A Lamp for Each Other
So much fails in the face of trauma. Even words fail. And yet we are here, holding out for each other, and that may be enough.
Dear friends,
What began as a regular meditation for Lent 2020 has become my best attempt at a lantern in what seems like an endless dark. I was on a call yesterday with a client where words failed. He couldn’t even say the word “crisis” anymore. “I just need a different word. I can’t hear it.” The conversation fell into awkward silence. Another client, usually full speed ahead on a thousand big idea projects, was steadfast only in his belief that the worst was yet to come. I have the story of impending martial law, a new Greater Great Recession, businesses closing, contracts broken, events cancelled. Stories of stir-crazy kids, inexplicable irritability, failures of best-efforts positivity. You have stories, too.
We are all the despairing, the isolating, the trying, the willing, the fearing, the hoping, the wondering, the wandering, the spinning in place. We are pretending to home school, enjoy the weather, try new adventures, imagine a post-corona world. But the imagining is a hard run. And words fail.
Each day, when I sit in my silent prayer, breathing in God’s presence, exhaling all my toxic stress, I know all I can truly do is hold this space. I cannot convince the world to quarantine correctly. I cannot offer enough tools and tips for us to deescalate our wall-crawling nervous systems. Theological frames fail.
This, in the middle or the beginning or the barely-just-getting-started of our quarantine, is a letter to the lost.
Maybe you are—
lost and laughing.
lost and learning.
lost and smiling.
lost and gritting your teeth.
lost and hiding.
lost and fighting.
lost and angry.
lost and tormented.
lost of holding on to hope.
Maybe your are like me, all of it in a moment, and none of it most of the time. We all know, jutting out of our most frontal of prefrontal cortexes, that this too shall pass. Pass how? Pass when? Pass at what cost?
Who is to say.
When you are in the heart of a global trauma, there are no answers to easily find. Today, my choice is to celebrate breaking addiction to answers. My hunger for them, my need for a way through, my demand that answers come to me and God’s making a way comes with a 3D map. I love to drink that surety by the liter. And there is not a drop to found in the house. We are teetotaling our answers now.
Instead, in this distant togetherness, this mapless terrain, we are each holding out a lamp for each other in the dark. I am holding out for you. And you are holding out for me. And I am daily believing more and more and more and more and more that that will be enough.