“The pandemic will pass. Our grief will endure.”

Eddie Glaude, Jr., Washington Post, April 7, 2020

I printed Prof. Glaude’s article more than three weeks ago and placed it on a small stack of books and papers at the left of my desk. To the right are the books with chapters I plan to use in coming sermons, the poems and paragraphs I will use as readings and openings, the files I must open to move our ministry ahead.

The stack to the left, which is much smaller, holds things that will not let me go, though I don’t yet know what to do with them.

The three weeks since the article was published feel like an eternity in Covid-time. The deaths were just beginning to accelerate. We had yet to see the images of mass graves outside of NYC, or the refrigerated trucks used as makeshift morgues outside the NY hospitals. There was  fear of what was sure to come. Anticipatory grief and fear are closely aligned.

With the US death toll now above 60,000, and growing by a predictable 2000+ each day, the losses are very real. Even here in Oregon where prompt action and perhaps luck have limited the number, the losses are still real.

There are those today who try to close the pandemic chapter, proclaim that our national response was prompt and effective, our testing the most extensive in the world and that the deaths could have been so much more numerous. There are those who want to “open the country for business” and pretend that we have weathered the worst.

I do not live in the world those people see. I live in a world in which tens of thousands of deaths are a tragedy not a triumph. I occupy a world in which each of those deaths needs to be mourned and each of those lives celebrated.

Our medical personnel have been asked to be the witnesses at the bedsides, with loved ones, at best, saying goodbye on Facetime.

In the public sphere, there has not yet been even a moment of collective mourning.

“The pandemic will pass. Our grief will endure.”

I finally realized this morning why I kept that article on my desk and why my eyes kept returning to it.

It is the religious community that is supposed to know something about grief, about mourning, about living with loss.

Perhaps it is our job and the job of other religious people to call the community into a different kind of presence to these losses. I am not talking about individual memorials, as important as they are, and as difficult to manage in these days of isolation. At the church, we are still trying to figure out how to memorialize our own dead, those who were not killed by the virus, when we need to remain at a distance.

Glaude closed his article: “The dead are not yours and yours alone. They are ours—all of them. No matter the color of their skin, the people they loved, their Zip code, the language they spoke or the political party they supported-they are ours.”

Perhaps, when we can gather, in person, once again we should read every name, take at least a moment in silence…surely each life is worth at least that. Doesn’t our affirmation of the inherent worth and dignity of each person call us to do that much?

Already more than 60,000. Will it be 100,000 when we can gather? More?  Perhaps we can’t manage that many. Take that much time. Perhaps we could just say the names of the Oregonians who have died Covid-deaths. Just more than 100, confirmed. Could we do that much?

Perhaps, until we can gather physically, we could include the name of one of the victims in our parish concerns each week…tell a bit about that life…remind ourselves of all the losses.

We could do that.

Perhaps we could go deeper in our religious response. Perhaps we could imagine a collective process not only of naming our grief but accepting collective responsibility for the circumstances that allowed the virus to be so deadly in nursing homes and prisons, in communities of color and meat processing pants and refugee camps.

Perhaps we could even invite our political leaders to give voice to their mourning, but also to acknowledge the ways their decisions made things worse. The reason the US death toll is so high is a matter of the delay of weeks in taking action. Do even the governors who moved more rapidly lose sleep counting the lives that could have been spared by action just a week earlier, or two?

Some of our leaders, no doubt, would not come forward in confession. But perhaps some would and, as religious people, we could then search in our own hearts for compassion and for forgiveness that might embrace us all.

Perhaps not now but when we “reopen.” Perhaps that would be the time to mark the collective grief and the collective responsibility and search for a collective way forward.

Perhaps the religious community could at least extend the invitation, provide the possibility, issue the call. Perhaps we could be pointing to a source of hope deep enough to survive this pandemic, this pandemic that will at some point pass. Perhaps we could do what we claim to know how to do: deal with the grief that will endure.

Blessings,

Bill