Religious leaders in Decatur, Ga., who recently staged an interfaith memorial for the victims of COVID-19 say the experience was emotionally and spiritually healing and demonstrates the need for mourning collectively. “There is something powerful about sharing grief in a…
What I learned from RBG about the ‘dissenter’s hope’
As a funeral director, I sit across from families trying to process their grief. Just about any funeral director you’ll meet will tell you that no two families are exactly alike. Some families really open up, and their faces light…
Learning the mixed metaphors of grief, a primary color
“Your father has had a stroke. We are on our way to the hospital.” The text message came from my mother, just as I was finishing a worship service at a youth camp in the mountains of Arkansas. The next…
My Coronavirus Summer: Coping with grief and seeking joy
None of us are exempt from significant loss at some point in our lives — loss of loved ones, property, health, income. Losses often pile up on one another, and the world seems to turn upside down overnight. After my…
Amid a pandemic and a fractured nation, how do we live ‘in the meantime’?
What’s going on with your feelings these days? In an old comic strip, Shoe, the curmudgeonly newspaper editor, is sitting at his desk. He declares, “There are mood swings and there are mood bungee jumps!” Some days are like that…
Q&A: Is that grief or depression you’re experiencing due to COVID-19?
People are recoiling from multiple aspects of the reality that’s impacting their lives on social, emotional and financial levels.
I’ll get to hope. For now, I need to sit in the ashes and mourn
This pandemic is not a theological crisis. It’s a moral one. We would do well in this moment to take the prophet Jeremiah’s advice to “put on sackcloth, lament and howl.” We need to mourn and rage and contemplate what led us to this moment.
‘Watch with me’: on the other side of our long night of grief, space to reimagine our world
The people who die from COVID-19 will come from every walk of life in every town in the country. But in aggregate, the pattern shows now and will continue to show that deaths by the disease are political deaths – ones set into motion by racism and oppression.
‘You can’t get a Ph.D. in caring’: COVID-19 calls for believer-priests | #intimeslikethese
With all this grief, on a societal level perhaps not seen since 9/11 or the stock market crash of 1929, we pastors and other church staff sure could use more ministers. For Baptists, this shouldn’t be a novel idea.