Life is changing. Everyone knows it. At this point though, no one can say for sure how. What “normal” will be after this? It’s too soon to tell what’s merely on hold and what’s gone for good.
So, we are grieving without being sure what it is, exactly, that we’re grieving. That means there’s a generous splash of anxiety added to this pandemic cocktail of grief we’ve been served. And that’s a potent combination for those who don’t tolerate anxiety well. Who want rush us back to a ‘normal’ that in reality, may no longer exist.
Opening businesses. Going out to eat again. Shaking hands.
As nice as that might sound in theory, in practice, the price of a premature return to ‘normal’ may be the deaths of thousands and thousands of our friends, neighbors and even family.
Now, more than ever, it takes faith to navigate the shifting reality we are in the middle of. Not faith as in, ‘believing.’ No. Faith in its pure form. Trusting.
Faith that lets us live with anxiety and somehow manage to thrive in the face of it. Or at least consider the possibility of thriving in the face of it.
Today, I mowed the grass. Grass grows with wild abandon at this time of year. Thick and lush enough to choke the lawn mower. I kept having to restart. Yank the starter cord, once, twice, three times, the engine finally clearing its throat, coughing back to life.
But the grass resists the only way that grass can; volume and sheer force of will. I kept having to restart the mower.
Such will to live feels out of place while we’re hunkering down. When nothing feels lush or thick enough to halt its own demise. Instead, we feel vulnerable and exposed. The emotional season we are living is out of step with the calendar. I have trouble just remembering what day it is anymore.
Going to the grocery store, stopping to pick up a prescription or, heaven forbid, a burger, has become an act of sheer reckless necessity. A reminder of our own mortality. Now or sometime later.
An inevitable sense of finitude guides our shopping cart down the gleaming, empty aisles where we hope to find toilet paper or paper towels.
And maybe that’s why I was struck and moved almost to the point of tears, when I reached to start the lawn mower again and noticed the cherry blossoms just beginning to shake out their lacy pink gowns.
And there, in the beds I built last year, the perennials I planted, many of which I don’t remember, pushing their way through the soil into the chilly air, the blinding sun, as though to remind me what they are and to remind me who I am.
It takes faith to perceive the order flowing beneath the turbulence and uncertainty we are living. To recognize it when we see the first tentative signs of it reaching out of the soil.
Faith, so we will extend compassion to each other. Give assistance where it is needed, and be patient, so we will all thrive together in the season that is coming.
Charles Oberkehr 