lives do matter and my dream is for us to say their names. Paradoxically, in naming the loss, we also name the connection; in naming the darkness we declare the light.
For me, nothing feels more appropriate for the 2020 Advent season.