Overwhelmed with Emotion?
“So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.”
Billy Collins
I am overwhelmed by the amount of emotions I am trying to process right now. Are you feeling the same way? As the country opens up from more than two months of restrictions, I feel freedom and fear at the same time. As peaceful protesters and violent rioters take to the streets over the death of George Floyd I feel a deep sadness and anger. As the country engages in a conversation about race, I feel humbled by all I don’t understand and know and experience as a white woman.
Life is not the same as it was a few months ago. Covid-19 is still with us and there is a lot of uncertainty. Meanwhile, the death of George Floyd has triggered a deeper sense of frustration and anger and a stronger attentiveness and listening to the desperate realities of racism and need for reform.
Time to Grieve
Underneath all of these overwhelming feelings, I realize is a sense of grief. David Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on this subject. He says we need to allow this time to process and to recognize a type of grief we may not be used to experiencing called anticipatory grief.
Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.
Kessler is speaking specifically about anticipatory grief relating to the coronavirus but you may be experiencing anticipatory grief regarding the country’s civil unrest as well. For me personally, I feel a sense of powerlessness when a police officer is accused of deadly harm and exposed on video. I feel a loss of safety when looters are destroying businesses. I grieve the fact that there are so many names that - as the quote above says - "there is barely room on the walls of the heart."
Finding Meaning in the Grief
Kessler co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, “On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss.” Many are familiar with their five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. He is soon releasing a new book adding “meaning” as the sixth step of grief. Kessler says that finding meaning beyond the five stages can transform grief into a more peaceful and hopeful experience.
How do you find meaning in the most painful or unjust circumstances? You can start by going within. The shelter-in-place may have given you more time to think about how you were living your life. What are the habits, behaviours, and attitudes that you have had time to reflect on? What are you wanting to keep and what are you wanting to let go?
You can find meaning when you don’t “grieve as others do who have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13). In this scripture St. Paul invites us to remember that as Christians we always have a hope that is bigger than anything on earth. It is our faith that will walk us through the questions, the pain, and the uncertainty to a place of wholeness and healing.
Time to Process
Don’t rush this processing time. If your life was busy beforehand and you are beginning to venture outside your home, resist the temptation to jump back into a busy schedule to distract yourself from the thoughts you are beginning to have, especially if they are uncomfortable. Staying with the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings coming from within is the only way we will grow into a more whole and reformed country of compassion.
Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Give yourself time to mourn the losses. Allow for quiet time to ask yourself, “What just happened?” “How is life different now?” “How is life not different now?” “How am I changed?'“ “What choices do I need to make to keep the habits I want to keep?” “What are the false narratives I have been holding onto that I need to let go?”
Time to Listen
The shelter-in-place seems like a long time but it is helpful to remember that this is not a long time according to God’s measure. Think of those quiet whisperings you are hearing as seeds planted in your heart. Those seeds now need to be nurtured in order to grow into the new choices or attitudes or behaviors that they are meant to grow into. How can you use this time to deepen your growth and listen for the still voice of God? How can you quiet down in order to hear how you are called to act?
How can you hold a sacred space for others to express their frustration or anger or hurt or fear? For me - coming from the perspective of being white and living a comfortable life - I know that listening is critical. Spiritual Directors International released a statement regarding the death of George Floyd this week urging spiritual companions to listen “to all those affected by these issues, from all sides, non-judgmentally.”
Listening is not a passive response to the crisis we now face. It is, rather, an urgent and necessary action, and one of the most potent tools at our disposal to begin a process of remediation, change and healing. It can provide the wisdom and understanding to see a way forward through taking action that may rectify, rather than intensify, the divisions in our societies.
Spiritual Directors International
Time to Act
If you are grieving over the pandemic and unrest and injustice, pray and listen and you will hear how you are called to respond. How you are called to act will be unique to you and that’s why it helps to pause, pray, and listen. Pastor and poet Steve Garnaas-Holmes wrote a beautiful poem this week to inspire us to do just that. I have been praying with it a lot this week.
How do you live through a siege?
How do you guard your heart and keep your hope
amid violence, hatred, injustice and fear?
You pray.
Sit still.
Let the sounds of the news
and the voices in your head settle and fade.
Release your fears and desires. Offer them to God.
Sit with the God of love and mercy.
Just sit with God. Sit, and listen.
Listen to God's passion for life and wholeness,
for justice and healing.
What do you hear from God,
the God who says “Let there be light,”
who says “I will give my life for you,”
who enters the world's suffering?
What is God saying to you?
It may be silence.
God may be weeping. God may be praying,
radiating blessing for all who are broken,
working wonders, renewing life you cannot see or know.
Open your heart
to let that light and mercy flood in.
to trust that gracious will.
Breathe deeply of that peace,
willing to be light in the darkness...
and go with love and courage
into the day.
Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light www.unfoldinglight.net
Join Us
I hope you will join me for my upcoming online retreat, “Listening for the still voice of God: A look at how God speaks to us and our call to respond.” If you are wanting time to discern how God is speaking to you or if you are wanting to learn how God speaks to you, you will like this retreat. Learning about the art of discernment will help us sort through all that is going on in the world and in your heart. It starts Monday, June 15. Learn more and register here.
Share
Please share how you are sorting through all of your thoughts and feelings right now. How are you praying and listening for the still voice of God above the unrest?
Please help keep this a sacred sharing space. We ask that you make comments from a place of God’s love.