When people hear “divinity school,” they tell you their stories. More specifically, they tell you their stories of life and death. They especially tell you stories of death.
I first encountered this shortly after starting my program. I was catching a ride to the Hartford airport. It was early. Even in the dark, I could see that my driver was wearing a three-piece suit and a fancy hat.
When he asked who I was and where I was going, I kept it simple, but I said something about divinity school. Right away there was a shift in the air, and our conversation changed.
I knew three people who died this month, he offered. I’ve got a funeral later today. I listened. I acknowledged how hard that must be. For a moment, I joined him in holding the weight life brings, right there from the backseat.
Pretty soon, the driver and I moved on to lighter topics, and then silence, but the turns of his life merited a moment of reverence on that quiet September morning. Hearing about his losses was an honor, because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that people’s stories are sacred.
A few months ago, I started serving as a chaplain, or spiritual guide, in business settings, which gives me the chance to hear more people’s stories. Companies who invest in the service are attempting to carve out a little more space for their employees’ humanity. I hold space for those employees over the phone, which involves deep listening and some conversation. When I started having chaplaincy conversations, I thought people might need some time to get acquainted before opening up. But right away, I was entrusted with stories of life and death—their joys and triumphs, fears and losses.
People’s willingness to share their stories of hardship, their gratitude when someone listens, their hope that someone might understand, their uncertainty about how to proceed when things feel like too much, signals to me that no matter how fraught the conversations around religion become in our society, spiritual leaders and clergy still have an important role to play. In a world that pushes past heartache at alarming rates, that expects you to get right back to work after death in the family, that asks you to constantly stuff your suffering down so you can produce more, do more, and earn more for those in power, we desperately need people who, by nature of their profession, can be trusted to hold space for the sacredness of life and death.
Looking towards spiritual leaders for comfort in difficult times will not resonate with everyone. There’s much debate, culturally, about the flaws of the institutional church, as there should be. In too many cases, the church has been a site of harm. A place for limited thinking. A factory that smashes god-concepts inside the limited boxes of human understanding. A system bound by the constraints of language and our tendency to use those god-concepts for domination and control.
As a result, millennials and gen Z are famous for leaving the church. Many small churches are trying to figure out how to survive. As large segments of the church failed to provide a vision that felt life-giving and inclusive for all, younger generations said enough. “Spiritual but not religious” became the popular refrain.
Today’s challenges with the church are difficult, mired in politicization and culture wars, but the demand as I see it is simple. The church’s expression of divine love must expand to truly meet the needs of the world, or its relevance is gone. And the irony is this: Every church desires to meet the needs of the world. They just cannot agree on what the needs of the world actually are.
But the needs of the world are staring us in the face. They have grown increasingly visible in the United States, torn open by the shackles of economic inequality. As our economy grew exponentially over the past 50 years, so did our wealth gap. As the wealth gap grew, so did the cost of living. At the same time, social programs were slashed. Put another way, as wealth increased, fewer people had access to it. On top of that, people have less government support and fewer opportunities to thrive. With 140 million people in poverty in this country, the repercussions are devastating.
Poverty like that is violence, especially in one of the richest countries in the world. It results in death every day. We saw this clearly through the pandemic, when people in poor counties in the United States died at nearly twice the rate of those in wealthy areas. We see need everywhere we look. People in poverty need clean water; people need access to health care; people need our country to curb its addiction to militarization and invest in their wellbeing. The needs of our neighbors have never been more clear.
Our collective suffering is not unlike the suffering of the driver I met last September. He needed someone to witness his struggle for a moment. To respect the fragile line between life and death. Our country needs the same thing. We need people willing to see the suffering and—most importantly—choose not to look away.
The topic of suffering is an age-old favorite among theologians. When our incoming class started divinity school in the fall, we laughed a little at how many courses had words like lamentation, struggle, and death in the title. But a few months later, I understand why. As people seek to make sense of the world and their experience in it, and the world feels increasingly daunting to navigate, coming to terms with struggle is an unavoidable part of our quest.
For centuries, theologians have attempted to answer classic questions about suffering. They go something like this: If god is real, why does god allow suffering? If god is all-powerful, why does god not end suffering? If god is in control, then why are horrible things happening? And when losses arise, people ask why. Why me, god? Why now? Why this?
Theologians seek to answer these questions. They hope to make sense of life with a divine presence that is mysterious above all else. The answers they desire are both sweepingly universal and exquisitely personal to each of us, since suffering is inevitable. By this point, I have explored a fair number of theories about suffering.
The theories I like most are unflinchingly honest about the human condition and wildly creative in their conceptualizations of divinity. They recognize a divine presence that is, above all else, with us in the struggle. A presence that soothes. A presence that uplifts. A presence that acts like a balm in personal suffering, and when seen from the cultural level, not only comforts, but in the name of radical love, paves a pathway toward liberation. They name a divine loving awareness that is present in life, present in death, and perhaps most importantly, remains present in the long stretches in between.
When my driver and I discussed the recent deaths in his life, there was reverence in the air. It was undeniable, and it was necessary. Lack of reverence for his losses would have been disrespectful at best, and destructive at worst. At the cultural level, our lack of reverence for death works the same way.
By refusing to show reverence for suffering, we support the destruction of human life. By refusing reverence for plants, animals, and natural abundance, we annihilate the planet, our only home. By offering reverence in highly specific scenarios and denying it in others, we are violently selective about what life we value. Some value life inside the womb, for example, but not among those suffering in solitary confinement. Critically, the radical love we associate with divinity does not discriminate at all. It asks us to ensure that all forms of life are lifted up in equal measure. There is no separation.
I wonder what it would mean to extend our reverence for life beyond interpersonal exchange and inject it into the webbing that connects us with the very source material of the universe that shapes all things. Is it possible to locate reverence for our neighbors, the people who live on the other side of town, those in forgotten parts of the state, who are incarcerated, who are unhoused, who suffer from food insecurity, who are disenfranchised by the constructs of race, gender, and class? I want to see what it looks like for our reverence to deepen and multiply.
We resist reverence on a broader scale, and there is a reason why. Offering reverence for matters of life and death demands more from us.
Voting is one action that reverence requires from us, but it is not enough. Limiting ourselves to fabrications of left versus right in a broken system will never be enough. Partisanship separates people who desperately need to come together. It blocks us from seeing the shared pieces of our struggle. Thinking in terms of red versus blue prevents us from uniting against the very system that thrives on our separation.
If we organize ourselves around shared reverence for life and death; if we reject punishing, death-dealing wealth disparity that reached soaring new heights during a global pandemic; if we find respect for the disenfranchised and non-human among us as well as ourselves, then the full force of our attention could change this country.
The suffering around us demands response. Our politics are not big enough to meet this moment. Maybe our reverence is.
Between you and me—
Welcome to the March installment of WE’RE ALL FRIENDS HERE! I come to you from the middle of spring break, which over the course of two weeks means I will have done some catching-up-on-work and some actual resting. I will have seen one of my husband’s concerts and watched the moon rise over the ocean. After the break, it will be a mad dash to summer.
This summer, I will focus on climate response and spiritual care in some capacity. I will keep writing. The questions of how and where this will all take place are still unfolding. The options are all wonderful, so I look forward to seeing what the coming months reveal.
Writing about reverence for life and death reminds me of the first memorial(ish) service I had the honor of leading back in January. I was invited to celebrate a congregation’s former minister with them in a time of remembrance, and it was meaningful. I also spoke about creating a legacy of radical love amidst loss. The experience left me excited to walk alongside others in life’s big moments: at births, weddings, funerals, and yes, even at the ballot box.
As birdsong returns and new blooms burst forth, as we bask in the delights of spring, here’s hoping the glorious show cultivates a reverence deep enough to inspire widespread protection.
Thank you for joining me in this space. Till next time, take care out there!
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