Acquainted with Grief

LuciusCommons Wikimedia

We suddenly find ourselves living through a time of a collective loss. Until now we never realized how much of our lives are marked in time and space by weekly schedules and commutes. Now that is gone. Every day feels like the next. If we are not looking at a calendar, we might even forget what day it is. My usually cheerful neighbor revealed his unease by saying, “this is crazy”.

We are also living through a collective loss of connection. Streets are empty. You can’t go anywhere except the grocery store. You are greeted by mask-wearing customers and empty shelves. You can’t visit family. You can’t shake hands. You can’t hug. You can’t kiss. You can’t see someone else’s face behind a mask. This is all very hard. This biggest loss for most of us is the sense of safety and control that we thought we had.

To the extent that the government has been a help and not a hindrance, it has prioritized economic relief for big business, limited relief for small business, and one month's living costs for the rest of us. To some degree that may help, but it won't replace a lost job. No government can compensate us for the loss of workplace routine, loss of purpose, the loss of camaraderie, the loss of loved ones, and the loss of milestones that mark and give meaning to our lives. That impact is profound because the reality is:

“We are all dealing with the collective loss of the world we knew. The world we knew is now gone forever” —David Kessler

We are suddenly inundated with this collective grief as we approach Easter and Passover. Normally we would approach this time looking forward to family gatherings. The spiritual meanings would have received a passing thought if indeed they are thought about at all. What is different now is that we can all relate to a collective grief and sorrow that we had not known before. Now we have made some acquaintance with the grief of Isaiah’s “suffering servant:”

“He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him” — Isaiah 53:3

To add to this grief, is the isolation of being “despised and rejected”. We live in a seriously divided country, with starkly different views of reality. If we voice our concerns regarding the nature of the pandemic, the need for social distancing, and the government’s handling of the crisis, we risk being ostracized from our social groups. We cannot hide our face from this grief. Now we know. Viscerally.

The reality of such mass grief and suffering is largely incomprehensible to those of us with some degree of privilege in the “Western” world. But to people of no privilege, few resources, people of marginalized groups, this is familiar territory. For the most part, the Western world does all it can to deny the inevitability of suffering. It is an irony crystallized in the symbol of the Christian faith:

"It is amazing to me that the cross or crucifix became the central Christian logo, when its rather obvious message of inevitable suffering is aggressively disbelieved in most Christian countries, individuals, and churches. We are clearly into ascent, achievement, and accumulation. The cross became a mere totem, a piece of jewelry. We made the Jesus symbol into a mechanical and distant substitutionary atonement theory instead of a very personal and intense at-one-ment process, the very reality of love’s unfolding." —Fr Richard Rohr

At some point in the future this crisis will be over, but the scars, financial and emotional, will remain. We are in shock now and we will be processing grief for the foreseeable future. We will have to turn to others for support.  We may find that support lacking because so many will be struggling with their own grief. It might have to suffice that we can get some emotional support on someone’s “good day” and they will find support from us on our good days. We should be open to the possibility of needing professional help.

When we come back together, it will be tentative. We will have spent so long developing the habits of separation that coming together again will feel strange and unsafe. We will have to go through the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. We need to be especially careful with the anger stage, that we don’t inflict harm on others. But we also have to be careful that we don’t hide or bury our grief. Instead we must allow our grief to be seen and witnessed, however difficult that may be.

"Each person's grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn't mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining." —David Kessler

We have to develop habits of grace, both receiving it and giving it. We have to develop a receptivity to recognizing the grace all around us that we’ve ignored in the past. The sounds of birds singing, rays of sunshine peeking out from clouds, kind gestures from others, and most importantly, our life itself. We have to allow ourselves to receive grace. From that place we will be able to supply grace to others as they process their grief and try to reassemble their lives.

It is my hope that we will come out of this with a new gratitude towards life. May we gain a new appreciation for the “invisible people” that harvest our food, transport our goods, stock our shelves, collect our garbage, clean our streets, protect us from harm, and treat our sickness. May we learn to love and appreciate members of our families and be truly thankful for the time we have with them. And finally may we expect more of ourselves, more of our society, and more of our government.

A Hundred Years

Aleksandr Ogonowski
August 25 1914 - March 15, 1995

On this day one hundred years ago, my father was born in Rzeszów in the Galicia province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. World War I was just getting started. Four years later the Armistice was declared and Rzeszów would be part of a newly independent Poland. My father grew up during the next twenty years, did his time in the military, and returned to civilian life. In August 1939 he had just turned 25.

On September 1, 1939 Nazi troops began the invasion of Poland. Seventeen days later, the Soviets invaded from the east. To avoid capture he made a run for the Romanian border. On one occasion,  he recalled laying in the ditch by side of the road as planes strafed those fleeing. He felt the repeated thump of machine gun bullets impacting the ground. After the planes left and he felt it was safe to get up,  he arose to discover every other person in the ditch was dead. He just happened to be in the place that was between rounds.

He made it to Romania, then to Athens, Greece. At Piraeus he boarded a ship to Marseilles, France and then made his way up to Paris. He remained in Paris a while, employed as an aircraft machinist. When France was invaded, he had to flee again. He rode his bike to the coast and boarded a ship bound for England. Because of  the ever-present danger of U-boats, the ship took a circuitous route to England and remained at sea for days. The was no food on board. All he had to eat was a sandwich shared with him by a married couple.

He survived the voyage and made it to London. His skills quickly landed him a job in the aircraft industry. Unfortunately, aircraft manufacturing was a principle target of Nazi bombing. As a result, his company moved the operation to Canada. He then emigrated to the US, got married, had children, and now I am here....one hundred years after my father was born.

A hundred years is a long time.  It is a full century of human history. When my dad was born, tanks were just being introduced; horse-drawn artillery was still the norm. Planes were fabric-covered wooden-framed bi-planes. Radio communication was by Morse-code. Voice telephone was in its infancy.  But decisions were being made. Decisions whose consequences are still unfolding today.

For the most part, I have been lucky. My decisions were not made under duress. Yes they were pivotal, such as whom I would marry and whether I would have children. But they were not forced decisions. On the other hand, history forced decisions on my father. Two armies invaded his country....should he stay or flee? If he had not decided to flee, you would not be reading this story. Had he stayed, he would have almost certainly perished, if not in battle, then in a mass-execution in the woods. My existence is the consequence of decisions that were made at definite points in history, a hundred and one years ago, seventy five years ago, and fifty nine years ago.

So here I am today, one hundred years after his birth. My life going forward will be the product of my decisions, the decisions of others, and circumstances over which I have no control. I will pray that the circumstances over which I have no control, I will respond to with grace. When I do come to the "forks in the road", the points of decision, I will pray that my decisions will "tip the scales towards the good" as Maimonides put it. I believe that the little acts of cruelty and the little acts of kindness multiply over time. Of all the stories my father told me, the story of fellow refugees sharing their sandwich with him is the one I remember most vividly.

Who for Our Sakes Became Accessible

"For your sakes, he became poor..." - St. Paul

This Advent, I thought about how much God gave up to enter our world in the person of Jesus Christ. I also thought about why He did it. He did it to become accessible....to all people. To do that, he had to become one of us, and not just the "one percent", but the "ninety-nine percent". He had to choose the lowest common denominator. To that end, he had to enter the world poor. To be poor is to have neither resources nor status. God gave up both. Christ was born in a barn, with animals. He was born as a refugee.  In many respects he was born in circumstances similar to what a great many displaced people experience in the modern world.

To be poor is to be denied access. Access to food, housing, medical care, a safe environment, dignity, and social standing. There were many barriers to access in Jesus' day. Being a Gentile, Being diseased ("unclean"). Being a foreigner. Being a woman. These barriers were used by the elite to keep out the undesirables. However, it seemed that everyone who was barred from approaching God by the religious elite was welcomed by Jesus. In fact, breaching social and religious barriers was a hallmark of Jesus' ministry. 

From what we know, Jesus grew up as the son of a tradesman. For most of his life, he worked in the family business. His first recorded public appearance was submitting to John's baptism. This was certainly an act of humility, as the religious leaders of the time would not submit to John's baptism. This public act of humility was the first of many. Subsequent acts of humility would have the dual effect of distancing Jesus from the religious elite and drawing him closer to the poor and outcast. Jesus did not exclude the elite. But the elite excluded themselves: either they admitted no need of the prophet from Galilee or would not risk their social status to associate with him.

The birth of Christ was announced with the message of unrestricted access: "Be not afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of a great joy which will come to all people". Despite the message of open access, subsequent church history has more than enough examples of walls being built. Today, the same people-groups are excluded along with some new categories: race, gender-identity, the elderly, and the undocumented. However, the greatest barriers come from our comfortable but isolated first-world lives, our technology, and ultimately modernity itself. Differences of belief and social status still separate us as human beings and from God.

So if these barriers trouble us, what are we to do? This Christmas, might I suggest something different, non-traditional, and non-religious. Reach out to those who are otherwise forgotten. Buy a cup of coffee for the bell-ringer outside your grocery store. The person inside the gas station booth. Public safety personnel working the holidays. The homeless person holding up a sign at the intersection. Nursing home residents and workers. Acts of kindness chip away at the barriers, the walls separating people from each other. If you will permit yourself an open mind, ponder the meaning of Jesus' words: "If you have done it for the least of these, you have done it to me". Beginning with simple acts of kindness, you might find Jesus in the place you least expected to find him.

Merry Christmas

Pale Blue Dot

Launched in 1977, the Voyager 1 space probe had given us the first close up pictures of the outer planets. By 1990, it had reached the edge of the solar system. On February 14, 1990 Voyager 1 was commanded to turn around and take one last picture, a picture of the Earth. At a distance of 3.7 billion miles, the Earth was only 1 pixel in size, a "Pale Blue Dot". Carl Sagan, the astrophyscist who lobbied NASA to take the picture, penned these words to describe the image:

On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. —Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1997 reprint, pp. xv–xvi

When the Earth is seen from this vantage point, we may recall the words of the Psalmist: When I consider the heavens...what is man that thou art mindful of him? This image, perhaps more than any other, is a picture of the place where our finite little world and the infinite meet. Even the most experienced world traveler, who has been to every corner of the globe, can only boast that they have gone from one side of the dot to the other. Of what account are our discoveries and advancements in science? Our loves, our hates, our worries, our squabbles, and even our wars seem petty when measured against the infinite cosmos. In the end, we are just travellers together on an 8000 mile wide ball of rock with only two miles of breathable atmosphere between us and oblivion.

Carl Sagan had hoped that this photograph would change our perspective and our behavior:

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

The certainty that we have a right to the life we are living, that the universe "owes us", ought to be tempered. Rather we should be aware of the obligation we owe our fellow travellers. Hopefully this image and the perspective it conveys would form our resolutions as we begin a new year to "deal more kindly with one another".