Congratulations everyone. We are here, living, possibly even thriving, under literally catastrophic world events.
In a time when the world is going through collective loss and trauma, I think there is a lot to learn from disabled people some of whom experience this on an ongoing basis. Beautifully distilled by Ellen Samuels in her essay “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time,” she encourages “for us to hold on to that celebration, that new way of being, and yet also allow ourselves to feel the pain...its melancholy, its brokenness.” We, as a society now live in a new way of being, but it is also set upon the background of pain.
It's worth celebrating that we’ve made it here. Those comments we made in Spring about how we won’t be able to handle quarantine for much longer. Well look at us. We’re here doing online school, which is not that bad in my personal opinion. We’re connecting, even over phone calls, FaceTime, Zoom, and socially distanced. But much more important, learning how to connect to God and our faith in a pandemic world. This was quite an adjustment for me that I struggled with a lot at the beginning of the pandemic. Yet, worth celebrating, I have found new rhythms of finding God and connecting with the Holy Spirit in the mundane, the silence, and listening to His voice as I connect with people in a pandemic world. I will maintain these learnings for the rest of my life, and that is worth celebrating, “hold[ing] on to that celebration, that new way of being.”
I say all of this with a painfully heavy heart. We live in a world where absolutely tragic amounts of deaths are nothing more than statistics we might pass by on the internet. Each life lost, each job lost, each family business no longer in existence, all of the memorable college nights that are now not yet to come, each child falling behind so profoundly with attempts at online school, public discord trying to put a definitive weight on the loss of human life.
So much death. So much grieving. Regardless of how “okay” each of us individually may be, I would argue for a time of collective hurting. A million global deaths should hurt; it should be painful. But, we don’t need to, nor should we bear this unimaginably huge burden alone. If we invite Him, God will be sitting right next to us, comforting our hearts in loss, grieving for the pain all His people are enduring. As mere humans we are incapable of bearing the burden of the deaths of over a million of our fellow human beings. But, God can carry the heavy suppressing weight of this onto himself if we ask, as we engage in a time of remembrance.
God doesn’t want us to hide our pain, our heartbreak. The Psalms express cries to Lord about difficult circumstances: “I am weary with my moaning. Every night I flood my bed with tears. I drench my couch with my weeping” (Psalm 6). If there was ever a time in recent history that things are “not okay” it would be now. With God by our sides, let us “feel the pain, its melancholy, its brokenness.”
We live in a paradox. Let us hold onto a celebration of all of the things we’ve been able to do that we never thought were possible while simultaneously grieving the loss of so many people and sitting in its respective melancholy. And, in this state of paradox we have a rock, a foundation that keeps us solid, a savior who cares about us and cares about this world, let us run to Him and find our refuge under His wings.