During my lifetime, I don’t recall a time like we are experiencing now involving the coronavirus. The fear I encounter in the news and around me is profound, and this fear is really affecting our ability to discern, plan, and live our lives in helpful ways. Fear is a very powerful emotion, but this fearful part of us is not our centre. There is another part of our soul that feels this fear but is beyond it. It will important in the days and weeks ahead that we intentionally work at living our lives from this calm centre rather than from our fears. Within our current times, we are becoming very aware of the two-sided nature of humanity, the fallen structured egoic part of our soul and the divine unstructured Being part of our soul. Our fallen nature, based on many past childhood experiences when we were not seen, validated, loved, and held unconditionally, is very sensitive to fear and distrusts easily. When we become centred in this egoic nature, fear often overwhelms us causing us to think and act in ways that fuels this fear even further. We often become fearful, impatient, judgemental of others, and quite demanding of others to take away our anxiety. This is what happens when we become centred in the fallen part of our nature; we lose touch with ourselves looking to the outside world for all our answers and support. We lose faith in others, ourselves, life, and God. But what happens, if instead of becoming centred in our fearful egoic nature, we intentionally work at staying connected to our divine centre that is not fallen? We experience this divine part of us as very different. It is unstructured, spacious, a sense of being to it, that has not been distorted by the sufferings and pains of our life. When we live from this centred part of us, we are able to experience the different aspects of God’s spirit ministering to our fears and doubts through compassion, strength, truth, grace, power, resilience and rootedness. We will still feel fear for it is a part of us that contains our history of when we have been fearful in our past. Furthermore, there are many unknowns regarding the coronavirus that make us also fearful now, but we are led to intentionally seek out good information so we can live with this unknowingness from a place of rootedness, neither inflating nor bypassing our feelings or risks to ourselves, our friends and family, our neighbourhoods or the broader world. There is a story in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 4:35-5:4) that highlights this two-sided nature of people involving fear. Jesus and his followers, after a day of public teaching with the crowds, take many boats to go to the other side of the Sea of Galilee. The other side was the place where the Gentiles live, non-Jewish people who Jewish people were to avoid due to religious purity reason. It seems that Jesus wants his followers to lean into their fears that rise as they relate to Gentiles. As they are crossing the sea, a great wind arises causing huge waves that threaten to swamp their boats. These winds and huge waves also capture symbolically the internal winds of anxiety and waves of fears of the fallen nature that is threatening to swamp the souls of Jesus’ followers as the boats get closer and closer to the Gentile shore. The followers of Jesus are very afraid and yet Jesus is asleep in the stern of one of the boats. It seems Jesus is not troubled by the weather and waves or by any emotional turmoil within himself. In panic, his followers wake Jesus up. Upon seeing the conditions and how it is affecting his followers, Jesus rebukes the wind and says to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” We read that the winds settled down and that the sea became calm. And then Jesus asks them, “why are you frightened? Don’t you have faith yet?” His followers are in awe of Jesus and how he was able to calm the winds and the sea. In this Bible story, we see people living from two very different parts of their soul. The disciples have become attached to their egoic fearful part, a structured part containing much fear and many coping strategies to deal with this fear. In contrast, we see Jesus living and speaking from the "Being" part of his soul, a spacious soul that is able to feel fear but not get lost in it. Instead, he also feels strength, power, an inner peace, and holds a more accurate perspective of truth that allows him to realize that things are not as bad as his followers believe. He is in touch with a faith, a knowingness, that arises from the state of Being that his followers have lost touch with. When Jesus speaks, not only do the external winds and waves calms, but so do the internal winds and waves within his followers. Both the winds and seas but also the followers become calm and settled again. Our world, including those closest to us, those in our community, and beyond, need people right now who are able to live from this Being part of their souls. Our world needs people who are mature, wise, resilient, attuned to other, seeking to understand and open to new information, and have this sense of being centred in Being. Probably, many of you, readers, have already found these and many other qualities in your own experience, as you live through this challenging time of crisis caused by the coronavirus. But it is easy to lose connection with our divine centre of Being due to the fearful pulls of our fallen nature. This is why it is so important, especially now in this world of fear, to take our spiritual practices seriously that keep us connected to our spiritual nature. The practices of centring prayer and meditation help us steady ourselves and deepen our capacity to disconnect from our anxieties and settle into the nonreactive presence with God. The practices of contemplation and inquiry makes it possible to help identify outdated, constricting historical patterns and other obstacles allowing the fruits of God’s spirit to minister to us more. As we do these spiritual practices and others, we find ourselves more naturally embodying and expressing those divine qualities that are needed for our time. Our current times of so much fear is a good time to rededicate ourselves to our spiritual practices. In the news we have heard a lot about the spread of this coronavirus and how contagious it is. It is also worth noting that the fear connected to this virus is also very contagious. But I want you to realize something else, that Carol Penner, Associate Professor of Conrad Grebel University College, reminded me of in her Pandemic Prayer that she published last week (link to Carol’s prayer). The love of God is far more contagious then this virus or this fear is. And it is not only the love of God that is contagious, but all the essential qualities of God’s spirit are very contagious too like compassion, grace, truth, determination, courage, power, peace, joy, etc. This is why it is so important that we commit ourselves to do our spiritual practices regularly now so that we can manifest these spiritual fruits more consistently in our daily lives, and allow them to minister to all the fear present to the people around us right now. During worship last Sunday (Mar 15, 2020), the last service before we closed down public worship due to the coronavirus for a few weeks, I took Carol’s Pandemic Prayer and adjusted it to capture this sense that the fruits of God’s Spirit are already active in our world and combating the viruses of fear and mistruths that are connected to the coronavirus. I share this with you below as a prayer of hope. Questions to Ponder:
Published by Gord Alton, Mar 18, 2020
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