After death

                                  

Luke 23:48-24:12

Christ has risen [He has risen indeed!]

The congregation gathered in this room and online here together this Easter is radically different from the one who gathered the last time we celebrated Easter in this space.  Our toddlers have become full-on kids. New people have joined this community both here in Minnesota and from afar.  And also, in the last 20 months, 11 people from this congregation have died.  Eleven times in the past 20 months loved ones in this community have had to begin the work of grieving and letting go, while the also doing the things that must be done to move forward -- choosing a casket or urn, making service preparations, the mountains of paperwork.  Right now three families among us are in the midst of that work.  The secular liturgy of death is imposed on us in the hours and days when we are most raw and shaky.  And it was no different when Jesus died.
 
We’ve heard this Easter story so many times, in so many different ways. But today I want us to recognize how this story is set in the hours, and days, and weeks right after death.  When Jesus died, those who loved him had to grieve and let go, while navigating all the details and logistics that come with death. 
 
This work was done by a group of women.  These women were Jesus’ friends and disciples, followers, patrons of his ministry, who provided for Jesus and the rest of the disciples. Some of them left lives behind to follow him. (Mary Magdaline was freed from demons and became known as “apostle to the apostles.” Joanna was the wife of Herod’s chief steward).  They were there with funding and support, coordinating meals and places to stay, taking care of what needed doing, and here they are, still doing this work, even after Jesus has died. 
 
These women stayed at the cross and watched Jesus die, watched the crowds leave, watched the soldiers take down his body.  They were there when Christ’s body was given to Joseph of Arimathea, and they went to the tomb to observe how Jesus was laid there.  Then they went home to prepare the spices for the body, to do the work that comes with death.
 
And then the Sabbath day comes, and everyone stops. Because their identity first and foremost is as God’s own people, claimed by God and reminded of this identity every week when nothing they do on this earth, not even the work that comes with death, is bigger or more important than letting God return humanity to the true order of things.  Even the death of God-with-us does not stop God from being God, or us from being God’s children.  
 
When the Sabbath ends, the women resume their work, bringing the spices to the tomb, where they are met by terrifying strangers in glowing clothing telling them in a cheeky way that that Jesus is not dead, but alive.  
Why do you look for the living among the dead?
I have always loved this question. Because they were obviously not looking for the living, they were looking for the dead, and expecting him to be where they left him.  But he’s not where they left him. 
(Christ has risen! He has risen indeed!) 
 
And I think we often are not looking for the living Jesus either.  We’d like him to be where we left him too.  In our bibles, in our lessons and our examples. We want to keep Jesus entombed as an idea, inspiration or supporting argument to use for our own ends. As though by our own our own efforts and striving, our own personal transformation or social engagement, inspired by the idea of Christ, of course, we can somehow save the world or ourselves.

We are not looking for a living entity who confronts us, and calls us, and wreaks change in our lives, and draws us into loving the world, and meets us with new life on the other side of a thousand deaths.  
And some years, with this text, that is my sermon. Amen. 
(Christ has risen! He has risen indeed!)
 
But this year I want to stay with the women who are doing the work that comes with death. 
In a time when a woman was not able to be a legal witness in a trial, in all four gospels one or all of these women are who share the news of Christ’s resurrection.  God chooses them as witnesses to God’s act of saving the whole world. God’s word comes through their word.  
 
And even though the rest of the disciples are hiding, and confused, and wondering what comes next, they are all already being called in scripture “apostles,” that is, instead of “followers,” they are being referred to as “sent ones.” Resurrection has happened, and things are already different.  
 
When the women go to the rest of the disciples-turned-apostles and tell them what they have seen, our prudish translators of old have said they thought it ‘an idle tale.’  This is actually a dirty word in the Greek. I already thrilled our teens a few weeks ago by using a swear in a sermon, so I’ll just say, they swore. The apostles called total BS on this claim. Peter had to run and see the empty tomb for himself. And when he did, he came back amazed.  He came around to where the women had been led – knowing something had happened but not knowing what it meant or what comes next.
 
There is no moving forward yet in this part of the story. Nobody knows what resurrection means and certainly nobody is celebrating. Later in the day on the road to Emmaus, two of Jesus’ followers will confuse him for a fellow traveler whose words strangely warm their hearts. They will invite him to stay with them and when he breaks bread and their eyes will be opened and they will recognize him, and he’ll disappear.  Sometime in that same day or the next he’ll appear to his followers again in another place and they think he’s a ghost, and he will eat broiled fish in front of them as though to prove otherwise.  

All that to say, it takes while for resurrection to settle in, for them to receive it, recognize it, to let it begin reshaping their lives. And when you’re still reeling from death resurrection sounds like BS.
 
But Christ has risen (he has risen indeed!).  
Resurrection has happened. They’ve yet to get their heads around that, and so have we.  God has already liberated the world.  Jesus has already defeated death. The end of the story has already been written. The “long arc of the moral universe is already bent toward justice” (to paraphraise Martin Luther King, Jr.). Redemption is underway.  The world belongs to God. We are being called and sent into this reality, to be part of the salvation already unfolding. 
 
We want quick fixes, instant salvation, painless upgrading.  But resurrection is the permanent shift, the long game, the real reality, and it means death is necessarily part of it.  Our Easter invitation today is not to jump right in with confident faith and cheerful rejoicing, as though death does not happen, as though suffering isn’t right here and the world as we know it doesn’t keep ending.  

Instead, our guides today are these friends of Jesus, these women who didn’t hide from death and loss.  They themselves will be moved toward God’s future where hope shows up in no ways they can anticipate, and life comes out of everything that’s been lost. God does this. The way there is to stay in the discomfort of being present to the reality, just as it is, however it is, and whatever that means for us. 
 
We are a community being reshaped by death and resurrection, always, and now. The living Jesus Christ is among us, working salvation in us and through us.  So we will be honest and willing to stay with each other in the stuff of life and death where Jesus can meet us.  We will keep stopping and resting on purpose to remember God is God of the whole universe, holding everything, and that our lives are a response to this God.  We will keep witnessing to each other what we’ve experienced, because God’s word comes through our words.  And we will watch for the ways we are being sent, even if we don’t know yet what comes next.
 
Life is precarious just now, for this whole world, really, and for this community, indeed, as we do the work that comes with death.  In the shadow of death, life is precious, and joy comes as a gift and a surprise.  On Good Friday, the energy in this room was palpable.  As we gathered in our black clothing in our living rooms and in this somber sanctuary to once again tell the story of Jesus’ death, the contrast of mood was striking. I wish you could have stood in my place and seen all the grinning, giddy faces smiling back.  The gladness of being together is profound.  Our emotions are close to the surface.  In the midst of it all, we are awake to God and to each other in a particular and poignant way.  We will cry and we will laugh, and God will keep meeting us with new life right where we are, ready to receive resurrection. 

Christ has risen (He has risen indeed!) 
 
Amen.

In on the Miracle

 

Matthew 5:1-12

Right now feels like we are poised on the edge of a significant, history-making moment. 

Friday a friend on the phone with someone in Washington DC said this person was watching out her window as the city was being boarded up. The National guard is standing by, ready to be deployed. Nobody knows what is going to happen next, or how we all will respond to what happens next. 
 
Of course, it’s already history-making, we’re in a global pandemic and all.  But it suddenly really feels significant and history-making.  Our country feels fragile, things are charged and divided, we are raw about racism and doing hard introspective work about the changes needed in our nation. Our mental health is affected by our limited our ability to be together, the loss of our normal routine with jobs and school, with no way to imagine the future or timeline for when this might be over.  We’re struggling to hang on when the ground feels so unstable. So we are coming into this significant historical moment exhausted from nine months of virus vigilance and let’s just say, we aren’t at the top of our game.  
We are going into this future-shaping, unknown outcome, amped up stakes, moment feeling especially vulnerable, particularly powerless, and parched in our hearts and souls.  Some of us feel a kind of alert, attentive stillness, preparing for whatever comes next, others of us are flailing and wringing our hands in worry, and sighing or swearing a lot.
 
Perhaps I am not speaking for you, and you’re feeling mostly terrific and unfazed at the moment.  If that’s you, I’m genuinely glad for you.  If you’re like me, though, what Jesus says today might sound like good news: 
 
Blessed are the poor in spirit.  
Ok, God, I’m listening.
 
Blessed are those at the end of their rope. Blessed are the bone dry, those who can’t fake it, those who are facing their own nothingness and know it: God’s way of life is for them. 
 
I want God’s way of life! I want to live beyond the striving and comparing, the judgment and the fear. I want to remember that we belong to God and each other and that can never be taken away. I want to remember that love is real and it never ends. The way back into that that reality is not by determined will or strong faith, but through our own emptiness and longing. 
 
Jesus comes into our death with new life. It is in our impossibility that Christ meets us.
 
Blessed are… all these beatitudes begin, this whole sermon on the mount starts with a litany of blessing like statements of fact. Happy, contended, grounded are those…. Then it flips everything upside down and says a bunch of things we don’t prefer and wouldn’t chose, and pull us into grace. “Grace means nobody gets what they deserve but infinitely more.” Fredrich Buechner says, “Blessed is the one who gets the joke, who sees that miracle.”
 
Blessed are the parched souls, God’s way of belonging and grace is especially for them. 
 
Also in on the miracle?  Those who mourn. They will be comforted.
 
This word for mourn is the strongest possible word for mourning.  And comforted here is the strongest possible word for comforted. So, blessed are those who are in absolute abject despair.  All defenses crumbled, unable to fake it, actively surrendering to all-out no-holds-barred grieving.
They will be comforted, not made comfortable, as in, hanging out in a familiar place with a hot cup of tea and your feet propped up.  But comforted, as in completely propped up on someone else’s strength.  When we let out our agony, others will bear us up and walk with us, and carry our burdens with us, and not let us be lost or alone. 
 
We are all mourning something. There is loss that we keep in or downplay, that we are invited to let it out. 
 
By the way - Jesus did not say blessed are those who mourn for they will find inner strength to triumph over their circumstances, or blessed are those who mourn for they will be delivered from the things that are causing them sorrow. No, he said, blessed are those who mourn for they will be joined and held up in their grief and their circumstances.  When we mourn we find right here the Christ who suffers with and for us. In the presence of those who come around us to lift us up is the actual the presence of God. 
 
The next one feels a little icky. Blessed are the meek. God knows, and this is on full display right now, we will choose security above all else. We will choose it over goodness or cooperation or justice, we’ll choose the way of fear’s promise of safety over love’s vulnerability in a heartbeat.  We want to be strong, and right, and self-sufficient, and respectable and buffered from loss. We don’t want to be “meek.”
Lisa once said, “It is hard and humbling to realize that faith leads not to security but to vulnerability.” We belong to God and we belong to each other- we are dependent and interdependent. No amount of striving can make us ever not need God and each other.  So saying Blessed are the meek is like saying, Contented are the honest. In on the joke are those who get that they are recipients of grace alongside everyone else. The antidote to our obsessive striving for security is humility.
Lisa said it this way, “To be meek not to be ashamed or small or groveling. It is only to be at peace with our place in the universe, not to be secure, but to be at home.”
In on the miracle are those who are at home in God’s grace, they are at home in the whole world.

And blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness!  We who long to live in God’s way, to see justice and kindness and mercy and love as way of life in this life, we will be filled. Because it is not we who bring about God’s reality, it is God who is already and always bringing it. So we watch and wait and pray and yearn that we all could live our belonging to God and each other, and the promise is, that in longing for it, we will experience it.

And being at home in God’s grace, and longing for God’s belonging to be shared means getting comfortable with mercy. But that is not a popular stance these days. Mercy feels risky and embarrassing, and so outdated. Right now our world feels like a very punishing place, without a lot of room for mercy. We’d rather punish others. We ourselves would rather be punished harshly. We are not good at accepting mercy or extending it to others.  We’d prefer to restore order, or pay penance, or earn acceptance. Even better, we’d rather just cut people off completely and move on with our lives. 
 
But in the kingdom of God mercy is what keeps us all afloat.  Because mercy is how grace works. God’s way is forgiveness and compassion that are not deserved and cannot be earned. 
And the promise is, you brave souls who reach your hand toward another with no guarantee they will accept or appreciate it, when you may not get the recognition or justice you deserve, You will receive mercy.
 
Giving mercy washes away the hardness and the stuckness in our hearts, and receiving it sets us free from the self-judgment and self-punishment we often choose instead. 
 
Blessed, then, also are the pure in heart, those who welcome mercy and live in it, those who for whatever reason, have chosen NOT hard and cynical, NOT self-protective and cunning.  Those whom we might dismiss as naive or weak, easily taken advantage of, are the ones who are tuned in to the song of kindness and love and mercy and hope that the rest of us mostly ignore. These are the ones who get to see God.
In on the miracle are those whose hearts are vulnerable and open.
 
Then there are the peace-makers.  The Hebrew word for Peace, Shalom, means “fullness” or “completion”.  So the greeting, Shalom, means “May you be completed.” When we contribute to others’ fullness, fullness in the world around us, and fullness between us, we literally share in the substance of God’s life, here and now.   Whenever we say, by our words or our actions, “May you be completed,” we make peace. 
We smile it, and knit it, and bake it, and write it, and march it, and speak it, and hug it, and listen it into being, we break down strife and strain by wishing wholeness and fullness upon others. And those who are doing this, Jesus says, know with confidence whose and who and whose they are. 
 
But just to be clear, being peace-makers doesn’t mean we’re suddenly no longer tension-makers and crazy-makers too.(Back to the poor in spirit!) It means, as Glen Stassan says, we “abandon the effort to get our needs met through the destruction of our enemies.” Being a peacemaker starts with surrendering our own troubled hearts to God’s mercy, and letting God bring peace through us.
 
And Jesus ends the whole thing with, Blessed are you when you are deeply misunderstood, labeled, dismissed and hated for living like the game is pretend, and choosing to live in God’s belonging instead.  And, then here comes the only command in the whole beatitudes – you should rejoice and be glad, because what you are doing is noticed.  You’re undermining the way of fear; you’re making good trouble. And there is a whole cloud of witnesses—those who’ve been in on the miracle longer than you have—cheering you on.  And one day, when all this is over, you will be thanked by the Creator for your participation in the miracle. 
 
This moment is significant, and historical, and it is fraught. But beloved children of God, we live in a deeper reality, deeper than any moment, and with a further horizon beyond all the significant historical moments gone before and all those to come, and we know this world belongs to God, and every one of us in it belongs to each other.  No matter what, and always. And God is always working.  No matter what and always.  God’s grace holds us and sustains us.
 
No matter what and always, this remains true: when we feel parched in our hearts and souls, God’s way of belonging and grace is for us. And when we express our heartbreaking grief we are lifted up on others’ arms. And when we’re at home in God’s grace we find the whole world to be our home. And when we long for God’s belonging between us we find fullness, and when we’re brave and generous with mercy we ourselves are awash in mercy.  And when our hearts are vulnerable and open, we see God.  And when we surrender our troubled hearts to God’s grace and let God’s fullness come to and through us, we remember whose and who we are, part of the eternal community of good trouble makers, persistent love-seekers and brave hope-bearers. 
 
This week, and always, may we know ourselves to be in on the miracle.
Amen.

PRAYER PRACTICE:

Using a journal, or verbally with a quiet few minutes to reflect and pray, let yourself express to God what is on your heart in this way:

God, I am mourning...

God, I long for...

God, thank you...

Repeat as many times as necessary.

Even the hard parts

Daily Devotion - May 8

I will send a brief message each day
while we are pausing gathering in person.
- Kara

Good evening friends!

Today got away from me. I realized at noon I was still in pajamas, and hadn't yet brushed my teeth. I sat down at my computer at 8 am and didn't do all the things on my well-thought-out list, but did other things instead. Mostly stupid, pointless things.

But, as NVC (compassionate communication) teaches us, every No is a Yes to something else, so it's a chance to be curious about what I was saying Yes to. What was I needing? Spontaneity?  Freedom?  Rest?  Mourning? 

My daughter went outside (in the 30 degree weather) this morning to eat breakfast in the driveway so she could talk to the neighbors eating breakfast in their front yard.  They wore mittens and hats and wrapped their legs in blankets.  I just called her in at 4 pm.  Her seven hour breakfast tells me she may have been needing Connection. Freedom.  Hope.  Rest.  (Schoolwork is so secondary to those things right now).

It was a session (church council) member who helped me make a mental shift.  She issued a gentle invitation in a session email that maybe NVC can help us through this - feelings and needs, we're back at feelings and needs. She was not wrong. It is helping me.

I am grateful for you, today, Church. I got an envelope with the mail from church - a couple of lovely cards and notes.  I had several email messages this week from church folks.  Session is praying for each other.  We are all reminding each other we are here for each other when things get hard. We are all helping each other through this. We are being Church.  

Next week I will be taking a few days off.  One of you will lead coffee hour. Another will preach next weekend (I'll be there).  I am so grateful.  This meets my needs for rest and care, for freedom and space.

Today our our country's brokenness feels close at hand. Our deep sins of racism, self-righteousness, division, hatred and judgment are plastered all over social media today.  They're tangled up with our deep needs for mourning, and justice, for wrongs to be right, for humanity to be upheld, for our belonging to feel real and palpable, for ease, for hope.  Come to think of it, that crazy cocktail of high intensity might be part of what had me pinned to my chair in my pajamas til noon.  

But this day - like every day - had beauty and gifts too. The persistent sunshine. World's easiest peanut butter cookies.* A preschool moving forward into the future in our church basement.  Us - you -  praying for each other.  A youth group zoom meeting and a confirmation kick-off.   A child who remembers her belonging.  

Life is a gift- even the hard parts. God is with us - all the time. This is grace.

No matter what, we belong to God and we belong to each other. 

What are the feelings you've had today? What are you needing?

What beauty do you notice in your day as you look back? What gifts?

What do you need to mourn?  

What is giving you hope? 

*( 1 c peanut butter, 1 c brown sugar, 1 egg, 1 tsp baking soda, 1/2 c chocolate chips, 1/2 tsp vanilla  - optional little handful of oats - Bake 350 for 10 minutes)

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

We are singing this on Sunday, and it's a blessing for us all - read it through a couple times. 

We are held in God's grace.

Only Grace, by Hannah and Lenora Rand
Things are broken here
things are shared
things are carried here
hearts bowed in prayer
            It is grace, only grace
            that brings us here, holds us together here
            it is grace, only grace
            that brings us here, holds us all together here
            all together here
Things are dying here
things are torn
things are growing here
and burdens born
            It is grace, only grace
            that brings us here, holds us together here
            it is grace, only grace
            that brings us here, holds us all together here
            all together here
Amazing grace
hear the sound
here is where
hope is found
            It is grace, only grace
            that brings us here, holds us together here
            it is grace, only grace
            that brings us here, holds us all together here

There are no "good" days

Daily Devotion - April 3

I will send a brief message each day (except Mondays) while we are pausing gathering in person.
- Kara

Today I woke up to the announcement that Minneapolis beaches and outdoor pools will be closed through the summer.
Through. The. Summer.
The City Pages headline read, "Summer is Cancelled."

It feels like too much to take in.
This thing is going to go on and on.

I am angry.
I am sad.

I have seen friends share, "I had a bad day yesterday."  And by "bad" they mean they had hard feelings to live with - sadness, anxiety, fear, anger.  By this measure, a "good" day is when we feel the easier feelings to live with, like happy, or grateful, or peaceful.

We tell ourselves we are supposed to be feeling the "good" feelings, at least most of the time.  And if we are feeling the "bad" ones, we should keep it to ourselves for the time being, and try to get over them quickly.  Once we move out of the discomfort and vulnerability, like maybe tomorrow, we can admit that we had those feelings today.

We used to measure our days by what we got accomplished. Did we get a lot of work done? Do we have a lot to show for our time? By that measure, right now every day is a "bad" day for many of us.  So we have shifted all the pressure of judging our days onto our emotions. But feelings aren't "good" or "bad."  Nor are they designed to be barometers of whether life is "good" or "bad" at the moment, or whether we are "doing good" or "bad," or our even whether our day has been "good" or "bad."

I have to keep remembering this: feelings are merely indicators that our needs are being met or unmet in the moment.  And right now is a weird, volatile, intense, rapidly changing and utterly standing still time, like nothing any of us have ever been through.  So it makes complete sense that our feelings would shift rapidly throughout the day, up and down, back and forth. And in the midst of all this, there are feelings I enjoy having, and those I'd prefer not to feel.  But they are all helpful. They are all informative.

My informative feelings are telling me that:
Right now, my needs for shelter and love are being met; my needs for hope and space are not being met.  That's happening at the same time. It's not "good" or "bad" - it just is.

Perhaps, if we insist on reaching a conclusion about how our day has been, "hard" or "easy" might be a more helpful way to label it. Or maybe we can begin to learn to inhabit our days as they are, resisting tallying them up on team "win" or "lose."  Just meet ourselves with gentleness and acceptance of the one life we are living in right now.

Just now, when I looked at the needs list to see what I might be needing, the one that screamed off the page at me was mourning.
So here I go again. 
I am sad.
I am angry.
I have a need to mourn what I wanted summer to be.
I have a need to mourn, again, all that this virus is taking from us all.
I can't receive the gifts in what life actually is, if I judge my feelings and don't recognize my needs.
The good news for me is, mourning is a need I can meet.

Circling back today to the Rumi poem is helping me.
So, here it is again:

The Guest House by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.
Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps, tonight before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we might pray this Psalm, and so join our hearts:

Prayer of Lament, (Psalm 130 paraphrased)
Out of the depths of my being I cry to you, my God;
Come near, hear my voice.
Listen to me! Turn your heart to hear
my cry for mercy.

If you, my God, kept a record
of the times we turn away from you
and reject your love,
God, who could stand?
But you restore us to our belonging in you,
so that we can, with clarity of purpose,
serve you and care for each other.

I wait for the Lord, my whole being waits,
 and in God's word I put my hope.
I wait for the One who comes in,
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning.

O beloved children,
put your hope in God,
for with our Source of being is unfailing love
and with Love incarnate is full redemption.
God who enters in, will redeem God's children,
from all that destroys.

This week, we are reading through the Gospel of John.  In my house, it is at the dinner table. Maybe for you, it will be when you wake up, or before bed, or over lunch.  It can be read in about 20 minutes a day, or by reading three chapters each day.  If this is your approach, today, we are reading Chapters 16-18.

Blessed are those who Mourn

Daily Devotion - March 25

I will try to send a brief message to my congregation each day (except Mondays) while we are pausing gathering in person.
- Kara

This morning I awoke to a message from a friend, about her 14 year old. "He won’t do school work. Won’t leave his room. Won’t shower. Won’t take a walk because what’s the point. I don’t know what to do. And I don’t have anything to motivate him. Or anything to take away when he won’t do schoolwork. This sucks."

I knew what she was talking about.  This was my daughter, briefly the other day. I laid her in front of an episode of Nova and we counted that as school.  It was me briefly, (a different day, thankfully than her) and I closed the door and watched 6 straight episodes of "Good Girls."  But today I had some perspective.
Her son is meeting a need.

In NVC, we talk about how needs are qualities that contribute to the flourishing of life, shared by all human beings.  One of those is the need to mourn.

The life we were in, the plans we had made, the future we were shaping, the rhythms we enjoyed or endured, they're gone. It's all paused, halted, with no end in sight to the strangeness.
Grieving is a shared human need.

My friend's son reminded me of a widower, In a kind of shock and loss. Shuffling around in a bathrobe. Not wanting to eat or get dressed. Not able to engage in life, or see what's worth living for.  Those were the actual words from my own 12 year old daughter who is usually vibrant with life, "There's nothing to live for." That is the sound of grief.
And mourning is a need that can be met.

I answered her,
He needs to grieve.
Maybe give him some really concrete way to grieve. What he’s doing is what people do when a loved one dies. Tell him to dress in black. Tell him mourning is an important way to pray, to grieve for the things that are lost- for him and for the whole world.

Give him a time frame, make it his job instead of schoolwork. "You  seem to have a calling right now to grieve. This is your job till Friday. Like monks who pray for the world on behalf of all of us. Cry if you can. Write about how bad this feels. Pray for those who are sick. Tell God. And when you’re finished you will know." So maybe not a time frame.  He will be done when the need is met."

Then a few minutes later, I added,
But maybe also say,  You have to shower and get dressed to show up to your job of mourning. (!)

Feelings & Needs
This pulled-out-of-our-lives time is a good time to pay attention to our feelings and needs.

Feelings are indicators of needs that are met or unmet.  There are not "good" feelings and "bad" feelings - they're merely signs, to show us what's going on in us.

We have a pretty limited vocabulary around feelings: happy, sad, angry, tired... but there are so many feeling words available to us.  There is satisfaction and relief in being able to name what we are really feeling.

These feeling words help us get at what our needs are, so that we can name them, and even find new strategies in this time to meet them.

FOR ADULTS -
Here is a feelings list (2 pages) and a needs list. I encourage you to print them out and refer to them throughout the day, especially when you feel stuck, or are having a strong emotion you can't identify (or someone else in your house is).

• What am I feeling? What am I needing? 
• What are they feeling? What might they be needing?

There is also an App - called "iGrok" that has the feelings and needs on your phone. (I use it frequently).

(You can watch clips of Marshall Rosenberg doing, or teaching, NVC here).

FOR KIDS & PARENTS -
We have mailed each family a set of kids Grok cards- which are feelings and needs.
They come with a booklet of games. Play some games together to get familiar with the cards and comfortable using the words.

Then - and I say this from experience - they come in really handy when someone is having a meltdown, or a shutdown, to take some guesses at feelings and needs.  Lay out cards, take guesses - Are you feeling frustrated? Annoyed?  Angry? Are you needing space?  Choice?  To see and be seen? 
And let the child - or adult! - say yes and no to different cards until they can identify and own the feelings and need.

It feels so good when you can get to the need and have it acknowledged and valued.

And if your need today is to mourn, embrace it.
Don't try to make yourself cheer up or feel something different.
Meet the need.

Here's the promise: When it is met, it will subside, and another need will arise, like gratitude, play, connection, or rest.
You can trust that this is true.

(FYI - Andy's Podcast: New Time Religion, has an episode about the virus called, "The Virus took our Future." You can listen here).

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we might all receive this blessing, and so join our souls:

THE LORD’S PRAYER - NEW ZEALAND PRAYER BOOK

Eternal Spirit
Earth-Maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven.

The hallowing of your name echoes through
the universe!

The way of your justice be followed
by the peoples of the earth!

Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!

Your commonwealth of peace and freedom
sustain our hope and come on earth.

With the bread we need for today, feed us.

In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.

In times of temptation and test, spare us.

From the grip of all that is evil, free us.

For you reign in the glory of the power that is love,
now and forever.

Amen.