"Someone I once loved gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” – Mary Oliver
I’m done with being resilient. Being plucky and dogged. Putting on a happy face. Keeping calm and carrying on. Trusting that after some bumps and detours our world will somehow return to normal (whatever the heck that is!).
It’s been almost two years since COVID smashed into our world and changed it so completely. In that time, as I’ve written here and preached from the pulpit and dealt with my own feelings of dislocation and struggle, I’ve always tried my best to fall back on the practice of resilience to keep going. The hope that resilience will see me through.
Resilience. Webster’s Dictionary says that resilience is, “the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress…and an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change.”
Yes, that stress strained body definition is certainly a good example of the need for resilience. We’ve all been physically strained by COVID in the past twenty-three months. Eyes blurry and itchy and tired from so many Zoom meetings. Numb backsides from so much sitting before the computer or on the couch in the midst of some Netflix or Apple TV binge watch. There’s my ever-lengthening facial worry lines getting even longer and longer. Who hasn’t been anxious about our aging parents getting sick or our toddler getting sick or ourselves getting sick or our job going away or our loved ones having to always be at arm’s length--literally?
Then there’s the expanded waistlines too, the “COVID twenty” so many of us have put on but that now sticks around, refusing to leave. Sure, the fact I’ve taken up baking homemade bread to ward off loneliness is great. The fact I eat so much of that bread, and ice cream and Chips Ahoy cookies and Cheetos? Not so great. I’m not so sure my body can bounce back, recover somehow. I may just have to buy a bigger belt, or at least a really, REALLY, stretchy one.
That second definition of resilience —that’s even harder to realize. Recovering or adjusting easily to misfortune or change. Easily?! What are those Webster logophiles smoking? Who are they kidding? Yes, resilience has helped me bounce back from my own vocational dark thoughts (will anybody ever come back to church ever again?!) We keep opening the doors every single Sunday morning and trying our best but that’s a lot of sabbaths to just buck it up. To soldier on.
You could say that about so many other professions weighed down by COVID’s tenacity. Teachers still teaching—how do they do it? First responders still responding: ambulances overflowing, violent crime on the rise. Imagine being a restaurateur. Talk about needing to be resilient. All those empty tables. Or a theater owner or anyone else in the business of performing live.
For all of us: the wells of resilience are getting pretty dried up.
Thus, instead of trying our best to be resilient, to bounce back instead, we can practice spiritual transformation: being changed as we move forward. Being changed to adapt to this brave new world now being born. Embracing change and accepting the fact we can’t go home again; we can’t go back. The only way through is straight ahead.
Resilience is about a return to normalcy, to the status quo, to homeostasis. But what if our communal trauma is so big, so world changing, so powerful, that there is no reverse, no turning around and getting back to square one? What if the only way forward is forward? What if changing who we are and how we live is the only way we can get through to the other side of the virus and all its societal implications and fall out?
The author and holocaust survivor Victor Frankl wrote, in his memoir of survival, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Growth. Freedom.
Dare we have the courage to change and to be changed? I know I can’t practice my work or my faith in the same ways anymore. There’s no going back for institutional religion the way it was, of this, I am sure. We can’t do the same old same old same old and expect the same results. Nope. I must change. Believers must change.
And if you think of your own world, your own ways of being or working or loving, you too might realize you are being called to change as well. Sure, it is so tempting to believe that one day soon it will all be over, and it will all be just like the good old days. But I think those days are going, going, gone. And sometimes they weren’t so good.
All we can do, all we must do, is be open to growth and to transformation. It’s actually kind of exciting if you think about. Yes, a bit scary but tomorrow beckons. Tomorrow is the place where my Creator and the Creator of the universe awaits.
Resilience? Not so much. Onward? Absolutely. See you on the journey.
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