The cat is driving me crazy. She’s a little annoyed by us working from home more, having been accustomed to her days alone and uninterrupted sleep. Near the beginning of Arizona’s shutdown, I handed her through the car window to a veterinary tech; as a result of that visit, she’s been on steroids for about a month. She’s almost seventeen, so this is the best way to treat current health problems that we’re not worried about curing.
However, a cat on steroids is just as bad as a human on steroids. About a week in, her appetite doubled, maybe tripled. She is now known as the hobbit, hopeful for second anything. Any time we walk near her food bowl, she’s hopeful for more food. She has dry food all the time; she’d just rather have the (expensive) canned rabbit. She’s gotten second dinner a few times. It doesn’t seem to have sated her hunger.
Her thirst has increased with her hunger, and we are regularly scolding her for sticking her head in one of our drinks. It is not uncommon for every glass to end up in the dishwasher as a result. I should note that not only does she have a water bowl that is full, it is actually a water fountain so that the water doesn’t get stale and unappealing. It was a recent Christmas present and we can talk about me becoming that person another day.
Oh—I missed all the extra energy from steroids in my summary of complaints about the cat. Luckily, she cannot share her complaints about me.
But I am also remembering how I got the cat, more than seven years ago now. One of my college professors lost her husband in a plane crash; her childhood sweetheart had lost his wife to cancer. They got married. She was not a cat person, but he had three cats from his first marriage. They went to work on rehoming the cats after a few months of marriage. His daughter ended up with two of the cats. I got my cat, transported from Virginia to Kansas City by my professor and her new husband. They arrived just in time for Thanksgiving dinner with me.
The cat’s original owner has since died of cancer, too. It was a shockingly aggressive cancer caused by Agent Orange from his service in Vietnam. My partner and I went to his funeral in Nashville, somehow more connected by the cat he was so glad we loved. The primary way we could care for him during his illness was to send cat pictures.
Somehow, the cat remains a symbol of connection stretching across the years. I even talk to her previous owners more often because she is in my care. As we sit in this pandemic that both isolates and connects us at the same time, I think most of us will come away with neighbor stories. Some of them are good stories of comfort and friendship; others are stories of neighbors like mine who start drinking at 10 a.m.
But at the end of the day, the command to love your neighbor is about remembering the ways we are connected and honoring them. In my case, an uncharacteristically annoying cat still turns me to my neighbor. Maybe even more importantly, those connections remind me that I have neighbors who love me, too. And we’ll probably have some good stories to tell along the way.
Year after year on Easter Sunday we joyously proclaim, “We are an Easter people!” But, Easter Sunday 2020 came and went. We find ourselves still wandering through a Lenten desert – not knowing when or how the nightmarish suffering and everyday losses wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic will end.
Passover prayers echo from our lips as losses mount in every state and nation. We collectively grieve illness and death, economic woes, lack of resources and healthcare, and not being able to live, learn, work, play, or worship as we normally do. Every aspect of culture is full of change that brings loss, and loss that brings grief.
There is a profound gospel message to be found in our grief this Easter season that requires some real daring to receive. It is this: Our beloved resurrection story does not change the fact that our grief will always be with us. Grief is as much a part of our human story and experience as is the Love of God.
The healing potency of Easter Sunday that often gets buried in the reverie of joyous celebration is that this holiest of days is set at the intersection of the Lenten and Easter seasons. It is that place in the Christian calendar where sorrow and joy, despair and hope, life and death meet to remind us that God’s love is present with us through it all. The same is true for grief. Although grief is often misunderstood to be synonymous with sorrow, like Easter Sunday, grief is found at the intersection of celebration and suffering. So, as we make our way through the Easter season, we have no choice but to take our grief with us.
We humans grieve when we lose what we cherish. But despite the fact that grief is born out of all good things in life, we often regard grief as an enemy to be eradicated. I beg you to consider (and invite your loved ones to consider) that grief is not the enemy. In fact, grief is that part of us that serves as a motivator and catalyst for healing – if only we will give grief a chance to work its wonders.
This wisdom story from India, retold in my forthcoming book, Doing Grief in Real Life: A Soulful Guide to Navigate, Loss, Death & Change, serves as an allegory for the intense challenge grievers face in responding to grief:
A youth wanted to befuddle the elder of the village. The old one was said to be exceedingly wise. But the young challenger imagined that youthful wit could outdo the wisdom of the rickety old sage. So, the youth caught a little bird, carried it to the elder, and hiding it between young hands not yet worn or weary, the youth announced:
“I have a riddle for you, old one. Here in my hands is a bird. Tell me – is the bird alive, or is it dead?”
The youth delighted in the game. There was no way for the elder to win. If the old one ventured to guess “dead,” an open hand would release the little creature and the bird would fly free. If the elder guessed “alive,” the youth would set a fist and crush the bird at once.
But the old one looked into the eyes of the young seeker and replied with care, “The answer, my child, is in your hands.”
Such is the puzzle of grieving. Grieving is a life-and-death challenge to which our spirits inquire, however silently or soulfully: “How will we hold our grief?” Will we crush it with silence, denial, a forced sense of victory, or will we open ourselves to grief as a teacher that reminds us how to live fully and freely?”
In our culture, we mistakenly view grief as something that happens to us, like a Covid-19 virus from which we desire to quickly recover. But grief is as common to the human condition as hope or love. Proposing that we “recover from grief,” is like proposing that we recover from being human. There is no such thing as a cure for grief. There is only this: learning to grow our capacities for grieving in ways that inspire healing. Grieving and healing, in fact, are one and the same.
Most of us have only a vague understanding of what grief is and how it affects us. So, let me give you a crash course: There is no universal grieving path. Researchers have proven many times over that stages and phases of grief are a myth from the past. Even so, our foremost grief experts continue to argue among themselves about how grief and grieving ought to be defined. Each one of us (grief experts included) come to grief and grieving from our own unique vantage point.
Through three decades of studying grief and grieving, a question pounded at the door of my psyche: Given our endlessly divergent paths of grieving and healing, is there some sort of navigational tool that might prove to be universally relevant and useful to grievers and healers? For years, I doubted that any bona fide answers existed. But, the grief-related suffering I witnessed in my ministry and personal life prompted years of exploration and pondering.
Suddenly, without warning or effort, I caught the thing – my theoretical Model of Adaptive Grieving Dynamics (MAGD). It flashed into my consciousness: a picture of the human grieving process that expands in all directions. It’s a view of grieving in which all of a griever’s physical, psychological, social, and spiritual responses to grief are relevant. Not a paint-by-numbers grieving model, but a picture of the grieving process that provides a sense of relational direction – whatever a griever’s unique responses to grief might be.
Engaging in all four of the MAGD’s grieving dynamics in ways that are meaningful and effective for you –is the essence of adaptive grieving. Together these responses provide needed release, relief, and reprieve from suffering, and help to recreate life and relationships as you adjust to personal, social, and environmental changes brought about by a grief-striking loss. Specific grieving responses (emotions, thinking patterns, behaviors, physiological changes, spiritual perceptions, etc.) fall into one or more of the following categories:
Lamenting: Experiencing and expressing grief-related pain, distress, or disheartenment.
Heartening: Experiencing and expressing what is gratifying, uplifting, or (even, surprisingly) pleasurable within the grieving process.
Integrating: Perceiving the life-shifting changes brought on by a grief-striking loss and incorporating these changes into everyday life.
Tempering: “Taking a break” from grief – that is, suppressing grief-related suffering, or avoiding grief-related changes and realities that distress or overwhelm a griever physically, emotionally, mentally, and/or spiritually.
As you become more familiar with these four universally relevant grieving dynamics, take note of your strengths and needs for balance in the grieving process. Learn from the strengths and growing edges of others. Be careful not to set up camp in only one type of grieving response, because just as each type of response can be a path to healing, each has its limitations. As the good book says, “There is a time to weep and a time to laugh…a time to mourn and a time to dance…a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing…a time to search and a time to give up…a time to be silent and a time to speak” (excerpts from Ecclesiastes 3:4-7). And so it is with seeking a balance of lamenting, heartening, tempering, and integrating as we grieve the losses of a lifetime.
During this Covid-19-Easter season, we write our own grieving biographies as we choose. Our grieving choices will determine whether our grief-related suffering and healing serves to diminish or enhance our relationships with one another, and with everyone and everything the world over.
Right now, as we tune into the palpable pulse of suffering at this extraordinary time in our world history, may we bravely and humbly open our hands to grief. May we allow this God-given gift of our humanity to work its healing powers. Because, we are an Easter people and we are a Lenten people, too.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
– Viktor E. Frankl
If I could pinpoint the moment that I understood I had choice over my responses in life, it would be the day I read and re-read (and re-read again) Viktor Frankls “Man’s Search For Meaning” and came across the quote above. I was 24 years old and reeling emotionally every single day. I didn’t realize I was reeling emotionally every single day because I had been reeling emotionally every single day for 24 years. You don’t realize there is a different way of being than the way you have always been until something pierces the pain in a new way. This book, that quote, pierced the pain and I was never the same.
I was in pain from a childhood that had lots of loss and trauma. I had found a lot of love along the way and it kept me going. It patched me up for just a bit until I got to the next stop and needed another fix. We do this (whatever our own “this” is) and we don’t know we do this until doing this stops working. It’s life and it gets lived in a way that makes the most sense at the time with the choices we have. Our development throughout life is about capacity to hold, to understand, to respond. We have some sort of event occur, small or large, and we respond. It’s living and we’re all doing it.
Some of us have more of what we need from the start and some of us have less. Some of us have circumstances that come alongside of us, that build us and shape us into having greater capacity within to hold hard feelings and emotions, to make decisions that match our inner desire to be safe and loved. Some of us operate from a place of surviving and overcoming because that is what had to happen at every turn. And many of us are a mixture of all of that. I see my life as a mixture of incredible love, earth-shattering loss, amazing joy, immense grief, reliable protection, harmful neglect, and a commitment (sometimes half-hearted) to try again.
Community helps and hinders. We are herd mammals and we need each other. If the herd is brutal, then need is neglected and treated as shameful. If the herd is protective, then needs are met and vulnerability is protected.
What happens, then, when the herd goes away? What happens when we look about and realize we are suddenly alone?
I attend recovery support meetings over video conferencing services quite a bit these days. They are constantly available. I have not been able to go in person to any of these meetings for years because I have been on medical restrictions long before the rest of the world joined me. Because everyone has been in quarantine, these resources have massively amped up and I am so very grateful for this.
The first few weeks that I attended, it was full of fumbling and bumbling. There was constant feedback, dropped meetings, messiness. It was lovely actually, seeing us all grapple and try. I love it when I can be aware of effort when the outcome is not what I expected. One of the things that was gradually realized is that everyone had to mute their mics unless they are speaking. It works. It also is so quiet.
When we talk to one another, we look for cues and responses. We look for engagement that we are being heard. We like to hear the “uh, huh.” We like to hear the laughter when we make the joke. We like to hear the clapping when we are being celebrated. We want the feedback. We want to know that our voices are traveling and landing into the hearts of the people around us. It is sustaining.
These meetings have been crucial and important to me. They have also been very, very quiet at times. I have heard people struggle with the change. I have struggled with it myself.
When we call, we need the response. We want it quickly and we want it in the way we are accustomed to receiving it. We don’t want our voices to echo back to us, we want it to land on the heart of someone else, have them take it in and emote it back to us.
The call. The response. The call…. The response. The call……………………… The response.
Between the call and the response, we have space. The space has gotten wider and in that space is the echo.
We often dislike the sound of our own voice because it is disjointed from what we think we sound like through the thunderous vibrations of our own vocal chords interacting with our own ears. It’s the same, I think, for the words we say. We want our words to land somewhere else, but now they sit outside of us and they bounce back to us in this space we now have. It sounds far different than when it landed somewhere else. We want these thoughts and these wishes and these ways of being to be swept up and taken. We want the response to be swift.
My loves… the space is a gift.
We will regret how we use this time if we do not use this time to become more comfortable with our own echo.
The thoughts we are having we were having before, we just got to distract ourselves more with the business of life.
The fears we are having we were having before, it is simply that our own awareness of our fragility and vulnerability is making it harder to hide from these things.
The pain we are having we were having before, we just can’t ignore it in the same way that we used to be able to.
The other side of this is equally true.
The love that we have is what we had before, we just didn’t know how crucial it was to live in because this loneliness is so hard.
The joy that we have is what we had before, we just didn’t realize how much the presence of one another amplified it so that it was harder to ignore.
The life we have is what we had before, we just didn’t realize that it was about being more than it was about doing.
Between stimulus and response there is space. We have stepped into the space that is offering each of us the power to choose our response. Craft that response intentionally, lovingly and fully, my friends. It is where we will find our greatest growth and our truest freedom.
During this season of COVID-19, I am much more aware of the sounds of the city in my neighborhood and in the courtyard of First Church, the location where I spend 5 – 8 hours of my day.
At home, I have a mockingbird that has made the large tree in my front yard his singing perch. Whenever I leave my home in the morning, the mockingbird is there with its beautiful and exotic singing. On our Church campus, as I sit in the courtyard, a mocking bird arrives each morning between 8:00 and 8:30 am and perches on the highest exhaust vent on the northernmost roof of the sanctuary. (I have wondered if it is the same bird who follows me?) The mockingbird in the courtyard sings its heart out until about noon, periodically flying straight up about 2 feet, showing his brilliant feathers, and then dropping down to continue to sing on its metal perch.
Mockingbirds often mimic the sounds of birds (and frogs) around them, including shrikes, blackbirds, orioles, killdeer, jays, hawks, and many others. They go on learning new sounds throughout their lives. The song is a long series of phrases, with each phrase repeated 2-6 times before shifting to a new sound; the songs can go on for 20 seconds or more. Many of the phrases are whistled, but mockingbirds also make sharp rasps, scolds, and trills. Unmated males are the most insistent singers, carrying on all day and late into the night.
I don’t know if the First Church mockingbird is an unmated male or female, but what I do know is that its song is ever-changing and simply beautiful beyond description. It seems to me, this mockingbird never makes the same sound twice. Its song and antics fill my ears and eyes and heart with joy. The mockingbird who has been visiting our campus every morning for a week and a half may have been present for months. But because I have been slowing down, being “fully” present outside, and hearing more of nature because humanity is increasingly more silent, I have noticed the mockingbird. And I have also noted that the sound of the mockingbird is not the only bird or human sound on our campus, but it is one of the loudest and most soul-nourishing.
As I listen to the bird mocking, I am reminded of Jesus’ words to his worried, anxious, perplexed followers:
“Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Parent feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” (Matthew 6:26)
Or from the Message paraphrase which I actually really like: “Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds.”
I love the way these two different expressions of the same saying of Jesus play off each other.
I am asking myself, what is this mockingbird teaching me/us? Look more deeply at this bird, James.
Is it time to change my “song”?
Do I keep singing the same old tired song over and over and over? Am I stuck?
Am I being encouraged to be less tethered to my “job description” of who and what I am supposed to be and be more in the moment, singing and flapping to a new song?
As my retirement account shrinks, am I being reminded that what I have stored away in my barn and banks is impermanent and less important than the value of the people around me?
Am I being reminded to breathe deeply and let the Spirit of God lift me up into the air so I can have a different perspective on what is really important in this life? A bird’s eye view (pun intended!)?
The mockingbird has many positive symbolic meanings, including joyfulness, cleverness, playfulness, security, and communication. In the book “To Kill a Mockingbird,” the mockingbird symbolizes innocence. Mockingbirds are known for being very intelligent and protective of their families. There are many myths about mockingbirds. Certain tribes of Native Americans once believed the mockingbird taught people how to speak, while others see mockingbirds as guardians of the dead. Cherokees used to have their children eat mockingbird heads in the belief it would make them smarter.
When the Mockingbird comes into our lives it can be a message that we need to rethink how we work, interact and communicate with others. Are we accommodating? Are we being flexible? The Mockingbird way is to listen first, then respond. This is one of its greatest lessons for humans. The Mockingbird is very playful. Few birds have the kind of bright vitality and obvious revelry. So when this happy bird flies into our lives it is a cue for us to frolic, and suspend our severity for a time. Enjoy, relax, and take time to appreciate the pleasureful things in our lives.
For me, and for Jesus, I am looking to the birds, to a mockingbird, at least for today and this time. Teach me, teach us, feathered visitor, to suspend my severity for a time and find playful moments during the season of COVID 19. Allow our minds and hearts to relax and take time to appreciate the sights and sounds we may have missed for years because our “job descriptions” and storage barns have taken our eyes and ears off of what is really important.
The First Church mockingbird is calling to each of us rethink how we work, how we interact with those who are familiar to us and those who are strangers. COVID 19 and social isolation are giving us plenty of time to hear and answer the call. The mockingbird is calling us to sing a new song, a melody released by the Spirit of God in each one of us, a gift to the world.
The Coronavirus has left no one unchanged. Its grip extends to every part of our lives. This is true no matter our individual circumstances. We all could tell our story and each of us would have a unique and reprehensible way it has changed us. My life since the coronavirus is no different. We have lost work like so many, and while we worked/attended college online/homeschooled from home already, just like so many parents are finding, it’s very tiring, incredibly taxing, and often completely overwhelming balancing it all at once.
There is however an element of my family’s life that makes this situation incredibly difficult. We live a good amount below the poverty line. This isn’t a unique situation. Many families do. In fact, in America at a minimum, 39 million Americans live in poverty. It is, however, incredibly important. Living in poverty is hard, really hard. It’s often challenging to explain the intricacies that make this so. However, this pandemic has brought us all to the same basic level. We are all struggling to find supplies and struggling to find resources and in need of health care, which are struggles that people living in poverty experience on a day to day basis. For my family, these struggles have only been exacerbated.
One of our struggles is the home we rent. While affordable for a family living in poverty, it hasn’t been well taken care of. We’ve had many problems, from sewage backing up consistently in our house, the shower wall falling in, to many leaks in our roof every time it rains. Our most recent problem is in one of the bedrooms. The roof has been caving in since we moved in and could no longer wait to be replaced. We’ve had to maneuver having little access to our house as the roof was taken apart and is still being fixed, all while being under the stay at home order. It has made our day to day outrageously tough to navigate with the seven people that live here.
Another area that has been made difficult is finding and getting groceries. At first, this was because there wasn’t anything available in the stores and now it’s because new rules have been put in place to stop the hoarding. These rules limit the amount that can be purchased. For my family and most large families, this means going to the store every other day, something which is very difficult to budget. Things like milk and cheese only last so long with five children. It also means consistent exposure as we are making more trips out in public and though groceries can be ordered online, things like WIC are not options that can be used. So there isn’t really a choice but to go out often. And because we use WIC we often find that the things we can purchase aren’t in any stores anyways.
Beyond this, Joe has lost a work contract, my volunteer job as a sexual assault advocate is nearly impossible at the moment with emergency rooms being off-limits, school for myself has been put somewhere almost mentally out of reach, and we both worry what we will do with five kids if or when we do get sick. It is often said that living in poverty is like living with chronic trauma, the jumping and maneuvering to keep up seems very real, especially during a pandemic.
While we are all lamenting the extraordinary loss all around us, there is also something else important and worth acknowledging about how my life has changed since the coronavirus. Just as the rapid pace of this virus has penetrated our lives, so too have other changes quickly happened. Acquaintances have become good friends, family I haven’t heard from in some time I’ve had the opportunity to connect with, I’ve been able to witness incredible acts of kindness, and have been the recipient of amazing gentleness. I’ve been able to talk with, laugh with, and cry with so many I love. I have had the honor of bearing witness to other’s incredible pain, and feel oddly connected to those in my life. It doesn’t make any of this okay. It doesn’t make any of it better. It does, however, mean goodness is persistent, that vulnerability is brave, that caring for your neighbor is a determined act of ingenuity and cleverness, that loving others when we are so uncertain and scared is indeed heroic, and that sharing toilet paper can be a holy act in a time of scarcity. I’m anxious for what is to come and defiantly hopeful.
