If your Pastor seems disinterested in masks and sanctuaries--it is not that they don't care. They may simply be grieving.

     Yesterday the skies opened up and it finally rained here in Maine. I was overwhelmed with such sadness. The rain came down by the buckets and it felt like God was weeping. Weeping for more than 500,000 lives lost. That is filling Gillette stadium, which holds about 66,000 people, more than seven times and having all those lives lost. So much loss in these past months. At this moment I was overwhelmed, and I admitted to myself that discussions over masks and when we will be back in the sanctuary are, for me,second to the grief of the world.

     Every pastor answers a call that comes in a different way. We share similarities but we also have calls that are specific, some of us have been called to be with people as they end their time on earth. This includes caring for and walking with the grieving. This has always been an important part of my call. It seems that for the past months I, like many, have been looking to the future without adequate response to all that has been lost. I have been running, not walking.

     Like many of you I move through these strange times feeling like I am walking through mist, the air feels different, the world moves slowly, I am a stranger in familiar places---exactly how we feel after we lose someone we love. And as most people in grief do--we move in silence, we know society is uncomfortable with grief. But there was a time and there are still places where people give way to great lamenting. They take to the streets, they let the world know that the one they love is gone.

     If you have lost someone you love, you might know that quite often with new grief we work our way through all our old griefs. Like worry beads we move through each one, holding, rubbing, and remembering. 500,000 lives have caused us to move through life upon life.

     George Floyd was the life that caused a ripple of remembering, his life lost came when the burden of pandemic loss was on our hearts. People were free to finally weep as Rachel---gone, gone, gone--my children are gone, there is no comfort for me. Their lament is renamed “rioting” we are more comfortable with that. Anger, a natural reaction to grief, is palpable. Anger at too many years of slavery and oppression, too many wrongful deaths.

     There is anger with pandemic grief as well, anger at wearing or not wearing a mask, anger that things are no longer the same. I have anger with my grief as well. I am a social science major, I know about survival of the fittest, I even appreciate it in the greater scheme of things, but as a pastor I am mad. I am mad at a virus that preys on the weakest and most vulnerable. I am mad that the elderly, the compromised, and people of color are seen as expendable. The elderly in particular, dismissed as ready to go anyway. I have lifted an 80 woman off the grave of her brother--gone, gone, gone.

     I do not live in fear of death, I have been with the dying too many times to not see beauty in our exit as it is in our entrance. But I also believe the Kin-dom of Heaven is at hand. The family of God is at hand. I see that this beautiful life is too good to be tossed away for even one minute too soon. I see my parishioners and I see whole lives, I see this corner of our world changed forever with their departing, I see the Kin-dom would be disrupted with their absence.

     It is raining again today, the earth rejoices, my heart is comforted with permission to cry. Tomorrow is a new day, I believe that good will come from this time of struggle, I believe there will be a time to rejoice. But today, I am grieving.

“Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was better after I had cried, than before--more sorry, more aware of my own ingratitude, more gentle.”

― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations