Mapping the Fault Lines
All serious daring starts within.
—Eudora Welty
THE LONG SWELLS of history crest and crash, century after century. The kindness and cruelty of an age expand and contract. The openness and narrowness of how we learn either grows or collapses depending on how each generation reacts to the storms they encounter and create. As I write this, a good part of humanity is in such a collapse of narrowness, in such a contraction of cruelty. And though we have crashed, the harsh beauty of waves is that they always reform, gathering all they’ve been through to rise and crest again. Likewise, we can learn from what we’ve been through. We can expand again and open our minds and hearts. We can find our way back to kindness, if we dare to see each other in ourselves and accept the truth of what we’ve broken. Then, we can see what needs repair. The chapters in this opening section explore where we are, how the old world is gone, as well as mapping the fault lines in our society. Then, there is the unfolding of the nature and life of storms, through which we can inhabit our place in the unending purpose of goodness.
The Old World Is Gone
AS THE PANDEMIC spread around the world, it brought moments from my cancer journey sharply before me. One profound moment in particular echoes where we are in a compelling way. It was the moment of my diagnosis more than thirty years ago. I was sitting in a doctor’s office when I heard the words, “You have cancer.”
I was, of course, frightened and disoriented. I thought, he must have made a mistake. How could this be me? Stunned, I left that appointment reeling. But the door I had walked through to keep that appointment was gone. There was no way back to my life before that moment. Life would never be the same. The old world was gone.
I think this transformative moment has gripped the world. Collectively, the world before the pandemic is gone. There is no way back to life before the coronavirus. We have no choice but to accept the truth of what is and love our way forward, discovering the new life unlived ahead of us.
To be sure, there is nothing glorious or mysterious about disease. The cancer I had was not as important as what it opened in me. Likewise, there is nothing glorious or mysterious about the coronavirus. It can never be as important as what it is opening in humanity. As cancer was a catalyst for transformation when I was ill, we need to ask: What is the appearance of this pandemic trying to open in us and teach us? How is it transforming us as a global family?
In the Jewish tradition, the word sabbath literally means “the one day we don’t turn one thing into another.” And we are being forced to stop, to be still, to halt our out-of-balance doing. In essence, all of humanity has been ushered into a global sabbath. We have no choice but to stop running from here to there, to stop planning, scheming, manipulating, even to stop dreaming, to stop turning one thing into another. All to be where we are, so we might discover, yet again, that everything is sacred and that we are each other.
There is an ancient Hindu ethic carried in the phrase “Thou art that.” It means that, no matter our journey, no matter what befalls us, we are each other and what happens to one happens to all. And so, it is our turn to stop and behold each other, to stop and accept that we are all connected and have always been so. Despite our fears, we are being forced to accept and inhabit that taking care of ourselves is taking care of each other.
The old world is gone. The world as we have known it has broken down. And this engenders loss. No matter how we move forward, we have to grieve what is no more. This brings to mind the work of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the mother of the modern hospice movement. Based on her work with those who were dying, the Swiss-born psychiatrist gave voice to what she called the five stages of grief. First introduced in her book On Death and Dying (1969), she later confirmed that these stages are not necessarily sequential, but more a constellation of passages that we can move through, or get stuck in, in any order.
The five stages of grief are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. It is clear that in pandemic America, there are substantial sections of our society that are stuck in different stages of grief now that life as we have known it has forever changed.
The part of our population stuck in denial won’t accept that the virus is with us. They insist it is a hoax. They don’t want the truth to be true. And part of our society is stuck in anger. They refuse to wear masks. They want to rebel and fight against someone or something because the world that we’ve known has been taken from us. But what are they protesting exactly—biology? And there are those who are experiencing the loss of loved ones, jobs, and life savings. They are deeply in pain, depressed at how so much is being taken away through no fault of their own. Yet, for all our pain, fear, denial, and anger, only by walking this difficult time together will we experience some form of acceptance that will allow us to make it through the storm and inhabit the future.
Since the landmark work of Kübler-Ross, our understanding of grief has evolved to include more ambiguous losses such as: loss of place, loss of time, loss of opportunity, and loss from being disenfranchised—all of which are affecting us now.
One inescapable and humbling challenge of loss is that grief requires us to make new maps. For when we lose something dear—a person or a way of life—the geography as we have known it has changed. And so, our old maps, no matter how dear, are no longer accurate, no longer of use. We have to make new maps for how to move forward. In its paradoxical way, grief forces us back into the world where we have to keep learning.
Copyright © 2022 by Mark Nepo
