Sorrow and Grief in a COVID Haunted World
The year of the global pandemic began for us at St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church with the funeral of a young man tragically killed in a car accident. The following morning handful of us gathered for Sunday worship. It was the last time we worshipped in our building until Easter 2021.
Yet mission and ministry continued. We housed a refugee family in our basement. We constructed a Little Free Pantry, planted a Feed Iowa First Grow Don’t Mow Garden, and continued our partnership with HACAP’s Backpack Program and our local elementary schools (Grant Wood & Erskine). We cobbled together a system for livestreaming Sunday worship. It was weird preaching into a camera, but we managed to do it for over a year. Everyone on the worship team stayed healthy, even though a dozen members of our congregation did get sick, but none of them died. We survived, and we are even thriving by a certain set of metrics.
We survived despite the pandemic, the derecho, isolation, and fear. Divisive rhetoric unleashed hatred and violence, highlighting the enduring plague of racism and white supremacy. People died of natural and unnatural causes. For the first time in my ministry, I wrote in the parish record beside the names of those who died: “no funeral.” My brother and my son died in Canada. No funerals there either. We grieve, physically distance, socially isolated from our loved ones, knowing that they too are grieving alone.
We survived. We are vaccinated and protected from the worst of COVID-19. But it continues to evolve, spawning new variants. There are millions of empty places in homes around the world. Millions of hearts are heavy laden with sorrow and grief. For them I offer this poem written by Jan Richardson.
The Cure for Sorrow
Because I do not know
any medicine for grief
but to let ourselves
grieve.
Because I do not know
any cure for sorrow
but to let ourselves
sorrow.
Because I do not know
any remedy
but to let the heart break,
to let it fall open, then
to let it fall open
still more.
Because I do not know
how to mend
the unmendable,
unfixable,
unhealable wound
that keeps finding
itself healed
as we tend it,
as we follow
the line of it,
as we let it lead us
on the path
it knows.
Because I do not know
any solace
but to give ourselves
into the Love
that will never cease
to find us,
that will never loose
its hold on us,
that will never abandon us
to the sorrow
for which it holds
the cure.
Amen. Thanks be to God who is love (1 John 4:20), whose Christ holds all things together (Colossians 1:17), and whose Spirit is present even in the depths of Sheol (Psalm 139:8).
Rev. Dr. Ritva H. Williams
Pastor, St. Stephen’s Lutheran Church