It seems like we have an opportunity to really lean into the “in between.” We cannot and should not go “back to all the ways things were” but we also don’t have all the tools to imagine the ways things can be. We started this podcast talking about the dislocation we as a body of people — and I think I can safely include the whole world here — have experienced over the last year. Even when we gather again in person, there is much grief and loss and dislocation we must hold space for. I will link to a blog by Diana Butler Bass that speaks eloquently to where we find ourselves in this moment.

We are, in a real sense, co-creators in evolution, in creating the world we want to inhabit, and this particular time is an invitation to lean into our imaginations without forgetting where we stand and have stood. Creating something new is both about re-membering, re-locating, and re-imagining. One of the things that we cannot avoid is grief, which has the potential to be transformative. Joy can inhabit and incorporate grief — both are reminders that we are ALIVE, that we love, that we are capable of re-membering what has been lost.

There is so much anticipatory joy in thinking about regathering, and let us be mindful of how our separation has also been dislocating. Click HERE to link to Diana Butler Bass’s blog post on “Religion after Pandemic.”

The full passage read from James Baldwin’s essay “Nothing Personal” is as follows:

It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within. And yet, the terror within is far truer and far more powerful than any of our labels: the labels change, the terror is constant. And this terror has something to do with that irreducible gap between the self one invents — the self one takes oneself as being, which is, however, and by definition, a provisional self — and the undiscoverable self which always has the power to blow the provisional self to bits.

Who do we say that we are and what do we need to re-member about ourselves in order to re-locate ourselves in this grand, evolutionary process, and, perhaps more importantly, in this present moment? “Our lost world needs finding….our lost selves need finding…one step at a time.”

Thanks for listening!