The journalist Leslie Jamison recently wrote an essay that included these lines:
A few years into sobriety, I went to a potluck where no one ate or drank anything. Half of the people were alcoholic and the other half struggled with binge eating. So what activity could we do that doesn’t involve putting something into our bodies? Everyone brought something to read out loud, and we listened to one another as if our voices were food.
I found that description to be especially powerful and apt for our current condition. We have long been creatures of habit, filling our days with routines shaped by a limited pool of activities—eating, drinking, socializing with friends, working in offices or shopping in stores, gathering weekly for church services, and so on. Yet for more than three and a half months now, several of those commonplace functions have been forbidden, curtailed, or extremely limited. We have found other ways to fill our days, but it has required both patience and creativity: patience negotiating the social isolation and creativity to remind ourselves that our value is grounded in who we are and not just in what we do.
Another month is now before us. The simple progression from March to April to May, June, and July had been taken for granted before, but now it is a litany of names marking how long it has been since things were “normal.” The simple act of breathing has been changed dramatically by the memory of the traumatic injustice inflicted upon George Floyd. So many things we took for granted—going to the movies, eating in a restaurant, singing in a sanctuary—are now fraught with worrisome risks and likely no longer things we casually include in our regular routines.
One of the blessings of this COVID-19 season is that we are having discussions about important topics previously avoided thanks to the demands of our prior routines. Our defenses are down enough to allow for necessary conversations about race in America and challenging the flawed effectiveness of old models of police “force” (as opposed to police as public service “partners”). The barrage of information about the coronavirus has awakened our political activism, for it is readily apparent that viral pathogens will always be with us, but political incompetence leading to pandemic and thousands of deaths need not be.
Leslie Jamison wondered how you could do a boozeless, foodless potluck, and discovered that being together and fed by the spoken word could nurture life far richer than she’d ever imagined. It calls to mind the “Word made flesh” by which we are healed and made strong. Jamison offered these concluding thoughts:
Grace never arrives as we imagine it… But suffering and grace live side by side as they always have. Grace locks eyes with pain from the other side of the sidewalk, six feet away, and they both keep walking.
God’s grace never arrives as we imagine, but know that it is always, always present in places of suffering. And it keeps walking—moving—lifting up—opening eyes—carrying us forward to that place we long to be. Thanks be to God.
—Randy Bush