Living with Uncertainty and other teachings of Corona

 Our country is getting more and more polarized over the Coronavirus.  I was amused when Donald Trump's press secretary first spoke of alternative facts.  What an oxymoron.  But now like living into a science fiction movie, there are people on both sides of the divide furious with the other side for doing what they regard to be life threatening or life worth living threatening behaviors. There is no way for them to even discuss the "facts" of the issue because they have different news sources and literally different facts.  In my clinical practice I listen to families that are being torn apart by these differences, and literally to people moving to other states, so they can either live where people are vaccinated, or live where they do not have to wear masks.

My last blog about the virus I said "well clearly Corona is not done teaching us.  We are still being held still in order to learn."  But I was getting pretty tired and board myself with that.   It was easy to just feel like "I wish those other people would hurry up and learn so we can get out of purgatory."  That is never a good position when you stop noticing what you might need to be learning.

Recently while talking to one of my clients - I noticed that all of us, both sides are grasping desperately for certainty, for normalcy.  One side grasp for an end through vaccination and herd immunity, the other grasps to maintain a freedom of choice and the normalcy that comes with that.  It occurred to me that through out time humans have looked for and made up explanations for the scary and unexplained thing in their time.  Ancient people explained earthquakes, volcanoes and hurricanes as the God's were angry with the people.  A previous generation believed the earth was flat because that was what they could see and the idea it was round felt like we could "fall off".  In a pandemic gone by people not knowing about germs and how they spread believed that whole towns fell ill because witches communed with the Devil.  There is a long list of things that without understanding the science, people made up explanations for.   Actually part of how our brains are literally wired is to fill in missing pieces of info to make sense.  If you print a word without a vowel most people will substitute it and not even know they did.

We don't want uncertainty.  It is uncomfortable; it feels scary.  We feel better with an explanation even if it is as horrible as one of our neighbors is a witch who has turned the whole town over to the Devil.

What arises for me out of this - especially if Corona is here as our spiritual teacher, is how do we learn to live with uncertainty?   It seems to me it requires quite a bit of faith, a belief in a Supreme being who is weighing in for good.  It means learning how to live inside the Serenity prayer.  It means having to surrender the desire for certainty and big T truths.  It means embracing the mystical which is the unknown and trusting being on a journey.  It means not turning away from the suffering which is part of the unknown experience we are having.  It means having to learn to respond with compassion and find hope from within.

Love, Lover, Beloved

 I have a friend who is Sufi.   She tells me that Sufi's frequently talk about God as Love, Lover and Beloved.   This is interesting to me.  Certainly Christianity talks about God as a force of Love, and certainly a sense of Beloved.  But the idea of God as Lover seemed new.

In my 20's I grappled with questions of "what Gender is God?" and tried on what was the experience of tuning into Goddess.  While this did seem to tap into slightly different aspects of the Divine, in the end I came down on the feeling that the Divine is genderless or as we would say now nonbinary.  During that time I was working out what to call God.  In a particular episode I heard the words of the Cris  Williamson song: Song of the Soul.   This is a song which had played in the background of my life without my putting particular attention on it.   So I would hear this part:

Love of my life
I am crying
I am not dying
I am dancing
Dancing along in the madness
There is no sadness
Only a song of the soul

And we'll sing this song
Why don't you sing along?

and in my minds eye I thought it was a song about a human lover:  "love of my life"   But suddenly one day as I listened more closely I caught the first line:

Open mine eyes
That I may see
Glimpses of truth
Thou hast for me
Open mine eyes
Illumine me
Spirit divine

and I could finally see that this was a song about Spirit Divine - but also about God as Lover, as Partner, and in a dramatic turn then all of the names I had played with as the right name for "God" played in my head to the beautiful melody of this song, Song of the Soul, profoundly making the point that all of them are names for God.

So as my Sufi friend tells me that they think of God as Lover, I realize this does open a new energy for me around the Holy One.  Many of the Christian descriptions of God are of a parental God or "Lord" a sort of powerful ruler.  While Jesus calls god Aba, there is not God as Mother (Only Mother Mary) and there is certainly not words or frames for god as partner, friend or lover.  This is a kind of intimacy that Christianity does not suggest.  It is however an exciting set of possibilities.  It suggests a more tender approach from God, and a much closer in relationship - not a God that is "in the Sky" or otherwise far away but one that is right there at ones side.  And put next to the word Beloved, it also suggests a sort of reciprocal loving and adoration.  I think I will be living into this idea for a while.