Dear Friends,

Can I see another’s woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
[. . .]
O no! never can it be!
Never, never can it be!

William Blake wrote these words in 1789. They are as true now as they were then. In one way, it is inevitable that our empathy and sympathy would be engaged by the sadness of another human being. And in another way, all those exclamation points seem to signal that a response of empathy and sympathy is far from sure. We see misery around us all the time, and sorrow is not always the emotion that rises in our hearts.

The fact is, we often shut down when we witness anger or misery or pain or the messiness of addiction and illness, mental and physical.  We justify our responses with intellectual analysis and moralistic judgment. And when I say “we,” I mean “me, too.” In some fundamental way, many of us are conditioned to move away from the pain of others, especially those we perceive as unlike ourselves. We move away from hurt. We might pity. We might judge. We might deny. We might go numb or go blank. We have lots of strategies for protecting ourselves from pain, from feeling the pain that others are experiencing, pain that we might not be experiencing. These strategies are all forms of trauma response.

Following a year of pandemic life, the evidence is all around us of the pain—personal, political, ecological, economic, social, cultural, physical, emotional, so much more. Even if racial injustice isn’t happening to you, even if no one in your family died from COVID, even if your bank account is solvent and you felt no change in your economic circumstances—even if all of that, the evidence of all of that is all around you. None of us can escape some amount of trauma. We are all on the web together. No one is outside of connectedness.

I encourage you to be aware of the trauma around your life and in your life, as we anticipate and contemplate a return to in-person experience and especially religious community. May your awareness bring you into kindness and gentleness, for yourself and everyone, as you remember, today and every day, that you are loved, you are worthy, we are welcome, and you are needed. May you feel it so, and may it be so.

Blessings, Rev. Rita