Complicated Blessings
Dan Holloway, Pinnacle Associate
Had I written this article six weeks ago, it likely would have had a very different flavor to it. News of Covid-19 was beginning to make its way into our daily newsfeeds, but it was just one among many items vying for our attention. Faith communities everywhere were entering into the season of Lent but with few expectations for radical change to their traditional routine. Now we find ourselves looking back on Easter hardly able to believe all the changes we have had to navigate over these six weeks. We have been reinventing ourselves on the fly, and it has been both awe-inspiring and exhausting.
Those who lead faith communities may well be feeling that exhaustion in new ways in these days after Easter. Most clergy experience that exhaustion in the best of times and you can multiply that exhaustion many times over when dealing with so many adaptive changes. This is a time to give ourselves an extra dose of grace as we consider the work that is still before us.
Yet even in this time there are blessings. I am inclined to call them complicated blessings for they come with both grief and hope, but they are blessings just the same. There are blessings in the knowledge that many people are loving us and supporting us as we seek to make necessary changes. There are blessings in the chance to think in fresh ways about what it means to be a community of faith. There are blessings in the discovery of wisdom that only comes in times of transition. I invite you today to consider what your blessings might be at this difficult time
And I also invite you into a season of lament if that is a part of your journey right now. It is to be acknowledged that there is a cost to all this. If you find yourself dealing with unexpected levels of grief among your people, that is draining even if it is to be expected. When you try to balance the church’s need for economic security even while providing support to those who have lost their jobs, that is deeply challenging. When you realize that you just don’t know how to address certain problems, that can be guilt-inducing. Our blessings right now can rightfully be called complicated at best.
All of this takes me back to a prayer written back in 1983 and offered to the world by William Coffin of Riverside Church in New York. He said this in part:
“O God, whose mercy is ever faithful and ever sure, who art our refuge and strength in time of trouble, visit us, we beseech thee---for we are a people in trouble. We need a hope that is made wise by experience and is undaunted by disappointment. We need an anxiety about the future that shows us new ways to look at new things but does not unnerve us. As a people, we need to remember that our influence was greatest when our power was weakest.”
“In the midst of anxiety, grant us the grace to count our blessings---the simple ones: health, food, sleep, one another, a spring that is bursting out all over, a nation which, despite all, has so much to offer so many.
“And grant us to count our more complicated blessings: our failures, which each us more than success; our lack of money, which points to the only truly renewal resources, the resources of our spirit; our lack of health, yea, even the knowledge of death, for until we learn that life is limitation, we as surely as formless and as shallow as a stream without its banks. Send us forth into a new week with a gladsome mind, free and joyful in the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Amen.”
(William Sloan Coffin, Riverside Church)