The Single Pandemic Life

Tonight, I am venturing pretty far afield from my usual subject matter, but I wanted to reflect a bit on the impacts of the last 2 + months of the pandemic and the associated physical distancing on me as a single person.

This is not something that I'm hearing people talking about--the impact of the pandemic on single people, especially the never-married variety of singles. Unless it's about the impact of the pandemic on dating--which, contrary to what the news media might lead me to believe, is not the only thing on our minds right now!

But as a single person who is neither in the "university, living with roommates" stage of life or in the "senior years" stage of life, I have come to a point where I'm in a minority among peers by virtue of my "not in a relationship, no children" status. So I have come to expect that my life situation is generally going to be underrepresented in the world around me. But I don't think that makes my experiences any less valid, and perhaps they're worth preserving if only for my future self to look back upon.

I am just about as introverted as they come, and I've been one of the lucky ones who has been able to keep going to work on a regular schedule throughout most of the past 2 months--stable job, work that I love, regular interaction with coworkers, and more Zoom meetings than a girl could ever wish for.

And friends, this pandemic and the need to stay at home has been lonely for singles of all ages, not only for those in the older age demographics. Except, based on things I hear, I think that people underestimate how hard it has been for singles who are not of retirement age.

When I got my hair cut not long ago, I went home feeling almost euphoric and couldn't immediately identify what that was all about--until I realized that the haircut had been the first time in weeks that I had experienced any significant human touch for weeks. And while I would never have identified that as a problem or something I was craving, it wasn't until after the fact that I realized how deeply that touch met a need that I hadn't even recognized that I had.

And I'm generally a pretty independent person, but I keep running up against tasks that require another human being to accomplish--simple things, from getting a signature on a form witnessed to cleaning my apartment and realizing that I have some furniture that I'd like to move, but that's complicated by the fact that I need another person to help carry it and that would require being allowed to be within 6 feet of another person--not recommended. I don't like to bother anyone at the best of times, and especially now when I know many of my friends are juggling parenting and teaching school lessons and keeping kids busy at home and working. So, the list of "I can'ts" grows longer.

I find myself moved to tears more than anything by any mention that there are people in my life who love me and care about me--because my world has been largely limited to my professional life and my quiet apartment, and the Netflix shows and podcasts that have been keeping me company in these last weeks simply aren't filling the void. It's just plain old getting lonely over here.

And the hardest part is, there's no really clear guidelines about when things might shift. Yes, restrictions here in Manitoba are starting to be lifted, and I'm so grateful. But there is still a lot of uncertainty about what the future holds, and what's okay and what's not.

I am a content single, and I love my life, my friends, my family, my work. And I really do empathize with the busyness that I know my friends who are juggling family and work responsibilities are experiencing right now. And I know that I will be okay, whatever the coming weeks hold.

But I'm also coming to understand how much I need other people, too--real, embodied people; people who know me and do life with me--a community to belong to--safe places where I can just be my authentic self--a healthy level of interdependency on others.

Healthy life lessons for me, things that I want to hold onto in life after the pandemic, whatever that looks like.

Grief, Interrupted

It is an unusual Easter this year for many of us. And in recognition of the fact that many of our normal Easter routines have been interrupted, I thought that I would share this sermon that I preached via live stream to my own congregation this morning. Sermons are really meant to be spoken, not read in print, but since this is a blog, written it shall be :) Christ is risen, friends. Even today. Christ is risen. Alleluia!

“Grief, Interrupted”

A Sermon Preached at Bethel Mennonite Church

Easter Sunday, April 12, 2020

Text: Luke 24: 1-12

Can I begin with a moment of personal honesty?

I struggled with writing the sermon for this morning’s worship service. This year, I have struggled to feel ready for joyful resurrection. The world is still too hard, the lurking danger of the pandemic that we are fighting still feels too real.

Before the sobering realities of COVID-19 really sunk in, I already had a good idea of the shape that I hoped these Holy Week services might take this year. As time has gone by, and our daily lives have shifted so dramatically, it has become very apparent that I would have to let go of these plans, these hopes, these dreams for what could have been. I would have to adjust my expectations, to know that I couldn’t look you in the eyes and see you looking back at me as I spoke these words, the way that I desperately wish I could.

All of which is to say that there was a very real grieving process that I had to go through in order to work my way back around to the good news of Easter.

I know I’m not alone in this. I know that many of you carry griefs of your own right now. Grief about family members who live in personal care homes or assisted living facilities where you can no longer visit them. Grief about family gatherings that won’t be able to happen this Easter, at least not in person. Grief about trips canceled, about jobs lost, about people you love who are sick, about deaths that have occurred for which funeral services or memorial services have had to be postponed or have looked dramatically different than you expected. Griefs about missing friends and classmates, and saying goodbyes in the midst of classes being moved home as schools have been closed. Reluctantly releasing hopes about how graduations and other life milestones might be celebrated. Profound loneliness. So much grief!

Grief that can feel oh, so heavy!

Grief that surely weighed upon the women early that Sunday morning as they set out at dawn to return to the tomb.  The same tomb where, just days ago, they had followed to see how his body was laid there. The tomb they had hurried home from in order to prepare the spices and ointments before the Sabbath started, before even this would have to wait until the appointed time of rest had finished.

Never has it struck me so clearly that the women left at the break of dawn that morning to go prepare a body. A real body, the body of a friend whose death they had witnessed with their own eyes, whose last words they had heard with their own ears. The body of a friend whom they had loved, and whom they dearly missed.

I wonder if part of the reason for their very early morning outing that day was that their collective sleep had not been good the night before, as grief can do to us. I wonder if they were glad for this concrete task, taking the spices and ointments to prepare the body, which at last gave them something familiar to do, as hard as it might be.

The good news of Easter doesn’t begin with loud hallelujahs, although that will certainly come. It begins at a tomb—a tomb in which a body had been laid, a tomb that by all accounts should still have held a body awaiting preparation for burial, a tomb which inexplicably lay empty.

Grief, interrupted.

The women swing from perplexed to terrified as two men in dazzling clothes appear at their sides from out of nowhere. Somehow, when I imagine myself among those women, I think that terrified is putting gently how I would have felt after the roller coaster of fear, grief, and confusion that culminated in this supernatural encounter on that first Easter Sunday. Really, there are no words!

They are already ducking and hiding their faces by the time these ‘men’ open their mouths to speak—and while I normally associate divine messengers with loud, booming proclamations--goodness, I hope they spoke the words gently, with voices filled with love and compassion! “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.”

And because the women had followed Jesus from Galilee, had been among those in his wider circle of disciples, had been listening intently to his teaching along the journey toward Jerusalem—they did remember what Jesus had told them.

So they pulled themselves together and regrouped. Which is something that I’ve hardly ever paid attention to in the past, but which I now imagine to be no small feat. There was no body to anoint. The thing that they thought they had set out to do, no longer needed doing. They had to figure out what to do with the unthinkably good, the unfathomably hopeful, with this interruption for which there were no instructions, no road map to follow, no prescribed next steps.

I imagine spilled spices lying discarded on the grass outside the tomb’s opening, a marker of the place where the encounter with God’s messengers that morning upended everything and sent them off on an entirely new mission.

When they return to tell the rest of the apostles of all that had happened at the tomb that morning, heart-wrenchingly, the men thought their words nothing more than an idle tale. It was only Peter who believed them enough to check things out for himself—and it was only when he saw the linen cloths, the remnants of the shroud, lying in the empty tomb that he truly believed.

Spilled spices and an abandoned linen shroud—perhaps these are the true markers of the first Easter. Signs of what is not, before there is yet any evidence of what is.

Resurrection begins with grief interrupted. And initially, that might look like puzzlement, fear, amazement, and cautious hope more than it does like overflowing, overwhelming joy and praise.

Because resurrection is disorientation, if ever there was such a thing! The body is missing—and bodies do not just go missing from tombs sealed shut with large stones. Bodies do not get up and leave because they’re tired of waiting for someone to come with the burial spices. Bodies do not stand up, carefully remove the shroud that has been wrapped around them, and carry on being, well, living bodies.

Except that it happened.

Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, Peter—they saw it with their own eyes. They heard it with their own ears. And they believed it in the depths of their very souls.

And because they did, because they dared to speak of the unspeakable, to share their idle tales even with those who would not believe—because they dared to allow grief to be transformed into audacious hope—so can we. So can I. So can you.

Today, on Easter morning, we stand looking in amazement at the spilled spices and the abandoned linen wrappings, and we are also invited to put our hope in the impossible.

We dare to proclaim it in the face of a news cycle that can feel impossibly heavy as we count presumptive positive cases and watch to see if the curve is indeed flattening; as we hear of the agony being experienced by those in areas where the death toll continues to climb exponentially; as we corporately speculate about how this will impact us in weeks and months and years to come—we dare to proclaim that in Jesus death does not have the last word, that the light shines in the darkness and that even now, the darkness has not overcome it.

And we pay attention to the things around us that might seem innocent enough at face value, but as we take a closer look seem to point to a higher truth. That aromatic dust was actually supposed to be the preparation for a burial that was not necessary. Those abandoned cloths littered thoughtlessly on the ground were in fact unwrapped from a corpse that is now eating and talking and whole among us.

While we gather for worship this morning via screens and phones from the safety of our own homes, staying apart for the sake of the common good, it is a profound act of love and care for our neighbours—an act of solidarity that is literally sustaining life in these days.

While I wish I could look each of you in the eyes this morning and wish you a happy Easter, in these last four weeks I have experienced so many examples of people reaching out in love by phone or email; I have seen Care Groups going to extraordinary lengths to support one another during these unusual times; I have witnessed people working hard to adapt our technology to allow us to continue to connect as much as possible as a church family until we can once again meet face to face; I have seen young adults step up to staff our food bank every other Monday, both meeting the needs of our neighbours and caring for people in higher risk demographics in our congregation by allowing them to stay home. All of these, and so many more, have been for me the spilled spices and abandoned linens that have served as powerful and tangible reminders to me that there’s another story at play here, one that is more powerful than the story that the world is offering me. A story of grief interrupted, a story of light and life and hope, a story of resurrection. Our story.

Friends, we are resurrection people.

I suspect that has never been a more powerful statement for us than it is this Easter, as we find ourselves nose-to-nose with the very reality of death in a way that my generation certainly has never before experienced.

We are resurrection people. And so, with some amazement, puzzlement, and even with some fear, we are called to embody Life even in the midst of death, in myriad different ways. We are called to be good news, even if it is scorned by some as idle tales. We are called to love with abandon, to spread hope as if it were contagious, to embrace the possibility of a good that is greater than any force in the world can offer.

We are resurrection people, now more than ever.

And so this morning, together we proclaim from all of the corners of the places where we are, the good news that we allow to shape our lives and change our paths; the good news that leads us to turn our eyes from the business of death to witness the miracle of capital-L life.

            Leader: Christ is Risen!

            All: He is Risen Indeed!  Alleluia!

            Leader: Christ is Risen!

            All: He is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!

Thanks be to God! Amen.

Ending the silence

News recently broke about Jean Vanier's sexual abuse of at least six women who came to him for spiritual direction.

I have no words for this yet. I've long admired his work and have spoken publicly about how his thinking about the nature of Christian community has been formational for me personally. To say that I'm deeply disappointed by this news really doesn't cut it, but I haven't yet found a better way to express the impact that these recent revelations have had on me. Like many others, I'm struggling to know how to hold onto deep admiration for the ongoing work of L'Arche, the community Vanier founded, and for his work as a theologian, while wholeheartedly stating that his actions toward these women were appalling.

This and a few other recent conversations have got me thinking about power dynamics in the Church, and about how they relate to my own experiences.

I cannot imagine the courage that it took for these women to speak out about the abuse they'd experienced at the hands of someone who was revered by so many.

Speaking out is hard, and many of us know all too well that speaking out doesn't always mean that we will be believed, that speaking out sometimes feels like it makes things worse, not better.

I thought about how power is used, and abused, in the Church. About how real the power afforded to clergy and others in church leadership is, and about how it can allow them to get away with much that should never be allowed.

I thought about the fact that I'm now a pastor, and about how much I want to believe that something like this could never happen in my congregation, on my watch. About how if someone ever came to me reporting misconduct, I hope I would believe them and act quickly and appropriately to help.

I thought about my own experiences, having grown up in and remained within the Church in one form or another throughout my life.

The truth is, I had no trouble quickly identifying three men in positions of power in the Church, in three different contexts in my life, who abused that power in different ways toward me in significant and intentional ways, in words and actions that hurt deeply.

Let me add quickly and firmly that none come from my current congregation or my current church context in any way.

And the truth is that I don't think I've ever spoken publicly about these situations before. I've shared the stories with close, trusted friends or family members, but even at the time when the #metoo conversation was at its height a few years ago, none of my experiences seemed "bad enough" to count.

Until a recent conversation made me realize that my silence on these things is not helping anyone, and that while I've told myself that none of these experiences was "really that bad," I'd be horrified if someone came to me and told me that one of these same experiences had happened to them. Until I realized that my silence might have allowed these individuals to continue to hold the power vested in them in a way that was at the expense of someone more vulnerable. Until I wondered about how prevalent experiences like mine really are.

All were wrong. None constituted sexual abuse, but all of them constituted a misuse of power to oppress or manipulate another person for their own gain.

That is not the way that I want my Church to operate.

But until we are willing to have hard conversations about how ministry leadership and power are connected--until we are ready to have hard and honest conversations about the fact that sometimes our very theology gives men a power over others that creates an environment conducive to such misuses of power and that makes it so hard for victims to bring such misuses of power to light, I fear that we aren't really getting to the heart of the issue.

I'm not sure yet how I want to speak about my own experiences, or to use my voice to advocate for changes that might make our congregations and faith communities safer and healthier for all people. I just know that I want to end my silence, in some small way--to take courage from the courage of others, to urge all of us to work for the safety of every person among us, to hope that I might in some way contribute to a safer Church for the little ones among us, to pray that they might grow up having a very different experience of church leaders than what some of mine has been.

I pray that someday stories like the news about Jean Vanier this week might be shocking to me, rather than disappointing.

Coming Home

Yesterday, the caregiving committee at our church hosted a session on "self-care for caregivers." The irony of the fact that I can tell others all about the importance of such a topic, while doing an abysmal job of practicing it myself, is not entirely lost on me.

At the break during the session, a congregation member asked me how I was doing at self-care these days. I had to admit that I could be doing better.

"Don't I remember you talking about how you have a chair?" he asked me.

Of course, I have multiple chairs--but I knew the one he was reminding me of. I have a particular chair, a comfortable one, where I only sit when I'm seeking out quiet time in God's presence.

It's been sitting vacant for longer than I care to admit right now.

I have struggled, to be honest, to find my own rhythm of staying spiritually connected with God and with my own deepest self, in the midst of learning the rhythms and demands of full-time ministry.

And at the same time, I've moved from one faith tradition rooted in a particular stream of Christian spirituality to another which has different gifts and finds its home in an entirely different stream of Christian spirituality. One which is rooted more firmly in an action-oriented, social justice stream of spirituality. It's a beautiful thing to witness--but it is simply not one of the streams of spirituality that I most naturally gravitate toward.

I've also come to realize that, for years spent trying to navigate a call to ministry in an often hostile environment, I learned to rely on the gift of God's inner voice to carry me through some pretty difficult seasons. I wonder now if God's voice wasn't exactly the gift that I needed for that season of my life--a grace given for the journey.

Now, I'm learning the beauty of hearing God's voice in the midst of the faith community in new and holy ways. But I do confess that I sometimes long for the clarity of encounter that I had so often experienced during those wilderness years.

Anyway, for a variety of reasons, I've struggled to give myself permission to find my way back to the practices and streams of Christian spirituality that restore my soul and that allow me to drink of the living water of God's presence, that nurture me and give me what I need in order to be able to offer the best of me to those I am called to walk alongside.

If I don't find a way to do that, as we were reminded yesterday, I'm not doing anyone else any favours by simply working harder and continuing to ignore my own self-care needs for sabbath and renewal.

So this morning I found my way back to my chair, without any easy answers but with a renewed sense of conviction that I need to find the patterns and practices that will allow me to serve as one "like a tree planted by streams of water, which bears its fruit in season" instead of as one who is trying desperately hard to manage of her own strength.

So thank you for the reminder. I've found my chair again, and today I showed up, and sometimes showing up is enough.