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

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...

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...

CMFTMs 2: "I Want to Schtup Santa Claus."

You are not coming to a CMFTM for originality, or if you are, you'll be pretty disappointed. They're making these babies on the fly, baby, Time is Money, so who has time for originality? As such, most CMFTMs fall into certain oft-used-and-abused genres. Someone even made a handy bingo scorecard of Christmas movie tropes. Today's genre is "I Want to Schtup Santa Claus." This is an interesting genre of holiday movies that seems targeted to Gen X – Boomer females. Why does this appeal to us? I conjecture it’s because of the stop action animation special, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town” in which a scarily thin Jessica-the-Teacher meets Kris Kringle, he gives her a doll, they get married by the Winter Miser and then she’s allowed to get nice and fat, and he still sits next to her, seemingly still in love, and eternally celebrating Christmas, but without bills or family members, or any of those other pesky things that make Christmas, ...

Boots and Blessings

Search This Blog