From Brokenness to Hope: Creating Space for Healing

I read a series of interviews recently on the impact COVID has had. The interviewees were British children and youth. As I read them, I heard three experiences that we all have had that have caused suffering and struggle.

First, we all lost a sense of security, and the unknown has worn on us. A 12 year old shared, “I was a carefree child before it hit. Now I’m quite scared and negative. I feel old before my time.” A 20 year-old admitted, “I feel l’ve lost my younger self in the pandemic. I’ve lost that youthful exuberance and joyfulness I once had. I feel like an old man: even though lockdown is over, I just want to stay in now – read a book and drink some tea.”

We went through a period of time that we were not sure there was a way to protect ourselves from a virus that seemed to be breaking out randomly across the globe. Do you remember wondering in March 2020 if anyone within your lockdown bubble already was sick and you just didn’t know it yet? I do. Do you remember when we did not know how COVID was spread, so we created sanitization processes for the things that came into our home? I remember being asked by one older adult whether I thought it would be all right for him to go outside and ride his bike, or if I thought that was too risky? We just didn’t know. We had worked out the risks of driving on the interstate, of being in a crowd during flu season, or of getting hurt and breaking a bone – depending on our age it might be from playing a sport or from falling in the shower. But we knew what those risks were and we were so used to the potential risks that we rarely ever even thought about them. We were “care-free” and all of a sudden, everything had a potential risk, and we didn’t know how great a risk.

Second, we all experienced isolation. We, who were made in the image of the one who is three-in-one, a holy community in very essence, were isolated and turned to artificial substitutes for relationship. A 14 year-old reflected, “I became totally dependent on screens… I once spent three whole days watching Netflix during lockdown: I was completely obsessed. That feeling hasn’t really gone away: screens were everything to me for two years and remain a much bigger part of my life now lockdown has ended than they would have been if it had never happened.”

We grieve lost time with family and friends. One child remembers, “I could see my grandparents getting older over Zoom and I was scared they would die before I could visit them again.”

And one, who finished at one school during lockdown and changed schools realizes that over time, “…I lost those friends for good over lockdown. We tried to stay in touch online but we ran out of things to say and drifted away from each other.”

Finally, during the two years of pandemic, our emotional capacities were overwhelmed. One young adult looked back and realized, “We had relatives who died and that, combined with all the other awful things that went on over those two years, it led to me becoming fairly desensitized.” Another shared, “I would say that before Covid, I used to be worry-free but now I don’t really care about anything. I don’t get excited about anything.”

Last week, as we looked at the third chapter of Lamentations, we considered how grief is taboo in our society. Unfortunately, our culture tells us that “real men don’t cry,” “suck it up, buttercup,” to “keep a stiff upperlip.” We stoically try to hide or ignore our emotional pain, to keep from letting anyone else know, when what we need to move from brokenness to hope is community.

The fifth and final prayer of Lamentations is a prayer of the community. Remember that in Lamentations 1, Jerusalem, destroyed, was a woman sitting alone, weeping with no one to comfort her, and now in Lamentations 5, the community cries out together, “Remember, LORD, what has happened to us; look, and see our disgrace,” signaling the way to recovery.

Unlike the first four prayers, this final one follows the patterns of Hebrew poetry with shorter lines that are more balanced and parallel, signaling a move to conclusion, from chaos to order. But then we get to the end, and we don’t get what we expect, nor was it what the original hearers expected. Princeton professor Dobbs-Allsopp says, “Here the poet frustrates his audience’s expectations and in so doing radically alters the nature of his composition.” What did they expect? Laments were not just written by people of Jewish faith. They were common in their Mesopotamian culture, and they all followed the same pattern: the city is destroyed, tragedy, all is restored, an idealized and happy world, and they all lived happily ever after. For the reader who is expecting a happily ever after, the silence and uncertainty of the last verses bring the poet’s point home.

University of Chicago Theology professor David Tracy argues that “Christianity has shown a tendency throughout history to rush too quickly past these moments of divine abandonment and hiddenness….[and that] God’s hiddenness, however hurtful, ‘drives the Christian…to the cross’ and to ‘the practice of resistance to evil in defeat’….The paradox of the cross is that it is at once a symbol of suffering and abandonment and a symbol in suffering and abandonment” (Dobbs-Allsopp).

When poet asks, “Why do you always forget us? Why do you forsake us so long?” it is not unlike the psalm Jesus quoted on the cross. “My
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and we learn that faithful people, even Jesus, experience silence from God in the midst of suffering. It’s not that God is gone or not present. There are times we just can’t hear God in our pain.

And in that silence, we have an opportunity to know our need for God, if we turn to laments like the ones in Lamentations.

Unfortunately, in our attempts to hide our pain, to “keep up appearances,” to “carry on, chin up” our culture has embraced four artificial methods of filling the void, the emptiness. When something bad happens, we try to escape. We cheer ourselves up with a little trip to the store, and we call it “retail therapy.” We try to find meaning in life by acquiring and possessing stuff. Or we try to escape making our own meaning by letting things possess us: work, food, drugs, alcohol. Or we try to escape the pain of our own lives by fantasizing about the “ideal” lives of others, living vicariously through the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and Entertainment News.

We see these three efforts to soothe the pain in our world today. As people were able to leave their homes, they started buying stuff, expensive stuff, and supply chains have had trouble keeping up. People, even in the midst of the pandemic, began working from home, and the line between work and home became even more blurred and now people are struggling with motivation to work because it was their way to escape the pain of isolation and they don’t have to be isolated anymore; people ate more – at my house we started baking a cake every week for the first several weeks of shutdown…that had to stop; people drank more, people turned to substances to escape. Interest in the Royal family has once again risen to levels like those when Prince Charles married Diana. Certainly, after a reign of 70 years, it is understandable that we would honor the service of Queen Elizabeth, but the media capitalized on our temptation to escape our own lives by imagining what it might be like to live their lives with hours and hours of coverage and now continuing windows into the lives of the Royals.

These three ways of escape are at best not helpful and can be detrimental to us. The fourth way, though, that the void of God’s silence, that opportunity for our faith to deepen, is artificially filled has led to higher motor vehicle deaths, random rampages of violence, and soaring crime rates. When we don’t allow space to grieve, it is like leaving a piece of moist bread under the kitchen sink, just as sure as that bread will get moldy, when we don’t allow space to grieve, in the dark, anger will feed on our pain. And that anger will either be focused on someone as a scapegoat for our pain, or be released in rage like opening a Dr. Pepper after giving it a good shake, or that anger will be like an anesthetic that numbs us to the value of life so completely that we have no regard for the life of another.
We see it. Read the paper, scroll through your socials, turn on the news. My friends, God sees it, and we need lament.

Dr. Federico Villanueva wrote about the power of Lamentations in the midst of tragedy. “One of the central themes in the final chapter of Lamentations is community. Suffering has a way of bringing people together. I saw this firsthand when Typhoon Ondoy inundated our village. [Most of us can recall how this happened in June 2019 when much of Germantown flooded.] The neighborhood instantly turned into a community. The flooding made us vulnerable. Those whom I knew by sight but had never spoken to became companions as we [lined up] together to get clean water from a neighbor’s well. There is overwhelming evidence showing that being in a community facilitates recovery during times of disaster.”

The President of Columbia Theological Seminary recently send an invitation for community dialogue to students. It began, “We live in times of deep relational chaos and complexity, where the information revolution is morphing into a deluge of propaganda and disinformation. Consequently, it is becoming more and more challenging to cohere a foundation of facts and meanings necessary for collaboration and co-creation. This issue challenges relationality at all living system levels: Individuals, families, teams, organizations, communities, societies, and geopolitical systems.”

We need collaborative community with everyone engaged to move from brokenness to hope.

The pastor of 4th Presbyterian Church in Chicago, Rev. Shannon Kershner, recently reflected in an email to the congregation: “Honestly, as I look back, once the panic of the constantly changing, quite chaotic first year of COVID had settled into a still-very-dislocated routine, I think I just felt lost. Cut off from this community who always helped me find sacred meaning in our experiences. Just kind of wandering around and trying to simply make it through.

…I have been hearing how so many of you have felt the exact same way. You, too, grieve the loss of connection you experienced with each other and with this community of faith. For some of you, that grief is showing up as anger with your church over feeling forgotten or seemingly tossed aside. I continue to hear how some folks who are a part of this group project called church now wonder if they should even attempt to come back, because they are unsure that anyone noticed they were absent. I am so sorry that is how some of you feel.”

We need our faith family, all of the Farmington family, to move from brokenness to hope. And I often get asked about the families who have not yet returned after COVID. They will not get reengaged because I invite them. I have invited them. They don’t need me. They need you, their family, to reach out to them.

One final reflection, from a former Idlewild Presbyterian Associate, who now serves in Baltimore, Kate Foster Connors, “When asked lately how I am doing, I have used the word “unmoored.” The rhythm that had defined our work is gone, for now, and it is easy to feel as though I am drifting. But there is another side to being unmoored: being freed from the tether that keeps you in the same place.”

We have been unmoored together to set sail. When we reflect on the last two years, there is much to lament. There is brokenness and division and sickness and pain and fear and rage. When we look forward, there is much to give us hope. But we mustn’t jump forward too quickly, we can’t move from brokenness to hope without creating space for healing. To name the grief and embrace lament. This is the work of the church today. And you are the church, each one of you a part of the community, a part of the body. Our world, our colleagues, our friends only move from brokenness to hope as we create space for them to grieve, as we help them put their pain into words to lament, as we create space for healing.