Lent Day 9: Uncertainty

I just had some blood drawn for my triennial (ahem) physical. Everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine.

Probably.

There's a forecast today for snow tomorrow. Six to ten inches, and 40 mph wind gusts! 

Of course, I remember when a "6" to 10" inches" forecast turned into 26"--or was it 42"? No one's really got it figured out just yet.

The past two years (almost to the day, now) have been a lesson in living with uncertainty, and it turns out it is hard. I remember when our congregation went into lockdown the week of March 15, 2020, assuming we would be back in church by Easter. While we worshiped together last Easter (2021) in our congregation's cemetery, Easter 2022 will be our first celebration of the resurrection in our sanctuary since Sunday April 21, 2019. 

The early months of lockdown were probably easier for me than they were for many others. I was fully engaged in learning how to create worship for a new medium (for me), for the online viewer. I was also engaged in figuring out how to Zoom and use MS Teams, not to mention learning how to successfully record at home and then send those recordings to our Media Manager. (Pro tip: what Apple calls a "vintage" laptop is probably not going to do the job.)

I did well during a period of uncertainty because I had specific, engrossing tasks geared towards an important outcome: keeping a congregation connected and spiritually fed during a time when it was not safe to gather in groups. 

Not everyone had that experience. I have witnessed the struggles of families in which a parent suddenly became their child/ children's teacher, with or without a teacher on Zoom, and I have heard stories about how excruciatingly hard that was, or how dispiriting, or even how impossible. I have seen young adults thrown into an unstructured, anxiety-filled time that was detrimental to their mental and physical health, and other young adults trying to do essential jobs, for inadequate pay, at great personal risk. I have witnessed some retirement-aged adults become withdrawn and isolated as the pandemic dragged on, and ebbed and flowed with seasons of severely heightened danger alternating with moments--but only moments-- of, "Oh hey, it's over! Back to normal."

Everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine.

At times of uncertainty, people of faith have some resources at our disposal. For one thing, we have a great prayerbook right in the middle of the Bible: the Book of Psalms. I will repeat here my very favorite quote of John Calvin:  

I have been accustomed to call this book, I think not inappropriately, “An Anatomy of all the Parts of the Soul;” for there is not an emotion of which any one can be conscious that is not here represented as in a mirror. Or rather, the Holy Spirit has here drawn to the life all the griefs, sorrows, fears, doubts, hopes, cares, perplexities, in short, all the distracting emotions with which the minds of [human beings] are wont to be agitated. 

Having an emotion? There's a psalm for that. The psalm appointed for this Sunday is particularly wonderful.

The Lord is my light and my salvation;
whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
of whom shall I be afraid?  ~Psalm 27:1

Uncertainty is so often about fear or anxiety. The chief difference between these two for me: Fear is about something specific. Anxiety is undifferentiated and global, because the "danger" feels so unknowable. Pandemic time has seen an enormous increase in anxiety-- in late 2020 people reported anxiety to their health care providers at a rate 62% higher than the previous year. 

The psalms can meet us in our state of anxiety, and, without giving us empty assurances about the specifics ("everything's gonna be fine, fine fine"), can nevertheless give us a sense of a firmer ground beneath us. "I believe," the psalmist sings, "I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living." The "goodness of the Lord" is on plain view for us if we take care to look for it. I think of the people volunteering at food pantries. I think of the health care providers who never signed up for such a time of testing, but who nevertheless persist. I think of the people of God who are brokenhearted over a war nearly five thousand miles away. I think of the people who shovel for their older neighbors, and I think of the people who offer the shovelers hot cocoa or coffee.

I don't think everything is "fine, fine, fine." But I believe we can see the goodness of God, and that gives us a counterbalance for otherwise uncertain times. 

Today, for me, that is enough.

Lent Day 2: Anger

Then Moses turned again to the Lord and said, “O Lord, why have you mistreated this people? Why did you ever send me? Since I first came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has mistreated this people, and you have done nothing at all to deliver your people.” ~Exodus 5:22-23

I left our Ash Wednesday service last night filled with love. 

O so I thought, until a I saw a car ahead of me that was stopped where it shouldn't be--on a busy street that has no parking--not because it was an emergency, but.............

Actually, I have no idea why they were stopped. All I know is that it was an inconvenience that tapped right into my own personal simmering cauldron of rage. I was angry.

And immediately the cognitive dissonance of that moment was very, very clear to me, and I breathed, and breathed some more, and thought, 

Way to go pastor.

I have a short fuse. Very short. In most areas of my life, I can manage it, control it, and I'm betting this is at least a little surprising to most of my congregants, for example. 

Although, to be fair, a lot of them have seen Monster Pastor on social media. So, maybe it's not as well-kept a secret as I think?

Here's the thing: I do not feel entitled to my anger at all. My anger has no rightful place in my life, at least, the anger that rises up in the quotidian interactions we all have with ourselves and the world (and cars that are parked where they shouldn't be.) I am ashamed of it, because I know it is usually way out of proportion to the harm (or perceived possibility) of harm done.

That's not entirely true when it comes to, let's say, dreadful politicians who put personal wealth and power above the common good. I feel COMPLETELY entitled to my anger at them. But even in that arena, I sense that my anger isn't necessarily a force for good. It certainly doesn't change a single unjust thing.

This morning, during my prayer, I decided I wanted to try to deal with my anger, to understand it better. This morning's passage from Exodus contains a LOT of anger: Pharaoh angry at the Hebrews; the Hebrews furious with Moses, and, finally, Moses royally pissed at God. I guess all that anger pinged something in my brain that led to me wanting to understand myself better, and maybe diffuse this, or at least re-direct it. 

Then, at the end of my prayer time, I pulled out today's card from my devotional*, and it said:

REMINDER FOR THE DAY

We are safe 
to bring our
anger and fear
to God.

And there it was. I had that hairs-standing-up-on-the-back-of-my-neck feeling, that feeling you get when things converge, and who you are and what you are experiencing and scripture and resources you have made available to yourself are all whispering (or speaking, or yelling) the same thing at you.

And let me not skate past the ever helpful reminder that anger is nearly always about fear. They are twins, close as the two sides of a coin, and to understand one, we have to understand the other.

So, my work is cut out for me. And the universe seems ready to help.

~~~

Throughout Lent I will be trying to write here. No promises of every day, but a sincere effort, that I do promise. Some of the thoughts I will be sharing will reflect the themes suggested by @sanctifiedart's Lenten series "Full to the Brim," I will indicate these by use of *. Today I made reference to their Lenten Devotional. It is really lovely.

Lent Day 8: Off On the Wrong Foot: A Reboot

I'm looking back on these early days of Lent, and feeling I've gotten off on the wrong foot with this Lenten reading-writing discipline.  I've slipped easily into something that tends to be my default mode with scripture: I'm analyzing, I'm explaining, I'm getting technical, I'm contextualizing. And... it seems to me, that's not what my intention was with this writing. My intention was to use it to spiritual purpose. Don't get me wrong: I think that analysis of scripture can have a spiritual component, but I'm not feeling it here.

So, today, what I'm doing is asking for a reboot. As if it were day 1. From now on, instead of trying to do something like an exegesis paper, I'm going to look for a word or a phrase in which I find God, and I'm going to try to talk about that.

This morning I read three passages, including Psalm 27; the psalm was, by far, the passage that stayed with me most powerfully. (You can find it here.)

Psalms are songs, and I've sung at least four different song-settings of this psalm over the course of my life of faith. The one that has found a home in my heart is the one by David Haas, "The Lord is my Light." You can listen to it here.

The Lord is my light and my salvation;
    whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
    of whom shall I be afraid? ~Psalm 27:1

Even now, as I sit here, gazing at these words and listening to the beautiful music, I'm drawn to this idea: "Of whom should I be afraid?" There are so many things to be afraid of in this world. By virtue of my race, class, wealth, education, I am protected from so many of them. That is not true for the vast majority of people in this country or in this world. Last week I watched a viral video of an Arkansas State Senator pushing back against proposed "Stand Your Ground" legislation  Sen. Stephanie Flowers spoke, angrily, with anguish, about her fear for her son's life. She is African American.

I don't face the same fears Sen. Flowers does, but I share her anguish for her son, and for all men of color. My fears are the fears of someone who, essentially, lives in security. I fear loss of love. I fear loneliness. These fears can be explained by psychological factors, by life experience, and, when I'm most centered, most present to myself and God, I can recognize them as just so much wheel-spinning, and let them go. At one time, I feared the loss of my livelihood and calling as a pastor, because I was planning to come out to my congregation. But even that fear was fleeting... my experience turned out to be one of love and grace.

Lent, this time in which Christians pay special attention to their walk with Jesus, this time when we seek a deeper spiritual connection with one another and with God, seems like a good time to confront our fears, and perhaps put them in conversation with this psalm/ song. We all have some fears, some times, whether there are psychological explanations or perfectly reasonable factors leading to those fears. I don't believe in a religious version of "Don't worry, be happy." I do believe that God's presence with us can help to put our fears to rest. I also believe that presence becomes more and more tangible, the more we open our hearts to God in prayer.

That's where the psalms come in. Thousands of years old, prayed by, easily, millions and millions of people over the millennia, they are God-soaked and bring us, I believe, into the presence of what scripture calls "that great cloud of witnesses." The more we allow these prayer-songs of ancient peoples to be part of the landscape of our hearts, the more our fears recede, or, at least, become "right-sized." The more steadily we pray the psalms, the more we can say (or sing), with the psalmist, "Of whom/ what should I be afraid?"