So many stories of where we’ve been, and how we got to this place.
So many stories. What story will we tell of this last year?
Do you remember how it began?
March 1, 2020. The first case of Covid in Oregon had been confirmed the previous day. The Bay Area of California had declared a State of Emergency a week before.
March 1. Sunday morning. We gathered in the sanctuary. Do you remember what that looked and felt like?
The large choir side by side on the risers. The RE class crowding to light the chalice. People sitting shoulder to shoulder in those uncomfortable seats. No distancing. Do you see any masks?
That was the first Sunday we mentioned the virus.
Things moved so fast. California declared a State of Emergency on the 2nd. Oregon followed on the 8th with limits on the size of gatherings.
Sunday March 15th, just two weeks later, the ministry of First Unitarian went entirely on line.
No one in the seats. There has been no one in the seats for a full year.
Our campus empty save for our Sextons and a person or two in the office.
What story will we tell?
Perhaps the most important thing to say , perhaps the place to start is that this has been a truly hard year. A truly hard year.
A year much harder for some…I think of the medical workers and the grocery workers, the agricultural workers and the delivery drivers…all those on the front line who knew they were putting themselves at risk and showed up because they had to or because they were called to. I think of all those who lost family members and beloved friends…who could not be with them when they died…who had no chance to say goodbye.
A year much harder for some…but hard for all of us.
If it were the virus alone, the illness and the deaths… that would have been plenty to deal with. But then there were the closures and the jobs lost. The fires here…so close. The protests on our streets. The insurrection in Washington. The ice storms and power outages.
And now, thankfully, the vaccines…created so soon that they almost qualify as miracles… and a turn toward whatever the new normal may become.
It felt important to take time to recognize and reflect on this year.
Tom and I asked a few congregants to share with us their experience of this year, beginning with the losses…because it is not possible to think about this year unless we name, first, that this has been a year of loss.
Many losses to name. But is our story only or primarily a story of loss?
I was remembering back to last March. I expected that this community could well be walking through the valley of the shadow as the dire predictions of the number of deaths began to come true. But, though many of us, probably almost all of us, know someone whom Covid took…a relative…a friend…few members of this community even contracted the virus, at least that we know of.
That seems an important part of our story, too: naming the losses we did not have to confront.
And in addition to the losses we faced and those we did not have to face, we wondered whether there were blessings that needed to be named. Did some of the changes in our lives point toward hope?
We asked congregants what blessings they had discovered in this last year.
Losses and a yearning for in-person connection. But also blessings found in this last year. A calmer, slower pace. Grace granted and grace received. Learning that haircuts have, perhaps, been overrated. And remembering how important family and friendship and community are to us and how important they will remain to us in whatever normal comes to look like.
Last March, we devoted our plate collection to the Emergency Fund for Members. We expected that many in our community would struggle financially. You all were very generous and, indeed, more people did request emergency financial help. That money was well used.
But not nearly as many asked for help as I feared.
That points to another part of our story that needs to be told. Some of us did loose income and need help. But most of the members of this community suffered little financially. Most, not all to be sure, but most of us who work…could work from home and our income continued.
Those of us who are blessed with investments in the stock market saw assets increase while our expenses shrank.
Those stimulus checks, if we got them…many of them went into savings.
At the church, we kept encouraging people to ask for help. I lost sleep fearing that folks who needed help would not ask…that they would be embarrassed or even ashamed. If that is true for you…even now …please, please don’t be embarrassed to ask.
But most of us have managed this last year pretty well, financially. Most of us, myself included, are deeply privileged people.
We asked the congregants about privilege, too.
Losses AND blessings AND privilege.
Whatever else I know, I know that our story has to hold all of this…the losses and the blessings and the privilege.
As Heather said: We have to be able to sit with it all.
Part of the story I want to tell is how much we learned and even grew through this year…when our very notions of normal shifted.
Before the pandemic, we talked about income inequality. We read the headlines and saw the graphs. But this year, the stark differences have been in our faces.
The privileged and the struggling have lived different lives through this pandemic. It has been hard to avoid knowing that our world is really two different worlds…depending on your privilege. And the gap has gotten wider…I am certain.
The racial divide has gotten worse too…that too has been hard to avoid knowing. The dramatically higher death rates for Black and Brown people. Life expectancy overall dropped by a full year in the US…that was dramatic enough…it dropped by 3 years for Black Americans.
The protests on our streets…over a hundred and fifty days and nights and counting…and the violent police response underlined…night after night…the need for fundamental change.in our system of what we call, without intended irony, public safety.
The fires here…so frightening…made worse by the warming climate. The weather is changing…This year has forced that too in our face.
And even the light at the end of the tunnel…even the vaccines and their distribution have things to tell us.
Were you surprised that people of color are receiving the vaccines least and last? Are you surprised?
But there is something else to know here…when our normal systems were overwhelmed…when we needed additional hospital beds or when we needed to get vaccines into more arms to bend the curve of the pandemic down…who did we call?
The National Guard. We called on the military to stand up the emergency hospitals and the mass vaccination sites. We called on the military. And why? Are they medical or public health experts?
Why call the military?
Because we have had more than 4 decades when the military (and at the local level, the police) were the only parts of our government being generously funded. So the military is where the capacity exists. And I suppose you can see it as a blessing that that capacity existed at all.
Because in those same decades, our infrastructure has been allowed to deteriorate, our public health system starved of resources so that South Korea put our pandemic response to shame.
It was not just our past-president and his deceit and his mean-spiritedness…we did not have and do not have the public health capacity to deal with this virus or the next.
You see it in our underfunded public education, in the quality of our drinking water. In our over functioning police and our under functioning justice system.
Are you seeing this with as much clarity as I am?
This pandemic leaves us with a great deal to hold…but perhaps one of its blessings is that the problems we must face have been revealed with an unavoidable starkness…
These issues are in our faces now. They are easy to see…
For those willing to open their eyes,…
For those unwilling to shut down their compassion…
For even the privileged among us who refuse to live…or to live…again…in complacency.
That is enough of a message this morning.
But there is more that needs to be preached here and we will return to this topic next Sunday…
…not to revisit the losses and the blessings and the privileges we have lived this past year…but to begin looking forward…to explore the promise that our next chapter could hold for us…
And also some of our fears as we strive to imagine a new normal with more justice and more compassion…as our Spirits begin to turn and we prepare to begin again in love.
Will you pray with me, now?
Spirit of Life and of Love. Mystery that helps us hold all of our losses and all of our blessings. Source of our strength and of our compassion.
We are so ready to close this Covid chapter.
We are ready to hug…not distance
To be together and to sing together.
We are ready to reclaim those
Simple things that helped give our lives
The shape of love and connection.
And we can glimpse a time
When this chapter can be closed.
But let us not forget what we have
Lived and learned…
let us not forget the losses
And their meaning…
How harsh the losses have been
For some…how relatively
Light for others.
Let us not pretend that
This chapter can simply be closed
Or that we can simply restart the lives
We knew.
As we move toward the writing of
a new chapter,
help us remain awake “to the magnitude
of our fortune…against the smallest of time.”
Help us remember and keep remembering…
As we go.
Amen
Topics: Intention