Reflecting, rethinking, reimagining:
When we get to the other side, what is the story we will tell?
What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world.
Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality.
Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. Arundhati Roy, “The pandemic is a portal”
in the midst of this terrible despair
In Seattle, news of the virus seemed to have circulated much earlier than the rest of the country — by the time it dominated the news, my anxiety was already at a full spike. Then each day saw hundreds, thousands of deaths around the world, and then hundreds, thousands in our own country, and then hundreds, over a thousand in a day in one region or another. Everything we watched or heard or read told us, told us again, and told us again what was happening, how we’re not ready for it, how people are suffering, how families are separated when they are most vulnerable and in need of each other. Stories and images of healthcare workers, first responders, overcrowded hospitals, of whistle-blowers, of who-responded-first debates and power struggles…it all overwhelmed me, but I couldn’t stop listening to NPR. I couldn’t stop checking my phone for updates. I scrambled to update the Zoom app so I could virtually connect with family and friends and anyone else who needed to share in the pain and the panic.
Over the course of the last few weeks, I’ve found myself in something of a pattern that has helped me to cope, to avoid the emotional paralysis that was emerging from the saturation of information and imagery mixed with my own anxieties and fears: I weep. It usually goes something like this:
I’m doing something I don’t need to think too much about but that keeps my body engaged, like cleaning the kitchen (and this Virgo enjoys doing a good deep-clean), walking with our dog, folding laundry…and in that moment, find myself fixating on one thing that is heavy on me, either because I’ve carried it for days or because it’s got me riled up: a story in the news, concern about a friend or family member, the welling up of old griefs. I sit with it: I try to give a name to what is scaring or crippling or angering or saddening me. I try to understand, and when I can’t give that knowing words, I weep. I let myself weep (while I keep walking or scrubbing or folding). As I do, I can see a little more clearly what I’m able to do, what I’m not able to do. And then my eyes stop welling, I let my breath relax, and I shed a layer that was weighing me to the ground.
I won’t go into the psychology or the neurophysiology of weeping or its place in the history of cultural representation (mostly because I don’t know much about these things), but I know that when I weep, I remind myself that I can still feel something, that I’m not callous or cynical as I might want or pretend to be. I know that the catharsis of weeping relieves a fair amount of anxiety, and I know that a brief weeping session is enough to wash away self-pity and self-isolating behaviors.
Each of us is navigating this crisis differently, in our own ways, according to our own needs. Too many don’t have the luxury of navigating through it — people responding to the immediate threats of a pandemic, caring for the ill and the loved ones of the dead. We don’t have access to the resources we usually rely on — our ritualized life, our sacred spaces, our sustaining networks. I don’t mean only spiritual communities or religious spaces — I mean all of those common spaces where we intersect each other’s lives, where we negotiate differences and find the words that affirm our unity, our comity, or our disparity, where we seek an experience and emerge transformed, even if for a little while. Synagogues, churches, masjids, and mandirs, for sure, but also theaters, shopping malls, restaurants, clubs, arenas, workplaces, playgrounds, national parks and monuments, airports and train stations…and the relationships forged in those spaces have been pushed into virtual channels. While many have access to means of virtual communication, we’re also seeing disparities in access and competence ranging from the hilarious (everyone on a Zoom happy hour has that relative who hasn’t quite figured it out yet…) to the outrageously unjust (the lack of access to now vital means of communication…). Overall, we are facing an opportunity to adapt the relationships and structures and practices that are fundamental to our worldview, to our individual and collective self-understanding, to how we relate to others, and to our ultimate goals and aspirations. But I’m worried.
Have you watched “The Rain”? It begins in a world in fear after a mysterious and highly contagious virus has wiped out most of the population of Scandinavia. When the rains came, a scientist leaves his two children in a bunker before he leaves to find help, but after six years the siblings decide to defy their father’s instruction and leave the bunker. They find others seeking safety and answers (each with an interesting backstory, of course), and as they travel across Denmark and Sweden, they encounter a variety of safe spaces — other bunkers, people hiding from the rains in abandoned farms, an idyllic manor with a well-nourished (but in the end horrifying) cult…each chapter of their journey offers a glimpse of safety that turns into some new horror, reflecting the continued threat of the mysterious disease or the dark corners of human psychology.
Haven’t we told hundreds of these stories before? I don’t just mean the polished cinematic variations of disaster films about mysterious and uncontrollable outbreaks that force the leading characters to confront ultimate moral conundra (which we can now recognize as darkly prescient). I also mean the narrative tradition that seems to have begun when our ancestors first put sounds and experiences together into words. The classic hero narrative, following a humble but extraordinary figure who faces challenges, loses himself (it’s typically male figures, and there is much to explore in terms of gender construction here, but that’s a different essay) in literal and metaphorical darkness, and emerges transformed and with a mission, is manifest in all of the so-called “classics,” from the epic journeys of Beowulf, Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Hunahpu & Xbalanque, and Rama, to the transformations of Jacob who wrestled with God and became Israel, of Jonah swallowed by a fish and spit out to prophesy, of Jesus who cast off Satan in the desert before he could be the Anointed, of Muhammad whom the angel carried to Jerusalem and through the levels of heaven to receive the instructions that would shape the daily life of millions who followed him on that path. Over the course of the 20th century, Joseph Campbell popularized the hero narrative, sometimes called the monomyth, and Victor Turner drew our attention to the liminal phase (the in-between of an experience where the transformation happens) of ritualized life, a building block of social construction. Whether we heard them in church or read them in high school, the subtle spread of Campbell’s and Turner’s insights directly and indirectly influences our understanding of these stories today.
Heroes emerge victorious. They always do, even if (or especially when) they martyr themselves to ensure the right and inevitable outcome. It’s always an emotionally satisfying climax that enables us to believe that it’s going to work out fine in the end, but we become the standers-by who are helpless, who rely on the hero to swoop in, who gratefully swoon at the service they’ve provided humanity. This shapes our expectations, doesn’t it? When we accept this aspect of the narrative as truth, we deauthorize ourselves from stepping into the roles we really need. We lose sight of the complexity of the situation and of the fragility of the resulting peace and justice. We let others think for us; we don’t vote.
Right now, I am grappling with two problems with the monomyth (there are many problems with it, but that’s another different essay) that point to the need for our shared transformation and bolster Roy’s invitation to imagine the world anew. The first problem (as we are seeing and hearing and living today) is that it doesn’t always work out fine in the end. When it does (and here’s the second problem) it’s never because of one person with extraordinary ability or insight or experience. It’s the collective (and messy and diverse and divergent and innovative) efforts of teams (both well-formed and impromptu) of people (each with skill sets and limitations) that are working toward care and solutions and stability. “The Rain” remains with me because, while the production is written around a hero-like figure, it’s really the collective, the group that ebbs and flows with joiners and dissenters and that makes mistakes and leaps of faith together. Instead of a single and poignant liminal phase, they experience the descent into darkness — and ensuing transformation — multiple times, on smaller and larger scales. Isn’t that closer to our experience in the world today? Malcolm Gladwell (in Outliers) and others have dismantled the myth of the self-made man, an extension of the hero narrative, and perhaps it’s no coincidence that the collective team of The Avengers emerged in this cultural moment (because Ironman couldn’t do it alone). Even the heroes (more specifically, the hero-writers) are attuned to the diversity and plurality and complexity of society; so why do we hold on to the myth?
Roy points us to a portal, and here’s one to pursue: We can cast off the expectations that the hero narrative suggested; we can recognize it as a vestige, not as a true reflection of our experience. Now that we have seen what we need at our most basic, at our most vulnerable, we can identify the real capacity and the real need in our lives and in the world; we can articulate our values, those we share and those on which we diverge; we can identify the things that obstruct our ability to establish justice, the things that sustain oppression. We can recognize baldly and plainly and with a fair amount of hope the reality of our interdependence as a foundation for whatever is next. That portal teases cultural transformation that will influence our worldviews, our institutions, and our self-understanding.
But we don’t know what’s on the other side of the door, and I worry that we are jumping to ultimate conclusions too quickly. This experience is telling us a lot about what it means to be human, and we’re scrambling for insights into what life will be like and when. We hear neighbors and experts and practitioners and grumblers announcing that this will change how we teach. This will change how we worship. This will change how families function. This will change how we work. This will change how we will consume. And it will…but we don’t know how yet. We are still in crisis mode, still amidst the trauma. We don’t know who will recover, who will be scarred, who will be lost. Thinking like that gives us something to grasp, something to hold on to, but when we jump to conclusions about the basic building blocks of our lives, of our identities, of our communities, we risk not fully recognizing the devastation. We risk deauthorizing ourselves. We lose sight of the complexity and fragility of our shared life. We let others think for us — but in this case, it’s our current selves. We risk handing our future to our current selves who are swimming in a tide of chaos and grief.
While we can’t (or, I suggest it’s unwise to) make ultimate conclusions now, we can start to pay attention to the “signs of the times,” to listen for voices with clarity, to consider the things that have risen to the surface amidst our grief, to hold on to the values and experiences that will, eventually, enable healing and reconstruction of our world. To move in that direction, to be able to survive this experience and adapt to a new and stark reality of the human condition (we’re not as invincible and in control of creation as we thought, eh?), we can recognize that none of us is experiencing this in isolation. We can choose to accompany each other as we find our bearings and direction. Each with a different lens, a different set of values, a different set of formative experiences, a different goal in this life or the next, we can accompany each other so that, when we make it to the other side, we can reconstruct on the foundation of our diversity and plurality and complexity.
it offers us a chance to rethink
Reflection gets a bad rap, typically treated as a soft skill, and frequently I hear it conflated with opinion or sharing one’s feelings. I never understood the groans — I loved being invited into reflection as a student, as a teacher, on a Tuesday evening… — but I was able to articulate what it was and how it worked with the help of an article by Carol Rodgers. Drawing on the work of John Dewey, another seminal educational philosopher, Rodgers describes reflection succinctly as “a complex, rigorous, intellectual, and emotional enterprise that takes time to do well,” and true reflection has four criteria (emphasis is my own):
1. Reflection is a meaning-making process that moves a learner from one experience into the next with deeper understanding of its relationships with and connections to other experiences and ideas. It is the thread that makes continuity of learning possible, and ensures the progress of the individual and, ultimately, society. It is a means to essentially moral ends.
2. Reflection is a systematic, rigorous, disciplined way of thinking with its roots in scientific inquiry.
3. Reflection needs to happen in community, in interaction with others.
4. Reflection requires attitudes that value the personal and intellectual growth of oneself and of others…Reflection that is guided by whole-heartedness, directness, open-mindedness, and responsibility, though more difficult, stands a much better chance of broadening one’s field of knowledge and awareness. (Carol Rodgers, “Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking.” Teachers College Record, pp. 844–845, 858)
These criteria can frame an approach to pretty much any type of activity, practice, or context. So what do we need to pay attention to now?
What do we want to bring up? Not good nonentities, who are only good because they are not bad. There are too many of them already, no trouble to anyone, only disappointing, so good that they ought to be so much better, if they only would. But who can make them will to be something more?…Those who have to educate them to something higher must themselves have an idea of what they want; they must believe in the possibility of every mind and character to be lifted up to something better than it has already attained; they must themselves be striving for some higher excellence and must believe and care deeply for the things they teach. For no one can be educated by maxim and precept; it is the life lived, and the things loved and the ideals believed in, by which we tell, one upon another. If we want integrity of character, steadiness, reliability, courage, thoroughness, all the harder qualities that serve as backbone, we, at least, make others want them by the power of example that is not set as deliberate good example, for that is as tame as precept; but the example of the life that is lived, and the truths that are honestly believed in. Janet Erskine Stuart, The Education of Catholic Girls
When I started teaching, a poster with the last two sentences (my emphasis added above) of this quote hung in the hallway outside my classroom. It was one of many nuggets of wisdom around campus, all quotes from the fore-mothers of the school’s religious order. There were triggers like this throughout the school, and administrators and teachers and students alike integrated these mots into everything from morning announcements to graduation ceremonies. Part of our professional development included formation to the religious mission of the school which was, as our Head consistently and poignantly summarized, “to make known the love of the heart of Jesus” through the work of education. Frequently, we were invited into critical, personal, and spiritual reflection (just as frequently greeted by my colleagues, like my students, with a groan), to frame our work in a context much broader than a single course or classroom or program. We understood our work in a context beyond the classroom or the campus; we were invited to understand our work as changing the world. And we believed it. (Well, I did.) It took a few years before I read the book that provided the original context for this passage, but these words guided me through my first day and first weeks of teaching.
School started on September 11, 2001. Before news of the plane crashes in New York and Pennsylvania and Virginia were announced, I taught my first two classes introducing the world’s major religions. For months I had prepared to deliver information, but that day I learned that teaching is much more than that. We gathered as a school community for a celebratory start to the year, but the Head of School shared what was going on, invited us to pray, and reminded us to be present to each other, to take care of each other. Classes went on to provide some structure, but most class meetings turned into small groups of students and teachers taking in information and processing, trying to make some sense of it. Many parents panicked and rushed to the school, wanting to take them home, and they were greeted by the Head of School who calmed them down, reminded them that their children were safe at school, they had their friends and their routines, that all they’d do at home is watch TV and the endless, terrible images broadcast that morning. In the weeks that followed, my curriculum, which started with an introduction to Islam, suddenly took on new relevance and need for students and families, and I shifted my teaching objective from providing information to shaping people, to preparing them to establish good relationships, and to helping them develop a vocabulary for difference. My colleagues and I quickly enlisted the local ADL to help us respond to the sudden rise in anti-Muslim and anti-Middle Eastern sentiment, speech, and acts in our region and across the country.
We knew that our students were watching us closely, listening for cues. It wasn’t enough to deliver ideas and assessments; even while we grappled with the event and its impact, we educators had to model “integrity of character, steadiness, reliability, courage, thoroughness” in response to the awful events of that day. This meant walking with them, experiencing it together, drawing on the resources we had to navigate fears and anxieties and offering those reserves to our students. Sometimes, that meant turning to each other, relying on a colleague for insight or for balance or for comfort; or it meant praying or meditating as a department or team, or sitting in the quiet Chapel together. It is only because we stopped (frequently) to reflect, because we made space and time to be and to listen and to discern, that we were able to identify and attend to our students’ needs. We didn’t just reflect in the wake of tragedy — we reflected at moments of joy and achievement, too. Reflection was integrated into our classrooms and our community gatherings and even the way we provided feedback on report cards. It was a well-developed part of our community vocabulary, and because we did this in community, in relationship with each other, that systematic reflection led to the strongest professional relationships I’ve ever had. These were my first lessons in holistic education, in preparing the whole person for living in the world (not just preparing a slice of her intellect for a narrow path).
Effective instruction toward this end does not begin with curriculum and assessments; it begins with people (educators, if that wasn’t clear) who “believe in the possibility of every mind and character to be lifted up to something better than it has already attained” (umm…does that sound like the more recently coined notion of “growth mindset” to anyone else?) and who are “striving for some higher excellence,” who “believe and care deeply for the things they teach.” They establish and nurture relationships with students and colleagues and families that become the DNA of a school community’s culture. This directs me to my professional mantra, the work of education begins and ends in the cultivation of strong relationships.
break with the past and imagine their world anew
As I search for the portal that Roy describes, as I imagine what could come next, I’m focusing on our relationships — relationships forged in community that are the DNA of our culture — and two things have emerged for me.
Sacred Space
It has been painful to be deprived of our sacred spaces. Synagogues, churches, masjids, and mandirs, for sure, but also theaters, shopping malls, restaurants, clubs, arenas, workplaces, playgrounds, national parks and monuments, airports and train stations…but our sacred spaces are built for us and around us, to give a home and shelter to our most fundamental relationships. The virus spread quickly in late winter, and communities heard the order to stay at home just as preparations for spring holidays and festivals were afoot. Religious communities, school communities, and recovery communities dove quickly into the world of video conferencing, attempting to replicate their sanctuaries and customs and lessons. Happy hours with extended families, friends, professional networks, and alumnx networks exploded. Singers and dancers and drag queens and piano bar singalongs appeared with live streams on social media to keep performances going and tips flowing. Celebrities lent their time to read stories. We were hungry for interaction, in part because we were suddenly and sharply deprived of it also because we knew our relationships were at stake.
Pride doesn’t need a parade. Church doesn’t need a steeple. Fine dining doesn’t need a restaurant. Sacred space is sacred because we have set it aside, because it reflects us, and because in it we find access to what is most important to us. But when the doors to these useful and wonderful spaces are closed, we don’t need to replicate them; we need to recreate them, reconstruct them, or even imagine them anew.
Exemplars
Adapting to a new reality will (probably…hopefully) not mean an adjustment to some dystopian state. The fundamental fabric of our lives and communities (and histories and economies and traditions…) will sustain, but how we engage them may need to change. When we look to reconstructing our relationships and communities and practices, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We can look to exemplars of adaptation. We’ve been telling some of their stories for thousands of years; others have emerged more recently. Two groups come to mind:
Jewish folks: Before it was destroyed (the second time, 70 CE), Jewish religious life centered around the Temple in Jerusalem, its axis mundi, and a fair amount of the Torah prescribes the ritual life of the Temple. Without the Temple, primary practice shifted away from the practice of sacrifice in the
Temple to practice in the home and in synagogues. Without the priests of the Temple, women maintained religious education and practice in the home, and scholars became leaders in their communities, interpreting their sacred text and adapting their daily lives and identities in the light of their new reality. For me, the examples to lift up here are the focus on home (whatever and wherever) as the primary sacred space in our lives and on the importance of words, of telling the story as the primary practice that ties us to the past, anchors us in the present, and prepares us for what’s next.
Queer folks: During the 1980s, AIDS ravaged the network of gay men in the United States. Government and religious leaders and everyday folks brushed off the cries of people suffering because of deeply seeded prejudices about sexual orientation, and calls for resources to contain and research a cure for the virus were ignored until much too late. People who survived “the plague” describe a decade of trauma. So many who had already experienced rejection from their families or their friends or their religious communities lost partners and lovers and best friends and distant friends. A generation of artists and economists and educators and, and and were gone. But this was after decades of a public, often inspiring, and often devastating movement to establish civil rights for people who identify as queer. Identities and identifiers had already been proudly claimed, like the acronym-friendly terms lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, but words used as weapons, like queer and butch and fag and dyke, were also reclaimed and redefined (by some, and it’s still too painful for others). Queer folks had already figured out the art of the “chosen family.”
Claiming a name and suffering together provided a foundation for building community; neighborhoods slowly transformed with the presence of “out” folks and the businesses and economic drivers that followed them; neighborhoods became voting blocks; and then voting blocks pushed the issue of equal access to fundamental social institutions to the Supreme Court. Despite this success, the experience of “the plague” is just under the surface. The stereotype suggests that now-older gay men are most horrified that the younger generation doesn’t know the true divas like Judy and Liza and Barbra, but their deepest horror springs from a younger generation that doesn’t remember, or that was never told, about the virus that destroyed so many. We can, we should look to the generation who survived the plague, those people who knew what it was to be ignored by your government, who knew profound and compounded loss, and who found each other and rebuilt their community.
Roy points us to a portal.
We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.
Before we can walk through the door, though, we will need to know: who are we, and what is the story we will tell?
