Skip to main content

Learning to Live Underwater

There is an old Unitarian Universalist joke:

Hearing that a great flood was coming, the Catholics said their rosaries and the Buddhists used their beads, the Congregationalists joined in prayer, and the Unitarian Universalists formed a class to try to learn to live underwater.


Well, friends, I believe it's time to start up those classes. For us, it's not living underwater, it's figuring out how to learn to live under quarantine.

Smart people are looking at what has happened thus far with coronavirus, and what our country is not willing to do, and it seems clear that this is not going to be a short inconvenience. We have to face reality. Many of my choral musician friends are in grief this week, because they are doing just that. They are looking at the information available, and concluding that "there is no safe way for singers to rehearse together until there is a COVID-19 vaccine and a 95% effective treatment in place, .... (estimated as) at least 18-24 months away."

Whew.

Okay, first:

Take time to absorb this. Take time to grieve. Remember that grief presents in many different ways, including anger. Try not to do too much damage to relationships as you grieve.

Please don't kill the messenger, however the news comes to you. If you want to protest, I'm not going to argue with you. I hope the experts are wrong. I hope I'm wrong.

And - preparing for this does not mean that we can't change it all if suddenly a vaccine occurs or a significant treatment. Wouldn't that be great?

But after you've fully grieved ... take a deep breath, and begin thinking of this as a period in which we will do things in a different way. Church, definitely. Perhaps school. Work.

Love. How will we love one another during this time?

We are not the first people whose lives have suddenly changed and will remain changed for a while. After Pearl Harbor, people in the United States did not expect the war to be over in a couple of months. They didn't know when it would end, but they knew they were in for a long haul.

It's time to learn to live underwater. Not for forever. This will end. But for a while.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Me and My Collar

You may run into me on a Friday, in my neighborhood, so it's time I let you know what you might see. When I was doing my required unit of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE), my supervisor suggested that any of us who came from traditions where a clerical collar was an option, take one "collar week," to see how we were treated, as opposed to wearing regular professional clothes. After a couple of days, I joked to the Catholic priest, "How do you manage the power?" In regular clothes, I would walk into a patient's room, and it would take about 5 or so minutes of introductions and pleasantries before we could really get down to talking about their feelings, their fears, the deep stuff. With most people, as soon as that clerical collar walked in the room, with me attached, they began pouring out all the heavy stuff they were carrying. I was riding the bus back and forth every day, and though not quite so dramatic, the collar effect was alive there, to...
10 comments
Read more

Beloved Community: The Now and Not Yet

Rev. Christine Robinson has a great little post up about the phrase "beloved community" and why it's problematic to use that to describe a church. Like her mom, I can get cranky about the whole thing, but my crankiness lies in the misuse of what is, to me, such a breathtaking and profound concept. Martin Luther King, Jr., someone whose words I study in great detail, is the one we often think of as originating the term, but he learned about it through the writings of Josiah Royce. Josiah Royce (right) with close friend William James.  Royce was a philosopher, studying Kant, Hegel. I imagine he would have enjoyed Koestler's theory of the holon , because he saw humanity as being both individuals and part of a greater "organism" that was community. As King's belief about Beloved Community would be rooted in agape , Royce's philosophy stemmed from what he called loyalty, and by that he meant, "the practically devoted love of an individual f...
6 comments
Read more

To Love the Hell Out of the World

To love the hell out of the world means to love it extravagantly, wastefully, with an overpouring abandon and fervor that sometimes surprises even yourself. That love flows out of you, sometimes slow and steady, sometimes in a torrent, sometimes filled with joy, sometimes with fierceness, or anger, or a heartbreaking pain that makes you say, "No, no, I can't take this anymore. I can't do anymore. It's too much ... too much." But it's too late. You've opened up your own heart, your own mind, body, and strength, and yes, it is too much. But there's also so much love that comes crashing down on you, gifts from the Heavens in the form of the smiles and cares from others, a giggle burbling up from a toddler's fat little belly, the soft, sweet smell of star jasmine catching you unaware, not knowing where it came from ... but it's here. And you're here. And just to live, just to exist, swells your heart with enough gratitude and love that you mu...
2 comments
Read more