Piloting Faith: It's time to create...

A Word for the Day...

We need new rituals to find our way through this time.

This week Rev. Beth Waltemath wrote a powerful piece in the NY Times about her experience losing Genia, a friend and congregant to cancer. During Genia's dying process, Beth and Genia together created rituals that felt right to them, ways to honor how life and death get all tangled up. Their rituals saw them through, as rituals should do. She writes about this time we now live in in the face of COVID-19:

"This Holy Week of the pandemic year, a year when memorials for the dead are indefinitely postponed and in-person Easter rituals are canceled across Christendom, we will mourn the pomp and circumstance of the sacred rites, but we can still linger in the intimacy of our bodies. We can savor the dampness of our tears and the coolness of the water when we wash them away. We can care for those with whom we are quarantined, if not in the bathing of little feet and anointing of brows, then by taking the time to practice silence together, to offer a long, loving look into the eyes of someone seated a safe distance away or on the other side of a teleconferencing camera. There’s so much glory to be experienced even on this side of the resurrection."

As we face weeks or perhaps months of not being able to gather, we will need to find new ways to celebrate weddings, baptize babies, grieve our dear ones who pass away, celebrate communion, sing together, pray together and stay connected through challenging days. But dare I say, we've needed new ways for a long time.

We are journeying into a world unknown with the freedom to create anew. Yet ironically we have been here before. History moves as echos of patterned pasts. All of our great movements have come from times of deep disruption. The new rituals will rise from us. You will find yourself singing a new song, and I will pray a new prayer, and your friend will find new words and ways to grieve. The rituals will come. But this time, they will come from the truest expression of all of us living in this time and this place. They carry the realness of our world and the earnestness of our seeking the Holy. This is as it should be.

Life, death, life again. So it is.

We are in this together.

Rev. Cameron Trimble
Author of Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight

Prayer for the Week

Holy God,

Keep us mindful of those who lack basic resources in these times. We pray for those who are hungry or without a safe place to stay. We pray for those in homeless shelters, in prisons, in detention centers, where close quarters make social distancing even more difficult. We follow a Christ who looked out for the most vulnerable, the least, the last, and the lost. Help us too, in these anxious times, to serve first the ones who need the most.

Amen.

- National Council of Churches, Rev. Lee Hull Moses, Chief of Staff, Office of the General Minister and President, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

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