Blog Post January 2021
Back in the 1980's and 90's I used to give talks on stress management. Inevitably, one of the hot topics would be the stress people were experiencing from corporate change. I recall reading (I believe it was in Tom Peters book In Search of Excellence) that Matsushita Electronics - which became Panasonic - had a corporate saying that no change was so valuable that it would be implemented before a ritual honouring of what had gone before. That bit of wisdom struck me as a good thing to remember when change was happening. So you preserve a sign from the old shop. Or you tell old stories about funny events. Maybe brag about achievements in the previous structures.
This stuff came to mind in the past couple of weeks as we approached the end of 2020. People were talking more and more about the urgency of getting this year over with. It has been a difficult and hurtful and .....(fill in your own descriptor) year.
Funny, though, the stress has been in what we are leaving behind. Hopefully less so in what we are going towards, especially with the arrival of the CoVid vaccines. Nonetheless there is a big psychological transition happening. And that means change. The health care system will be doing a lot of review and soul searching. Long term care facilities will take a hard look at their preparedness for something like this in the future. Businesses will plan for hybrid delivery structures for their products. Any or all of these reviews and adaptations are capable of producing their own stress.
But what can we honour about this painful year 2020 as we leave it?
Pope Francis has just released a book titled Let us Dream: The Path to a Better Future. In it he says this:
"These are moments in life that can be ripe for change and conversion. Each of us has had our own “stoppage,” or if we haven’t yet, we will someday: illness, the failure of a marriage or a business, some great disappointment or betrayal. As in the Covid-19 lockdown, those moments generate a tension, a crisis that reveals what is in our hearts.
In every personal “Covid,” so to speak, in every “stoppage,” what is revealed is what needs to change: our lack of internal freedom, the idols we have been serving, the ideologies we have tried to live by, the relationships we have neglected............
If we are to come out of this crisis less selfish than when we went in, we have to let ourselves be touched by others’ pain. There’s a line in Friedrich Holderlin’s “Patmos” that speaks to me, about how the danger that threatens in a crisis is never total; there’s always a way out: “Where the danger is, also grows the saving power.” That’s the genius in the human story: There’s always a way to escape destruction. Where humankind has to act is precisely there, in the threat itself; that’s where the door opens.
This is a moment to dream big, to rethink our priorities — what we value, what we want, what we seek — and to commit to act in our daily life on what we have dreamed of."
Key points in this little excerpt: everyone will experience ‘stoppages’ in their life; the stoppage will reveal to us what is in our heart; it may lead to a change in our life; and (the critical point), “ Where humankind has to act is precisely there, in the threat itself; that’s where the door opens.”
In the threat itself is where the door opens. If this is true - and it surely is - then this pandemic and by extension the year itself and the bad things in it, need to be seen as what my Jesuit director refers to as a ‘hard gift.’
Immediately I think of the cancer experience as exactly that. I became aware in the middle of it that this was the most spiritually fruitful time of my life. When I finished with all the treatment, I was able to honour the experience even before I moved in to remission. I am applying that as best I can to 2020. Can you do the same?
Other writers have this topic on their mind. A story in the Toronto Star on December 24 by Steve McKinley (“Hope”) quotes psychologist Steve Joordens discussing the optimism created by the CoVid vaccine while at the same time the numbers are going the opposite, wrong, way. There is a tension, “and the journey from here to there is going to be very dark and very difficult.” “But that dark and emotional place can also be transformative.”
There it is again, the same theme as in Pope Francis’ writings. Joordens adds: “To some extent, it is a bit of a rebirth when we come through the other side. It may cause a lot of people to have a serious reflective moment and there’s going to be some lifestyle changes imposed because people have just lost their previous way of existing.”
Where humankind has to act is precisely there, in the threat itself; that’s where the door opens.
The honouring that we will be able to do - will need to do - is in the new awareness these hard times have given us, of where we have lost a part of ourselves. Perhaps our generosity, our kindness, our patience. Maybe our awareness of just how much we need each other, in a world where we act as little gods unto ourselves.
That awareness is happening at the international level. The World Council of Churches has just released a document titled Serving a Wounded World in Interreligious Solidarity. The Vatican was a signatory to this document. Right in the preamble there is this statement: “This document aims to offer a Christian basis for interreligious solidarity that can inspire and confirm, in Christians of all churches, the impulse to serve a world wounded not only by the Covid-19 pandemic but also by many other wounds.”
You can see the CoVid awareness of our lack of unity that has developed in this group. It is an awareness that helps us to honour the hard gift of 2020.
The awareness is happening at the organizational level. My own parish of St. Paul’s has realized that we have to rethink who we are in this world, in this community. The venerable but ‘same old’ practices that serve as the foundation of the parish, we have come to realize, actually are self-referenced and are about maintenance. The awareness has grown that parishes, ours included, have to have a missionary mind-set that reflects Jesus’ directive to his disciples, “Go out .....” That mind-set has to become our foundation or people will stop being interested. This is another awareness grown in the hard gift that is 2020. We certainly honour it.
And yes the awareness happens at the individual level. Back to Pope Francis and his wonderful insight into what life ‘stoppages’ can do for us personally, what the stoppage of Covid-19 can do for us:
“In every personal “Covid,” so to speak, in every “stoppage,” what is revealed is what needs to change: our lack of internal freedom, the idols we have been serving, the ideologies we have tried to live by, the relationships we have neglected.......”
Wonderful opportunity, this hard gift. The best stress management, I think, will come from owning the moment and having the freedom to honour the awareness we have just developed.
Happy New Year 2021, everyone! Don’t forget to bring with you the hard gifts you have just received.
