Tenderness
FROM THE RECTOR
How do you manage times of increased anxiety, hardship, and loss? Under normal circumstances, I might pose that question in the abstract, but lately it feels like everyone is enduring a season of abnormal grief and stress. How have you been handling it? For some of us, withdrawal is the preferred coping mechanism. We instinctively pull back from our usual engagement with family, friends, and others, allowing a veneer of detachment to shield us. Others pretend that nothing is wrong at all. “Pandemic? What pandemic?” Lately, as emotional fatigue has set in, I have felt pulled toward a different approach—one that I usually would not seek: tenderness. Becoming intentionally more tender carries heightened risk, but I suspect that, in time, it will be a posture that offers a deeper, lasting hope.
Although I am always likely to tear up during a sentimental movie or an evocative piece of music, lately I have found myself moved by even the slightest hint of emotional engagement. A few months ago, I sat in on some choir rehearsals and joined in singing Rani Arbo’s setting of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar,” which the choir performed on Monday night at its requiem concert for All Saints’. Back when I rehearsed it with them and then again on Monday night, I began to cry. Both times, though, rather than allowing that moment of tearfulness to come and go, I went home and found a recording of it on the internet and listened to it while I read Tennyson’s poem over and over, weeping all the way through. Part of me longs to be tearful, and I wonder whether you might have experienced that same yearning.
Some of us have lost loved ones to Covid-19, but many more have lost loved ones to other circumstances yet have had to carry that grief in an isolated way because of the pandemic. The last nineteen months have taught me a great deal about how important the community is to those who are experiencing loss. When we cannot come together for a funeral, when we cannot visit in each other’s homes, when we cannot wrap our arms around someone in an extended embrace, the grief within us mounts continually. Without our usual vehicles for expressing our sense of loss, our grief can find no container, and sometimes it spills out of us when we least expect it.
More than those personal experiences of loss, we seem to share a collective, unattached, free-floating grief that affects us all. Even though no members of my family have died during the pandemic, I carry an extra burden these days—one that I share with each of you—and those moments when it rises to the surface and rolls down my cheek feel significant. In them, I hear God beckoning me not to tense up and guard myself against uncontrolled displays of emotion but to allow the holiness of that loss to come through.
Through the prophet Hosea, God described God’s own vulnerable response to the pain and anger caused by the struggles of Israel: “How can I give up on you, O Ephraim? How can I hand you over, O Israel…? My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender” (11:8). Similarly, Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, gave voice to God’s promise of salvation not grounded in God’s invincibility but accomplished by God’s pursuit of gentle love: “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace” (Luke 1:78-79). How might we know more fully the saving love of God by turning toward our loss instead of away from it?
Tenderness seems like a virtue until you are the one under stress. Vulnerability sounds attractive until the storm hits. Yet I believe that our experience of God’s compassion flows from those moments when we bear up to God the fullness of our loss. God is the one who promises to wipe our tears away, and we must find in that promise the confidence to weep before God. Then, our tears become tears of healing.
In the months ahead, how might we explore together opportunities for a holy encounter with our grief? Monday’s requiem concert was surely one of them, and I feel certain that I was not the only one in tears during the performance. Where else might we turn? What liturgies or teachings or spiritual practices might we use to help us find those missing containers for our loss? Whatever they are, I hope we will find them together, and I hope you will help us know where to look.
Yours Faithfully,
Evan