The Slow Way: The Antidote For Our Breathless Pace? Full-Hearted Lament
The hectic pace of our culture is actually an overflow of our failure to grieve.
When we got to Ace’s Spring Fling picnic at his school this past Tuesday night, we were prepared for some music, families on picnic blankets, and some awkward get-to-know-yous. Ace has been at his typical neighborhood school for two years, but this was the first real social event to happen since he’s been there. When you combine the challenges of Covid with just how difficult it can be for a non-verbal 7-year-old with multiple disabilities to make friends, we’ve found that getting involved in this school community has been particularly hard.
What we didn’t expect when we dragged our older boys, our snacks-for-dinner spread, and a couple of rough wool blankets to the space behind the school, was the world’s sweetest and most effervescent DJ. He was speaking the language of elementary kids everywhere and Bringing The Party.
Ace is always drawn to music, so as soon as we dropped our stuff on the lawn he made a beeline for the dance party. But when he got to the gaggle of kids he hesitated, wanting to be in the mix of dancers losing their minds over Taylor Swift, but not sure how to find his way in. He’s small, sweet, and uncertain how to engage with his peers. I grabbed his hand and we danced together, twirling and jumping for a while. Then he would ease away from me into the group, and stand as close to his peers as he could, watching the kids dance together. I would let him stand hovering near the other kids for a while, then I’d jump back in to rescue him, to give him a hand to hold and partner to dance with, all while feeling the ache of what he wanted. Ace wants the welcome and acceptance of friendship in his life. But for it to come his way, his typical peers will have to reach beyond their comfort. Do 7-year-old kids even know how to be with a friend who doesn’t speak to them, who struggles to look in their eyes, who would rather watch them dance for a good ten minutes, before feeling brave enough to try it for himself?
My morning reading this week has been The Wild Edge of Sorrow, the book Barbara Brown Taylor referred to in the talk I mentioned in this newsletter last week. As I entered into the early parts of Francis Weller’s book, I found myself drawn to the big statements of his Preface. Weller sets us up for a big idea that will run through this whole book: That grief is part of all our lives – collective grief, traumatic grief, personal grief – and that grief that has not been lived out, spoken, expressed, “falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms.” The symptoms he mentions may not be shocking: depression, anxiety, loneliness, addiction, and — say it, Francis — “moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.”
When I started this newsletter, I wanted to explore the “breathless pace” of our culture. I wanted to offer an alternative way of living that taps into our soul’s need for rest, meaning, and authentic connection with ourselves, each other, and the world around us. What I didn’t expect is how much my personal journey of grief would help me understand a core truth: that the hectic pace of our culture is actually an overflow of our failure to grieve. There is so much loss in our shared earth, and in our individual lives, and we don’t know how to hold grief and hope in the same hand.
Weller talks about collective grief that stems from living in a world wrecked by war, climate change, and authoritarian governments. He wrote his book seven years ago. If it were written now, especially this week, I assume he would mention the devastation that white supremacy continues to inflict on people of color in this country. The attack in Buffalo this past week by a raging white kid with an assault rifle was another example of the depth of racial hatred and bigotry being passed to the children of this country, perpetuated by a (white) culture that insists that we don’t need to talk about the race problem in America.
I imagine Weller would talk about the personal and collective suffering of deep political and cultural divides in the US, the loss of one million people to a virus that may have been controlled had it not been for those deep political and cultural divides. And the personal pain that those divides have caused many of us who grew up in the evangelical Church and now find ourselves estranged from a faith that so far from the the teachings of Jesus that we are spiritually homeless. What does it mean to grieve these deep sorrows in a way that allows for wholeness, for full-heartedness, knowing that if we don’t grieve our faith, our country, and even our religious identity, we will most likely lean into the “machinery of our culture,” forgetting that our limits, our desires, and even our sorrows point to a reality that we are made for what Weller calls, “a bigger, more sensuous, and more imaginative life.”
The hectic pace of the machine allows us to skirt above pain for a while but, eventually grief always leaks out. And when grief leaks out in the form of depression, anxiety, anger, addiction, or loneliness, its a symptom of a bigger problem: shallow attempts at satisfying ourselves.
Real humanity must include grief over what has been lost. So where do we start?
When I think about what I want for Ace it always comes back to full-welcome into his community. I don’t want Ace to change one bit of himself to be accepted. Who he is — autistic, non-verbal, living with an intellectual disability – is beautiful and worthy. What I want is for his community of peers to see his beauty and worth for what it is as well, and to reach toward it, even if it's difficult. How do we teach kids to reach toward the uncomfortable? We tell them the truth: that every human is valuable, that friendship requires love-beyond-our-comforts, and that there is pain in the world worth feeling sad for. We teach kids that life is not meant to be lived protecting our own safety, not meant for, as Weller would say, “resignation and endurance.” But, instead, we are made for “amazement and wonder,” a way of living that must always invite in grief if it is to be full-hearted, because wholeheartedness always welcomes “all that is, thereby granting room for our most authentic life.”
My dream is to build a world where Ace can walk into that kid-flash-mob and find himself surrounded by authentic friendship and care, not because he has changed, but because his friends are learning the true thing about this earth: it’s hard, it’s beautiful, it’s worth being amazed by, it’s worth weeping for.
A Slow Practice
When we’re talking about something as abstract as grief, it's easy to determine that it doesn't apply to us, particularly if we’re in a season where things are going our way, and in which there are no massive losses to grieve. We haven’t lost our jobs, our family is intact, we’re relatively healthy. What’s the point in thinking about grief?
I want us to consider that the turmoil and suffering of past two years of the pandemic, the deep divides in our country over race, and perhaps the tumultuous political years before Covid have placed us in a moment where grieving our collective losses is necessary if we’re ever going to heal. Otherwise, our society will continue to live at a shallow level of being, content to accept “resignation and endurance” as the norm.
How do we learn to grieve collectively? That’s a question I’m still working through, but perhaps learning to lament together is a good way to start. Lament is a biblical and communal form of what we might call grief-prayer, in which we’re invited to raise our fists in frustration, push back on God’s seeming inaction, and push for divine action on behalf of the broken-hearted and oppressed, hopefully from a place of believing that God loves our created selves and dreams for us to live in peace and justice on this earth.
One place to start might be listening to this beautiful song “I Hear Silence,” performed by David Gungor, one of the pastors at my church, who wrote this as a lament, a song of grief and frustration with the seeming inaction and silence of God.
Take some time to listen if you can.
Another way forward is to pray with the Psalms, which is what I invite us to do today.
Let’s pray together parts of Psalm 44, verses 18-26, which I’ve adjusted a bit for this prayer. If you want to read the text as it’s written (in the New Revised Standard Version) you can find it here.
Let’s pray this lament together as breath prayers:
Breathe in: Our heart has not turned back
Breathe out: Rise up, come to our help.
Breathe in: You have broken us in the haunt of jackals and covered us with deep darkness.
Breathe out: Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.
Breathe in: Don’t you know the secrets of the heart?
Breathe out: Rise up, come to our help.
Breathe in: Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O Lord?
Breathe out: Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.
Breathe in: Awake, do not cast us off forever!
Breathe out: Rise up, come to our help.
Breathe in: Why do you hide your face?
Breathe out: Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.
Breathe in: Why do you forget our affliction and oppression?
Breathe out: Rise up, come to our help.
Breathe in: We sink down to the dust.
Breath out: Redeem us for the sake of your steadfast love.
Breathe in: Our bodies cling to the ground.
Breathe out: Rise up, come to our help.
A List of Things
This coming week I’ll be away. The family and I are off to vacation! And I’ll be taking a break for the week. The newsletter will be quiet next Saturday, and while you’ll see a new episode of the podcast in your feed this Tuesday, we’ll take a break Tuesday, the 31st. The Slow Way Podcast will be back at it June 7.
It’s been a wild week of prep for our trip and writing and big family happenings so I haven’t been able to curate you a list of things this week. But you just wait until I’ve had a week of vacation. My brain will be firing off articles for you. Enjoy these next two weeks. See you here June 4!