Back in March, before Barrows closed down but after we had stopped gathering, Rev. Kimberly Wootan recorded Bill leading Mindfulness Meditation in the chapel. You can watch it below. Bill leads a 25 minute meditation with reflection afterwards and closes with the Metta Prayer.

I remember as this was beginning when I would see residents who were out without their masks on and they’d see me with my mask on and would apologize: “oh, I am sorry I forgot to bring my mask.” I remember thinking and sometimes saying, “it’s ok, you were just going about as usual in very unusual times.” We’ve had to make a huge adjustment to a very strange new kind of living. And no matter how many times I pray, “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” I go back and forth between accepting and raging against this “new normal.”

I found it helpful and I know others did as well – when I read trauma specialist, Jennifer Yaeger, name that what we are collectively going through is indeed trauma. And since it is a kind of trauma we are in the middle of, even though we find ourselves doing many of the things we might do on an ordinary summer – and perhaps we find stretches of time, maybe days, when we forget or at least seldom think about being in the middle of a global pandemic – for many of us it is difficult to not be reminded constantly that we are here, under pressure and a threat the like of which we had not ever had to live with before. And that is stressful, that is anxiety-inducing, that is indeed an ongoing experience of trauma.

So, though we may have to accept many of these things under the heading of “that which we cannot change,” we can also move to “courage to change the things we can.” And one of the closest and perhaps most important things we can change – is the responses we have to our reactions to the pain and stress this all causes. We can choose to have compassion on ourselves as we name the weight that this is and what this unusual strain can do to us. We can choose to have compassion on our families, coworkers, residents we care for, even the strangers on the street or in the grocery store.

We can choose to have compassion on ourselves for the burden that this is, and be understanding when we don’t feel the way we think we should, or can’t do the things we think we ought to, and when we need to we can muster courage to reach out for support – maybe by contacting EAP, or reaching out to someone we trust and can simply confide in. (And we here at Spiritual Care are always available to listen and support you – never hesitate to reach out).

I found this graphic put out by Trauma & Co. to be a helpful reminder that it’s ok to feel and experience the extraordinary feelings and experiences this time brings. Naming these reactions as ok goes a long way in lessening the unnecessary burden we can find ourselves carrying.

And so I offer this little grounding exercise by Marchaé Grair from the collection Michelle and I have been sharing this past week or so. I invite you take a few moments sometime today to read through and follow the instructions of this small ritual (you’ll find it helpful even if you aren’t in the middle of an anxiety attack).

Ritual During My Anxiety Attack

When my skin keeps crawling,
Wrap me in your loving embrace.
When my breath keeps quickening,
Give me sweet release.

Pause to bless something you hear, smell, see, touch, or taste.

When my weeping consumes my being,
Lead me toward self-compassion.
When the “what-ifs” feel too scary,
Help me stay present in your presence.

Pause to bless something you hear, smell, see, touch, or taste.

Tend to the undercurrents of emotions
That burst forward in ways beyond my control,
And release me from any grief and shame
I carry just for feeling my feelings.

Pause to bless something you hear, smell, see, touch, or taste.

Ground me in my divine resilience:
I am still here, I am still worthy.
Ground me in your divine companionship:
You are still here, I am never alone.

Repeat the final stanze as many times as needed.

Writer’s note: Engaging the five senses during an anxiety attack can lessen the symptoms and length of the attack.

I hope this week you can stay hydrated, and take good care of your emotions as well as the body that houses them as we continue to navigate this uncertain time together. The good news, is that we are more resilient and stronger than we ever can imagine, and especially when we open ourselves up to the connections outside of us that sustain us and always have.

May you be well and supported today and may the blessing of God or all that sustains you, Keep you safe, grant you peace and fill you with all that you need, just for today. Amen.

Joel

Many of us have a complicated relationship with our face masks. I find most of my frustrations involve my glasses – steamed up lenses or glasses falling off if I’m not careful in taking off the mask. Sometimes the loops pull my ears in such a way that the glasses no longer sit snug and are constantly in a tenuous balance on the ears. (I suppose I should just look into contact lenses.)

So I want to offer a blessing for our face masks this morning. It comes from a collection of blessings that Michelle shared with me, written for this strange time of pandemic. Here we are, taking on this daily new article of clothing – a new decision about what and how to color coordinate, inspiring creative ways to drink our morning coffee as we work. Here we are in this new time. Let us, then, bless these face coverings, see them for what they are, for what they do, and then take on this “holy inconvenience” in love.

Blessing for a Face Mask
By Mary Luti

God of health and wholeness,
of neighbor love and kindness,
Bless this mask, my slight shield
Against great ills:

Bless the fabric that repels the drops,
The ties that go behind my ears,
The wire that fits snug against my nose,
The folds that cup my chin.

Make me grateful for my mask
Even when it makes me hot,
Even when I look funny in it,
Even when I’m dying to take it off.

Bless me also, and everyone
Who for their own and others’ sakes
Put on this holy inconvenience every day,
Our minds made up to love.

Yesterday I came back to my office with the need to express a very simple and very heartfelt lament. “Why does everyone have to die?” It’s a lament as old as my first memory of death, when I was four and saw my mother crying on the phone as she heard the news from the States about her mother’s passing while we were living in South Africa. I remember going to the funeral in Beloit, Wisconsin and dropping my matchbox car by accident into the hole they had dug for my grandmother and all of the tears came forth in this more tangible experience of loss for a four year old.

We ache anew with the fresh losses that come, and come, and each new one presses on the rest like old bruises. And we have also found after each one that something new comes again in the landscape of our being.

My 3 yr old son has been fascinated with volcanoes recently (hashtag parenting in times of disaster?) and we’ve been reading a book “Gopher to the Rescue: A Volcano Recovery Story.” While so much of the landscape is devastated by the volcano’s eruption, gopher is digging and surviving and is the protagonist in the recovery of the ecosystem after the eruption, aerating the soil, providing shady spaces for emerging frogs and salamanders. It’s a beautiful story of what happens in a landscape after huge loss. And it’s been giving me hope. And I thought of that gopher, and about the resilience of our hearts to emerge anew after every loss as I read what Maya Angelou has so beautifully articulated in this poem. So I offer this to you with a word of solidarity – this is hard and disorienting, and the same healing that has carried us through before is carrying us through even this.

When Great Trees Fall
By Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance, fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance of
dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

May you be well and supported today and may the blessing of God or all that sustains you,
keep you safe, grant you peace and fill you with all that you need, just for today. Amen.

– Rev. Joel Eaton

You can watch last Sunday’s worship with Rev. Michelle DeCoste here.
We plan to update the worship tab on this website each week with the most recent video of worship.

I am a bit teary as Chuck Poirier just came by and shared this story from his daughter-in-law, Cindy, with me. I wanted to share it with you. It is quite incredible and if you don’t know what a Luna moth looks like, look it up. They are magnificent creatures.

We were at the cabin one weekend in June. I got up bright and early to take Hazel the dog for her morning walk. Business done, we returned to the cabin where I noticed a large leafy thing on the front door. I did not heart a storm overnight and was wondering how a leaf could have been blown so hard it struck to the door. As I got closer I realize tis was not a leaf at all, but a moth. A very large, green moth, about 4 inches long. It was amazing looking, like no moth I had ever seen before! I carefully opened the door, trying not to disturb the moth, and went inside to get my camera. Coming out again slowly, I took several pictures. The moth was so still I was wondering if it was dead but dared not touch it to find out. I did not was to scare it away before Mark got up and had a chance to see it. The moth stayed where it was on our front door. Mark got up and we were able to identify it as a Luna moth. The moth stayed with us all day, despite our going in and out the door many times. It’s position changed slightly from time to time so we knew it was alive. Darkness came. We walked the dog a last time and closed up for the night. The moth was still with us. By the next morning the Luna moth was gone. It struck me as odd that a moth would remain where it was for 24 hrs with all the movement and activity nearby. It seemed special somehow, like we were chosen to be blessed by its presence.

The following weekend we were back at the cabin with our friends Connie and Choy Leow. We were showing them pictures of the Luna mother and telling them about it’s stay with us. Connie told us that in Chinese culture when an animal comes and stays by you like that it is the spirit of your deceased loved one come back to visit you. I recalled that I had been thinking of the moth as if it were Pat visiting us. She had passed away only a month before. Mark recalled the same. While neither of us had spoken to each other of it, we had been thinking the same thing. That Chinese culture held this belief just reinforced what we felt in our hearts. Mark’s mom had come to say goodbye and leave us with a little reminder of the miracle and beauty of life.

Special thanks to Chuck Poirier for sharing Cindy’s lovely story.
May you be surprised by something beautiful and mysterious today.

May you be well,
Michelle

Last week we looked at some practices that build our resilience.

As we begin this week, here is a Blessing for mixed feelings.
We are glorious in our humanness, and that includes our feelings,
all of them.

God, they say feelings are a package deal. The yuck and the yum come bundled.

God, they say that all feelings are from you-it’s what we do with them that matters.

But what do we do when our feelings come not tidily trussed but messily tangled, like a fine silver chain that won’t be undone no matter how long we labor over it? It sits in a box waiting for a miracle-worker.

I take them out again, the pile of feelings. And this time, I ask you to bless them before I begin work:

Bless the anger and the irritation. Bless the gratitude and the joy-sparks. Bless the compassion and the selfishness, The fear and the courage, the gloom and the hope, The listlessness and the purposeful action. Bless the love in my life, and bless the distance- Emotional and physical – Between those I would reune with. Bless the stress, and bless the serenity.

Bless it all, the whole mess, and remind me that having a rainbow of feelings is your light, prismed into spectrum.

I feel a little more ease now. I can see where to begin, to gently untangle, pull there, push there, rest there…. And find how it all fits together in one unbroken, beautiful strand.

– Molly Baskette in Emerge: Blessings & Rituals for Unsheltering from the Stillspeaking Writers Group (2020)

May you get things done today.
May you feel deeply with the work.
Your presence makes all the difference today.

“A broad mosaic of churches from all 6 New England states collaborated to create this project,” (from the video post).
Members of churches throughout our region sing a beautiful blessing for all of us and our families. Take a listen and receive a blessing for you and your families today.