Faith Matters | Don’t view isolation during the pandemic as lost time. Rather, look for the lessons it teaches
Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find … is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know … about where we are separating ourselves from reality, how we are pulling back instead of opening up, closing down instead of allowing ourselves to experience fully whatever we encounter, without hesitating or retreating into ourselves.
--Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart
The real question is “What does this have to say to me?” Those who are totally converted come to every experience and ask not whether or not they liked it, but what does it have to teach them. “What’s the message in this for me? What’s the gift in this for me? How is God in this event? Where is God in this suffering?”
--Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs
The world is now months into this experience of social distancing and isolation and it’s getting really tired of it. The talk now is about “opening up” again: parks, beaches, stores, restaurants, businesses, schools, churches. The frustration is palpable. We just want it to be over.
The words quoted above come from teachers of two different spiritual traditions. Pema Chodron is a best-selling American author and renowned teacher of Tibetan Buddhism. Father Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest, author, teacher, and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Chodron and Rohr both highlight here an ancient tradition that has largely faded away in contemporary culture. This belief rejects the notion that life is our experience of a series of events, good and bad, and largely out of our control.
Instead, Chodron and Rohr are each affirming here that our lives have purpose, and part of that purpose is to learn. This doesn’t mean learn in an academic sense: facts, information, skills, technique, etc. as important as that is. Rather, this learning is about life and our own individual lives. It is learning as growing into who we are.
Religion and philosophy are often thought of as dealing with such questions. And they do, but usually in a theoretical way which we process in our heads. Chodron and Rohr are talking about learning from experience, which we process in our hearts. It is what the Bible and most spiritual traditions call wisdom.
In pre-modern cultures, elders were thought to be the repositories of wisdom for the simple reason that they had the most experience. The words of elders were respected and listened to because their wisdom could guide the young to understand and learn from their experiences.
Because that’s the thing about experiences: we don’t automatically learn from them, especially if they are painful, like months of isolation during a pandemic. Then, we just want the experience to be OVER. Or we can learn the wrong lesson, as when we get hurt in a relationship and decide to avoid relationships in the future, so we won’t be hurt again.
Such experiences are frustrating, and often involve some collision with our limitations, some denial of what we want and even expect in life. For that reason, the lessons that such experiences have to teach us are usually ones we’d rather not learn. They reveal some insight into life and into ourselves which we don’t want to be true or we don’t want to face. They are a blow to our ego.
We turn a corner, however, when we stop seeing life as a competition, with winners and losers, but understand it instead as a journey of discovery and growth. Our frustration with this pandemic isolation is natural and understandable because we are social creatures and we have plans we want to get on with.
But it is a mistake to believe that this “great pause” is a waste, days of our lives now “lost forever.” Even now life’s giftedness remains. Or to use the title of the book from which the Rohr quote came, “everything belongs.” Every moment is a gift, however meaningless it may seem or painful it may be, because every moment shapes us and teaches us.
In his online meditation this past Easter, Richard Rohr wrote:
I believe the Christian faith is saying that the pattern of transformation is always death transformed, not death avoided. The universal spiritual pattern is death and resurrection, or loss and renewal, if you prefer. That is always a disappointment to humans, because we want one without the other—transformation without cost or surrender. We ordinarily learn to submit and surrender to this scary pattern only when reality demands it of us, as it is doing now…. There is something essential that we only know by dying. We really don’t know what life is until we know what death is.
These months of isolation have left many of feeling like we were dying. And in a sense, it’s true. Some part of us is dying under the constraints of this global upheaval. The challenge is to see that dying isn’t the worst thing because it is also the path to rebirth and new life. Or it can be if we’ll listen and learn; if we will ask ourselves, “What does this moment have to say to me? What is it teaching me that I need to know?”
Faith Matters is written by members of the Bradenton clerical community. Doug Kings is pastor of Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Holmes Beach.
