.a blessing for the both/and.
Perhaps you have heard
These questions
Making their way
Around this COVID season
From author
Unknown
As you sit with where you are
As you notice how your life
Is being affected
Ask yourself 3 questions:
What has COVID-19
taken?
What has it left
Untouched?
What has it
Given?
I sometimes fear
The question
“How are you?”
It seems a trap
Someone wants only one slice of me
And my survival depends on
Figuring out what it is.
I scour my experience
Searching for what is honest
And then from that
Which slice they wish.
Sometimes, though,
I simply say the whole.
The both
And
The both/and.
Both/and.
I often hear you,
dismiss part of you
favor one side
out of balance
in the soul's whole experience.
With a ‘but’
you diminish the gifts
Or the griefs
Self conscious about the two of them
Or one of them
Being unwelcome.
And yet,
We are always in the both/and.
We are grieving
The losses
Of what is no longer.
We are grieving
The lack
The pauses
The surrendering
The un-closed chapters prematurely ended
The untimely deaths
And straining burdens in this time
It is good and right to pause with your grief and attune to these.
For they are part of you.
AND
We are also
celebrating:
At the same time
with our same personhood
same humanity
Celebrating
The gifts in the pause
The awareness to our wider global impact and connectedness
The abundance growing in ourselves
The blessing of technology
The unforeseen joys in these weary and weird days
The connections of heart and soul to new friends
Once acquaintances,
Now going deeper together.
Neither
Undoes
The other.
We are both, and.
Both, and.
Both, and.
Resurrection does not undo death,
Thomas knows this as he touches the wounds.
Death has happened.
I will not underestimate
the way the death
you have experienced
has shaped you
changed
and transfigured you.
You walk with the impact of death upon your heart and soul
A bit of a limp
You are never fully walking away from it.
But resurrection comes anyway.
Death is not undone,
It is repurposed
Composted
The soil is the same and yet new
And resurrection,
Like a strange new light rising up from the
Unexpected direction
Or like the extension of a friendly and supportive hand
From someone you didn’t think to ask to offer it:
The light of resurrection comes.
A blessing
For the both/and
For you becoming a vessel
for grief and celebration
In the same
Abundant
Brutiful
Holy
Moment,
Each breath is.
A blessing
for you
taking longer
and more sacred, soulful space
to answer
how
(all of) you is.
