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Sunday, April 12, 2020

For Sunday 4/12/20 "An Easter Morning Reflection"

An Easter Morning Reflection

I watched a video from a religious leader this past week. He said that “stay at home” had given him a chance to dig into a stack of books he’d been wanting to read. I also heard him say that he’d had a chance to visit with a neighbor, socially distanced of course, and sensed the guy just needed to talk. Lastly after citing things from a few writers he’d been reading, the religious leader commented that we need to get our soul’s attentiveness turned toward what matters most.

Life definitely turned my soul’s attentiveness to something that really matters right now, namely providing telehealth psychotherapy. I had such sessions (visual and/or audio) with about 25 persons this past week. Most of those conversations reflected what many of us are experiencing these days, i.e. profound exhaustion, intense distress over relatives’ well-being, loss of income, crushing loneliness, worries over how the rent or mortgage will get paid, anxieties over how to feed our families, loss of loved ones from devastating illness, even thoughts that death might be easier than life if one contracts the coronavirus.

As I watched television news stories of COVID-19 bodies being piled into refrigerated semi-trailers and unclaimed bodies buried on Hart Island in New York City, I remembered a few weeks ago the USA President peddling the snake-oil notion that life would be back to normal by Easter. I’m guessing one of his fundamentalist white evangelical followers persuaded him into that idea.

Most of us know that come tomorrow’s Easter dawn, the semi-trailer doors will not fly open from the dazzling white light of the resurrected. There will be no modern day equivalent to the stone rolled away from Jesus’ tomb. Casket lids will not burst away from coffins on Hart Island giving up the dead to rise heavenward.

No, tomorrow will simply be another day of living, coping, and dying with the coronavirus that infects our lives and brutally impacts our way of being. It will continue to showcase the rot that capitalism and market-based economies wreak on our lives and the world. Perhaps from the ashes will arise something Deepak Chopra MD wrote of in his blog post March 16th, 2020, -- "....the need to take human well-being more seriously.” Perhaps with tomorrow’s Easter dawn, we’ll begin to see, as Deepak puts it, that well-being is actually something very different. If it is something we can be born-again into, it’s hallmarks per Deepak are: 1) valuing happiness is essential to human life, 2) having lifelong good health, 3) living in an environment with pure air and water, 4) a lack of violence with a necessary emphasis on peace, 5) equal acceptance for all, and 6) the abolition of us-versus-them thinking that builds barriers of every kind.

Deepak notes that the wellness movement hasn’t caught on to the extent that the average person knows how to be well, secure, happy, and self-sufficient for life. Most of us instead live frantically trying to make ends meet from one paycheck to the next. I do think however that the societal cultural rot lurking about in this year’s Easter tomb is about to die – and die for good.

The wellness movement is the dazzling light about to emerge from the tomb and per Deepak it will be here to stay. As I see it, the obscenely wealthy and powerful have had their chance to make life better for everyone, they failed due to their greed, lusts, and need for control. As Deepak puts it, if the well-being movement “…sounds too ideal or even foolish, then look in the mirror and ask yourself what your own happiness is based on. If it is based on money, status, possessions, and lifelong consumerism, you need to wake up.”

Many years ago as a young adult, I woke up from an early morning dream with a profound sense of peace that I believe will one day come to be. In that dream, I found myself sitting in a beautiful spring or summer meadow. The grass was such a perfect green and the sky such a brilliant blue that I no longer needed my thick lens glasses to see clearly. The warm breeze was filled with Spirit. Puzzling over this beauty and peace unlike any I had ever known, the realization came to me that God was in and through all things and the earth was at last filled with God. A few years later in church as I was singing a hymn with my fellow congregants, God brought understanding of that dream through the words I and my friends were singing, “…for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” Some will recognize this verse from the Hebrew Scriptures as Habakkuk 2:14 (NRSV)

Let this Easter’s resurrection in you and me be something far more compelling than any in the past, let it be the start of a journey we begin together toward wellness and doing right by all. For me and my soul and what matters most, the stone I will roll away is the one preventing well-being for all.

Brad Shumate, M.S., M.A., LPC/LMHC
Free of Encumbrance
Eugene, Oregon
USA