🦠 On Rituals and Pandemics
Dear Friends,
I hope that you are all well. We are all doing pretty well here in Greensboro but a lot is going on! As you have probably noticed, I have been a little less frequent as of late. With the ending of the school year, going on vacation, performing a wedding ceremony for one of my sisters, and moving houses (within Greensboro), I have not been able to spend the time I want to on my newsletter. I suspect over the summer things will remain intermittent, but have no fear and hang in there with me! I have some good stuff planned and am working on getting some great guests for you to meet as well.
Today, I have two really great pieces to share with you that keep in the theme of the previous issue "Disruptions in the Circle."
First, is a message from Friend, Cassandra Israel. Cassandra is a member at First Friends Meeting here in Greensboro, where my family attends. She is a very active Friend and I have always appreciated the wisdom she brings. Then she shared a message with us last Sunday that blew me away. It is beautiful, poetic, true, and healing. The more I reflect on what she shared, the more I appreciate what she shared. I emailed her right after our meeting for worship and asked if I could share it with you. I knew I had to share this with all of you. I am glad she was happy to share.
Second, is something a fun and a little off the beaten path. I wanted to share with you an event that some of us at Guilford College recently planned: an "end of school ritual" as we called it. I'll share more below but I think you'll enjoy this.
Finally, I want to draw your attention to the National Poor People's and Low Wage Workers' Assembly happening later today in person and online. We will be joining online and hope you can too.
Thanks for reading,
Wess Daniels
Haw River Watershed
(Greensboro, NC)
Article: Coming Out of the Dark: My Journey through the Pandemic
By Guest, Cassandra Israel (Greensboro)
First there was Confusion: some kind of disease was out there and it was killing people all around the world. And suddenly, life as we knew it stopped. It just stopped. A pandemic (what’s a pandemic?) was spreading like wildfire across the world. The world! We were commanded to not go to work. We had to keep and home school our children. We had forgotten what it felt like to teach (what is the formula for multiplying a fraction?) had forgotten what it felt like to protect (Sweetie, you need to give me a little bit of down time right now) and had forgotten what it felt like to endure kids in 24 hour increments. We had forgotten how, in times of great stress, the noise and antics of children can really get on our nerves. There was no middle ground anywhere. Confusion had us at war with ourselves.
Confusion. We had so many questions: How is this disease spread? Through touching items? How long did it live on surfaces? Were public restrooms safe? If I am buying takeout or getting groceries, do I need to disinfect the packaging before I eat?
How is this disease spread? Through breathing contaminated air? Does it spread via spit droplets? Mosquito bites? Yes, the mosquito theory was out there. It was just one of many illusions that caught hold. It didn’t help that politically we were dealing with facts and alternative facts. Because living in real time was so extremely draining, we were desperate to latch onto any reality, but our own.
After Confusion came Fear. Fear of being touched by an infected person. Fear of being coughed on maliciously. Fear of one’s personal space being violated by someone who stands too close. Hospitals, before a safe haven to go to when one was ill, became places to fear: we were terrorized by images of refrigerated trucks being swamped by bodies and terrorized by videos of people on gurneys, lining the corridors of hospitals, struggling to breathe without the aid of a ventilator, hoping, no praying, not to die.
For the first time, many of us experienced the fear associated with economic insecurity. Millions of people lost their jobs. For some, it was their only source of income. We found ourselves wondering if we needed to stash food. Or worse, we found ourselves going to food pantries for the first time as supplicants, literally needing help to feed our families. Fearful of the virus, we began to stockpile items that we thought could help defend us against disease: hand sanitizer; anti-bacterial soap; alcohol; and bleach. And, of course, for some unknown reason, we found comfort in hoarding toilet paper.
After Fear came Boredom: Pure ennui. We were stuck in our homes with family members - unable to escape because there was nowhere to go. We found ourselves staring at the television or perhaps ordering something online that would give us a tinge of joy. At times we were able to transform the boredom: we started new hobbies – knitting, baking bread, solving jigsaw puzzles – or returned to old pastimes that our formerly busy lives did not make time for – reading, playing and yard work.
In some hard and interesting ways we had to deal with ourselves. We came to appreciate the meaning of the anecdote about moving: you can change your physical location as often as you want, but there will always be one person, whom no matter where you go, will be there - you. We had our pandemic variant of this phenomenon: no matter how hard we tried to distract ourselves, we were always stuck with a feeling of malaise. A feeling that emerged from a cavernous place within. We had to search deeply to understand the depths of our ennui.
After Boredom came Isolation. We shut down. It took effort to mingle in masks in our new socially distant way. We felt strangely solitary even though we may have been near others. That’s what happened with zoom. We were alone, yet we were surrounded by the faces of other people – people who were not there. We developed a “zoom face” – a look that manages to exude interest in whatever is being said. This isolation had as its foundation a vast misery: a low grade depression that was easily dismissed by us as being inconsequential.
Confusion. Fear. Boredom. Isolation. My apprehension about Covid 19 intensified when my uncle, a Baptist preacher, casually referred to the pandemic as a plague. As in a biblical plague. His pronouncement caused me much distress: If this was a plague, were we being punished? Were we even aware of what we were being punished for?
I know that discussing celestial punishment may cut across the grain for some of you; it may not seem to be an appropriate topic for an audience of Quakers. However, regardless of where one stands in believing in the idea of retribution, it became clear that we needed, as a human race, needed for all of us, the whole world, to develop the capacity to learn how to survive the pandemic.
The most effective lessons were simple enough: wash hands, wear a mask, wait an appropriate social distance away from other folks. And yet, so many perished. I thought about the tens of thousands of senior citizens who had fallen to the virus and had died without the presence and comfort of loved ones surrounding them or perhaps had died after a video chat to say goodbye. Darkness, the child of Confusion, Fear, Boredom and Isolation, caused me to experience the waking nightmare of envisioning myself in their place, of dying solo.
To emerge from Darkness, I knew that I had to turn towards the Light. But, with my faith challenged, I could neither sense nor see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.
What to do?
Pray my way to illumination.
Searching for a beacon, I started by dissecting my belief system. What did I understand about my capacity to conjure myself toward the Light? What did I know about my ability to act to shift the Darkness away?
And so I bowed my head, closed my eyes, and opened my heart to possibilities…
I prayed for sight, for the vision to see clearly thru the Confusion.
I pled for courage, for the ability to step into the abyss of Fear and know that my faith would be a ladder, a pathway out.
I wrestled with Boredom. Tried to center myself and eject out all of the negative energy that kept it alive.
And, I dared to open myself up to other souls, all of us sojourning alone in Isolation, finally becoming aware of each other’s True presence.
Those first months of the pandemic were unlighted. I searched outside of myself looking for a flare, something quintessentially unique and alien, that would show me a pathway forward.
But I found nothing.
To emerge from Darkness, I knew that I had to turn towards the Light. I found nothing until I looked inside to retrieve what had been there all along. I already had the words to comfort my soul – a signal fire to the Divine.
Searching for a beacon, I rediscovered a lesson that I have to keep learning over and over again: That lesson is this - Only thru prayer will I have the vision, the courage, the centeredness and the presence to find my way out of the Dark.
I learned this prayer starting at around age 4. My ma would kneel beside me at my bed and she recited it with me every night for years, until I could say it to her on my own:
Our Father
Who art in Heaven
Hallowed would be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day
Our daily bread
And forgive us our trespasses
As we forgive those
Who trespass against us.
Lead us not
Into Temptation
But deliver us from Evil
For Thine is the Kingdom
The Power
The Glory
Forever
Amen.
Cassandra Israel is a Friend who believes that Silence is God's preferred language and that all have an opportunity to hear it.
Sidebar: Creating an End of School Ritual
I'm really grateful for Cassandra's words above. I've been thinking about them ever since she first shared them in meeting a week ago. I found what she shared to be healing and the perfect message for those of us re-entering our worshipping communities for the first time.
Thinking about how we move forward together after this past year, how we re-enter community is a necessary next step. Therefore, a few weeks back, some colleagues of mine and I helped create an end of school ritual. A way to bring an end to this past year that was creative, fun, and cathartic - hopefully healing through a kind of "ritual."
Rituals are deeply important. They are also deeply human. The way we wake up, the routines we have, the pouring of the coffee, the books and blogs we read, the meditation and prayers we offer up, the greetings of our loved ones are all rituals. They all mark time and help create space for things we want to participate in with our lives. We can also create rituals. That's what we did for our Guilford community. By most accounts, it's been a terrible year at Guilford, as it has been a terrible - or uncommonly difficult year for all of us. BUT there are also some really powerful and positive moments as well. We wanted to find a way to signify this in the hopes of helping us move forward together.
Thus, we made a life-sized CoronaVirus out of cardboard, transported it to the fire pit on campus, filled it with things we wanted to leave behind and lit it on fire.
Here are a few photos from the event and a video is at the end of the assembly of the CoronaVirus.
Here's a 5 minute video of the making of a end of year ritual. I hope we do it again next year, but I hope we don't have to live through another year like the past 16 months!
Music: The Lone Wild Bird from Seth Martin
I've been listening a lot to Seth Martin recently. I find this song in particular to be grounding.
You can listen to more of Seth's Music at his Bandcamp page.
Note: On Juneteenth
Friday was Juneteenth, a new national holiday to mark the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. In talking with some friends, there is both a sense of "why did it take this long to mark something so important in our country's history," and a sense that this is yet a symbolic gesture where we need real racial justice, reparations, and structural change. I agree and while I'm happy to have Juneteenth as a holiday because it does deserve to be marked, we should not allow it to make us feel like somehow we have made more progress than we have.
People can use Juneteenth as a day to move toward new futures by registering voters, getting more folks vaccinated, or pushing elected officials to carry out the work of reparations. If Americans fight to make sure history and critical thinking are integral parts of the classroom experience, students can use that knowledge to change the trajectory of society. Thus, critical race theory does not create division; it engenders solidarity by recognizing our common humanity, and compelling Americans to allot resources so that everyone might obtain liberty.
The Atlantic, What the Push to Celebrate Juneteenth Conceals by Kellie Carter Jackson
Read, Watch, Find: Dress Down Friday Links
Christianity and Capitalism Are Fundamentally Incompatible — christiansocialism.com To connect socialism and Christianity is to say it's not enough for progressive Christians to have a bland kind of general inclusiveness that doesn't really look at undermining, disrupting, or dismantling fundamental economic systems.
King, the great march and bearing witness: The Berrigans on what it meant for Syracuse — www.syracuse.com Eleven years ago, after the death of Philip Berrigan, I went downstairs - into the basement morgue in the old Post-Standard building - and found a yellowed clipping in an envelope in the files.
Fontshare: Beautiful Free Fonts Fontshare is a free fonts service from ITF, making quality fonts accessible to all. It’s a growing collection of professional grade fonts that are 100% free for commercial and personal use.
Ted Lasso #3 Reverse the Curse
My Friend, Rev. Lia Scholl, is preaching a series on Ted Lasso. It's so good!
At the Crossroads of Community and Benign Mutual Neglect — quakervoluntaryservice.org
The following post was co-written by Mike Huber and Hilary Burgin from the Quaker Voluntary Service. A great post of things they learned this past year in their work.
Building a More Honest Internet — www.cjr.org Over the course of a few short years, a technological revolution shook the world. New businesses rose and fell, fortunes were made and lost, the practice of reporting the news was reinvented, and the relationship between leaders and the public was thoroughly transformed, for better and for worse.
Juneteenth: ‘How Beautiful Are the Feet of Those Who Bring Good News’ | Sojourners — sojo.net Black soldiers gave flesh to the emancipating spoken words.
‘The Beatles: Get Back’ Documentary—An Exclusive Look at Peter Jackson’s Revelatory New Movie | Vanity Fair — www.vanityfair.com This fall Disney+ unveils the three-part film, which mines long-lost footage for a portrait of the band’s final chapter that’s so unexpected it surprised even Paul McCartney.
Upcoming Events
TONIGHT! Monday June 21: Moral March on Manchin 5:30pm (Live and Virtual) A Third Reconstruction — www.3rdreconstruction.org Together, we can put an end to the injustice of poverty in America
Classifieds
Friends Committee on National Legislation is Searching For Their Next General Secretary — www.fcnl.org The new General Secretary will be a courageous Quaker leader with a commitment to justice, peace, and environmental sustainability; to expanding diversity, equity and inclusion within the FCNL community and beyond; and to building and nurturing relationships across political and organizational divid
Wanting something to show up here? Reach out at cwess@icloud.com
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Thank you! -Wess 💚