Hello dear church, dear Beloved Community, dear friends who are connecting from faraway places. Until just recent months, I too had been residing in far aways places - primarily Oregon - where I served as a hospital chaplain with a palliative care team. I’m so glad to be back in the Bay Area and back to being in person with our Fellowship Church community. It is from my orientation as a chaplain that I am honored to provide a reflection for us today, at this rugged and volatile moment in our country’s history.
In-patient palliative care teams meet with patients and families who are dealing with serious illness in order to help them navigate medical crises and the decisions they have to make. As the chaplain, my lens was focused on the spiritual dimensions of the person and the “invisible heart,” as I called it. The medical definition of spirituality was my guide for how to assess well-being. Here it is:
“Spirituality is the aspect of humanity that refers to the way individuals
seek and express meaning and purpose
and the way they experience their connectedness
to the moment, to self, to others, to nature, and to the significant or sacred.”
-National Consensus for Palliative Care
We are currently facing a crisis as a nation. A merciless and opportunistic “cancer” is on the loose, with the potential of dire repercussions for our systems of functioning, uncertainty as to the safety of the safety net that provides a backbone of support for so many, a total “whiting out” of our steady progress in bringing equity to our diversity, and even life and death consequences for those already dealing with marginalization. Perhaps, like me, you are experiencing a tumult of emotions with new and additional stressors: Shock and awful.
The health and strength of our spirituality can be instrumental in supporting us through difficult times. Using the above definition of spirituality, we can make a little self-assessment and see what needs our attention. Additionally, an intentional self-reflection process can remind us of our profound capacities for resilience and lift up our strengths. This reflection is a chance to do a brief “spiritual health check-in.” And I’ll offer some resources that might be of support if you need it.
Meaning and Purpose
As a self-reflecting species, we have an innate need to make meaning of our lives. We need to tell our stories and we want to hear each other’s stories. Relatedly, having a purpose in our lives gives us drive, motivation, and life-force energy. Without it, people can fail to thrive, and there are numerous studies that show the health benefits by having a stated life purpose. Victor J. Strecher, who wrote Life on Purpose, defines purpose as “a higher-order goal that has deep value.” He encourages us to create our own statement of purpose in life – similar to what Thurman calls our “working paper,” of which our Board Chair Bryan Caston often reminds us.
When we have a purpose for living beyond ourselves it can create agency and give us spiritual sustenance. In a recent webinar on psychological first aid to those affected by the LA fires, mental health providers pointed out the positive effect it has on fire survivors to identify something they can do to help others – even as they themselves were needing help.
Again and again throughout history, people have found extraordinary reserves, and developed a depth of spiritual strength to face their challenges, by defining for themselves their meaning and purpose. How are you making meaning of our current situation? What story of resilience and agency are you developing for yourself? Is there something in particular that you feel called to protect? What is lighting your flame?
Connectedness to the Moment
How are you doing in being present to life as it happens moment-to-moment right now? Being intentional and mindful of our experience in the present moment is one of the core practices of many Buddhist traditions. Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh taught that the reward of this consciousness, or mindfulness, can be a profound sense of being alive, can connect us to a sense of each moment as a miracle, “and a joy will open our hearts like a flower, enabling us to enter the world of reality,” even touching a sense of eternity.
But right now, our shared present moment is being subjected to an intentional non-stop hurl of stupefying actions and headlines that assault our values, and trigger threats to our sense of safety and stability. It can be hard to “stay present in the moment.” Buddhist teacher Kaira Jewel Lingo gently encourages us that “Just being in the moment with what your experience is, versus caving into that pressure to be in reactivity to what’s there, is self-care.” And when the moment seems overwhelming, we can do our simple practice of bringing our full attention to our breath, following it in and out, supporting our nervous system in doing its natural healing process of regulating and calming. And, very practically, as far as following the news we might do best by ourselves by following a tactical, quick, “get in and get out” approach.
Connectedness to the Self
How are you doing with listening to yourself during this time of tumult? Are you taking a pause to pay attention to what you’re feeling and to what you need? There are so many ways to connect with ourselves – from expressive movement, music, and art. Developing our “EQ”- our “Emotional Intelligence” – is also one of the ways we can develop our sense of connectedness with ourself. Emotion is a physical thing … it’s your body talking to you. You honor yourself by paying attention to it, not running from it, and by identifying the feeling (a cognitive thing) as well as the need underlying it. Then we can start to address it, and feel relief and restoration.
But we often can’t name what we’re feeling, so in my work both in chaplaincy and in facilitating a climate activist support group, I encourage the use of “emotion wheels” or referring to a list of Feelings and Needs. When I come home after a hard day and I am emotionally charged, I still pull out these tools and take a few minutes to figure out what is going on.
One last thing on emotions… Britt Wray is a writer and researcher at Stanford working at the forefront of the emotional and psychological impacts of the climate crisis. She explains the social consequences that come from of our lack of awareness of our emotions and how they are being manipulated:
Emotions are the gas you can’t smell or see but that fuel the public circus on social media that allows big tech to cash in. There are active incentives against us handling our emotions well. We can see clearly in the political arena how our lack of emotional intelligence is pulling at the frays of our democracies and our families. All of this requires a high degree of emotional intelligence. We have to practice it and we need support to do so because it is not innate to all of us. What is more often innate is becoming stressed, rigid, shutting down, projecting blame onto others, and being defensive.
-Britt Wray, Generation Dread
Emotion Word Wheel model by Geoffrey Roberts
Connectedness to Others
How is your sense of being supported in community? Are you finding ways to be in touch with others each day? Do you have at least one good friend who you can share openly with?
One of our core human needs is belonging, community, companionship. And the health of our relationships to the key people in our lives can make a great difference for our peace of mind. Although periods of solitude are beneficial for our wellbeing too, being connected with others - whether family, friends, school, workplace or a religious community - gives us an embodied experience of safety, wellbeing and love.
When the results came in on the night of the presidential election, I turned to my stunned neighbor and said, “The only way we are going to get through this is together. No more lone wolf.” We can be strategic about this and foster connection with each other in productive and empowering ways. So, although venting frustration and worry with each other is natural and needed at times, it often has the unhelpful effect of supercharging an already frazzled situation. What is more helpful and deeply nourishing for our spirits, is to afford deep listening to each other, allowing for a chance to do some deeper meaning-making and recognition of emotion.
Connectedness to Nature
Have you had some opportunities recently to be outside, to enjoy some hands-on, nose-in connection with nature? Have you been able to stop and pause and take in the beauty of a tree? If housebound, have you been able to find some restorative food for the spirit by slowly watering your plants or gazing out the window at the clouds? Are you feeling like you are just “consuming” nature, or do you let yourself feel a resonant back and forth flow of connection?
I love that this clinical definition of spirituality has our connectedness to nature as a key aspect of our spiritual wellbeing. In my involvement with other eco-chaplains and The BTS Center (which focuses on spiritual leadership for a climate changed world), there is an understanding that our human disconnection from the natural world is one of the main factors underlying our climate crisis. The mechanistic thinking of our Western World paradigm – and the values that go with it - has blunted our sensitivity to our mutual relationship with plants, animals, even minerals. Our old religious doctrines have conveniently been interpreted such that humans have “dominion” over the earth rather than responsibility for the care of God’s creation. Our spirit has become impoverished as a result.
That said, many do experience being in nature as their sanctuary, their connection to the sacred, what evokes a profound sense of awe. It is a gift to be humbled and quieted in the vastness of a landscape, of the sky and stars, in the stunning intricacy of a leaf, a bloom, an insect. Our burdens are lifted by experiencing a larger perspective.
The Peace of Wild Things
By Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Connectedness to the Significant or Sacred
Whatever your understanding of God, whatever your experience of the Holy, of Divine Intelligence, are you taking time to be in connection with it? This is about nourishing a connection with the most sacred part of ourselves, the deepest and purest place in our heart. Our beloved Howard Thurman describes this “Island of Peace within One’s Soul”:
We are all of us deeply involved in the throes of our own weaknesses and strengths, expressed often in the profoundest conflicts within our souls. The only hope for surcease, the only possibility of stability for the person, is to establish an Island of Peace within one’s soul. Here one brings for review the purposes and dreams to which one’s life is tied. This is the place where there is no pretense, no dishonesty, no adulteration…. What one really thinks and feels about one’s own life stands revealed; what one thinks and feels about other people far and near is seen with every nuance honestly labeled: love is love, hate is hate, fear is fear. Well within the island is the Temple where God dwells – not the God of the creed, the church, the family, but the God of one’s heart.
-Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart, 1.
In this time of chaos and upheaval, may your spirit be well tended, rested and nourished. May you have a sense of meaning and purpose that inspire you. May you feel connected to the fullness of life, to your heart’s truth, to your beloveds, to the trees and to that which you find as sacred. Keep holding on to your dreams.
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