Care of the Soul in a Time of Grieving

Along with the very real loss of income so many of our neighbors are experiencing because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the very real anxiety that loss of livelihood produces, I also want to address a different kind of grief -- the loss of identity.

My work is interacting with rooms full of people. I have been a professor of philosophy for thirty years. For many hours a day I run groups of 45 students, leading them through a guided inquiry into the life-changing insights of the world's wisdom traditions. My tools? My voice, my face, my hands, my body, my mind, my heart, and my words. I tell stories. I make analogies. I cajole, I hover, I lead, I follow, I ask, I tell, I show, I wonder, I weave metaphors, I wax poetic, I orate, I preach, I pace, I stammer, I sing.

All of that is gone. Now I am forced to hammer all of that into screen and keyboard transactions. Every class is an online class now.

Experienced distance education (DE) instructors create highly interactive and engaging online classes, or so I'm told by people committed to online teaching. But in my years of informal surveying, most students see DE as merely a means to an end. What they love about it is the convenience -- no class meetings, no buses, no driving, no parking, no tardies. I have never met a student who preferred online education to face to face. DE is educational triage for students who for any number of reasons cannot attend traditional class schedules -- mothers of young children, 9 to 5ers, deployed military members, and now, pandemic isolators.

All of my judgements about online education should be viewed with great suspicion. I just don't know enough about it yet. I am a DE outsider. Here in the infancy of my abilities as a DE instructor I'm coming face to face with my woeful inexperience and deep ignorance as to how to use DEs many tools. So I feel pretty lost and pretty stupid. But there's something deeper going on, beyond simple technological frustration.

I'm grieving. I'm grieving the loss of my way of life, my life's work, my identity as a public speaker, as a weaver of spells with words and ideas. Canvas announcements, video snippets, discussion threads, and digital quizzes are a profoundly impoverished way of "interacting" compared to the living, breathing communion of an actual classroom. Human beings have been learning and teaching face to face for hundreds of thousands of years. That is a hard habit to break.

I know my students are feeling it too. And there's not a damn thing any of us can do about it. We didn't even get to say goodbye.

None of this amounts to anything near the hardship so many of my friends in the culinary/restaurant/bar/nightclub world are experiencing. Or any of my many friends in the arts -- singers, musicians, actors, and all the production support surrounding the performing arts. They've lost their identities AND their income. At least I'm still getting paid, well, for my Southwestern College job anyway. I've lost thousands in off-campus gig work already. But I can weather that. It's the grief that's getting me.

Now is also not the time for sunny speeches about gratitude, or looking on the bright side, or not giving in to fear. People are raw. People are scared. People are lost. Things are falling apart. Be with that. Let that be true. Move through it with hearts and eyes wide open.

We can talk about Phoenix rising from the ashes later. What this is is the great burning down.

So know that everyone is hurting. Know that behind the "funny" memes and the brave faces there is confusion, fear, sorrow, and grief. We're all adrift and no one can see the shore.

Our physical health is in jeopardy. We're all taking precautionary measures to avoid infection, and to slow the infection rate so that others may survive. But now is also time for the care of the soul. Follow your soul down into the Center. The soul holds secrets, wisdom, and music we rarely hear. Listen. It will lead you through this dark forest, no matter how badly we stumble and sway down this path we cannot even see. Don't try to manage your soul -- let your soul manage you. Like a river, it knows the way.

Love in the Time of COVID-19

With each passing hour there are more announcements of closures on account of the COVID-19 pandemic. I won’t even bother listing the latest ones here. By the time you read this, there will be many more.

Social isolation is keeping us at home as much as practically possible. We are drawing inward.

            It looks like for the next few weeks and months the patterns of our lives will be dramatically altered. There is reason for fear. Many people will die. Many more will have their family savings decimated. Businesses will be crippled. People will lose their homes. The suffering will be real, and it will be widespread.

            Differences in class pull into focus. Those of us privileged enough to be able to work from home, and who have money in the bank, will be alright. Most Americans do not. The average American cannot work from home, lives paycheck to paycheck, and has a cash reserve under $1,000. That’ll be gone in a few days. Then what?

            But this is also true: there is an opportunity in the heart of this deep and real trouble. This looming disaster is a pathway to a startling authenticity, a vibrant aliveness that our soul has been longing for. As the veneer of our oh-so-organized ordinary life is ripped away, a normally hidden depth is exposed. As they say, this shit is about to get real.

            Real is good.

            In any social upheaval the best and the worst of us is revealed. Be prepared to come face to face with who we really are.

            In a matter of days everything-all-the-time America has vanished. Wholesale disruption is the new norm. We have all become refugees in our own homes.

            Sure we haven’t seen real social breakdown yet, and we probably won’t. The water still flows from the faucets. The stores are well-stocked, despite early flourishes of panic-buying. The pharmacy is open. Basic services remain uninterrupted. But it all feels so…different.

            What’s happening is this: we are being thrust into the realization of our oneness. COVID-19 has made one thing patently clear: there is no such thing as my health. There is only our health. We do not practice social distancing or social isolation for our own wellbeing alone – unless you are over 65 and have underlying conditions, you are in relatively little danger. We practice social distancing as an act of loving-kindness for the most vulnerable among us. Our health is their health.

            There aren’t enough tests. There is no vaccine. There is no treatment. There is no cure. The only tool we have is social isolation, and all of the scientific projections indicate that if we can flatten the infection curve we will save tens of thousands of lives. Socially isolate as much as practically possible, not for yourself, but for the beautiful strangers whose lives you are saving. Again, social isolation is an act of loving-kindness.

            In the book of Genesis, when God finished making the world, he rested. Nothing in the world needed his further manipulation or interference. He stepped back and let it run according to the natural laws with which it had been imbued.

            So too now is the time for us to let the world run without our manipulation or interference. Now is the time to shelve our self-importance. Our absence from that thing we were going to do isn’t going to kill anybody. But our presence might.

            Now is the time to let the song of the universe sing itself.

            Now is the time to step off the hamster wheel and turn away from this incessant doing.

            Now is the time to feel more than to know.

            Now is the time to shift down into the center.

            Now is the time for releasing others from their obligations, and relinquishing the commands we place on ourselves.

            Now is the time for a deep and final forgiveness.

            Now is the age of love, and the epoch of mercy.

            Now is the time to know that this breath, this air, this light, this aliveness, is enough.

            As Rumi said, there are many ways to kneel and kiss the ground. Let your kitchen counter become a holy altar. Let your bedroom become an ashram. Let your garden become a tabernacle and the canyon path a Camino de Santiago.

            When you awake at three in the morning, savor the darkness, wait, and listen. Hear the world sleeping, worrying, praying, crying, longing. Feel it all in your bursting heart. Be startled by how much you feel it, as if it were your own worrying, praying, crying, and longing.

            Know your oneness with all that is – all matter, all energy, and all consciousness.

            Know that love in the time of COVID-19 is a light in the darkness of our unknowing. Let our chaos, uncertainty, and suffering be a cleansing salve that purifies us of triviality, strips us of banality, and drives us deep into the heart of our boundless, brilliant aliveness. Let this upheaval overturn our complacency in the face of each other’s pain. Let the beauty that we are finally, finally reach the surface. Let the wonder of this being alive lift us over every obstacle.

            We are buried in fear, encased in self-obsession. Let the love that we are find its way to the surface the way a seed bursts forth from its muddy grave.

            May we be the bursting forth.

            Amen.