Dear Dinner Guests,

Beginning this coming Sunday, June 9, our Adult Education program will feature a series of speakers discussing the lingering spiritual and emotional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. These presentations will rely on materials and research prepared for the spring conference that didn’t happen due to low enrollment. I reflected on possible reasons for our collective disinterest a few weeks back in an essay linked here, and it is quite possible these Sunday post-worship gatherings will garner the same lackluster participation. But in consultation with our Adult Ministry Moderator Joe Yount, we’ve decided to try anyway, because we believe these conversations will be good for you—think of it as educational broccoli.

A core concern of mine has to do with what I have witnessed as a pastor and counselor when we fail to acknowledge undigested grief. (Yes, I’ll continue the roughage metaphor.) When we individually or collectively experience trauma, loss or disappointment, our attempts to ‘move on’ are stifled by the emotional residue of our experienced helplessness. No matter how much we believe we’ve recovered, without a digestible narrative that helps us understand what occurred, we instinctively flinch whenever we encounter vaguely similar problems or circumstances. I am certain that much of our national division is not the result of rational and divergent interpretations of political philosophy, but knee-jerk reactionary convulsions brought on by a failure to address our collective pain. I’ll be saying more about this on June 9, but as political options seem to be skewing towards a choice between authoritarian nationalism and coddling technocracy, we are witnessing a global—not a domestic—crisis. Why? Because it was a global pandemic. We’ve not cleaned our plates before rushing to dessert, and we are now baffled by our collective nausea.

The point of these conversations over the next few weeks is not to find blame, or wallow in the past, or rehash policy; it is to build our ability to talk about hard things that happened to all of us. We went through this experience together, and our failure to acknowledge our shared grief threatens to tear us apart. We have experienced a tragedy of Biblical proportions, so perhaps it is to that book we should turn to find consolation.

The book of Isaiah begins after a time of unimaginable catastrophe. The people are at their wits end and bring only hostility to one another. Into that post-crisis trauma, the prophet wrote these words: “Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil; learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land.” (Isaiah 1.16-19)

Consider these post-COVID Adult Education gatherings as an opportunity to reason together, so we can once again clean our plates and be healthy.

Hoping you will join us, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor