hope – Victoria MCGee, M.A.

Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

The world is upside down. We struggle every day to make sense of the happenings in the world. We reach, gasping for breath, hungry for hope. We reach, but many days come away empty. We feel at the mercy of events that spiral out of control – because we truly do have no control. We have only ourselves, our faith, our God. So where is God anyway? As someone who has survived trauma, I know there are moments in life where God cannot be found.

When I reach for hope, I find I keep coming back to these three quotes for comfort. They are simple, profound, and reassuring. They remind me that almost everything we experience has happened before, but the human race survives, faith persists, and somehow we go on.

The first is from Martin Luther King, Jr:

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

The moral universe being that which is the ultimate compass of what is right and what is wrong. Bending toward justice reminds us that when pain and suffering is caused, the tilt in the moral compass must be righted at some point. The Universe will bring justice to the situation, perhaps not in our time or in a way we recognize, but it will. We can look back and see this at work in the past, and we must cling to this truth in the present.

The second is from Julian of Norwich, a Christian mystic of the 14^th Century. She wrote a passage I clung to when the pandemic started and still repeat it almost every day for comfort!

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well… For there is a Force of love in the Universe that holds us close and will never let us go.”

The force of Love moving through the Universe is whatever you call God. God does hold us close and never lets us go. But how shall things be well? That’s all relative, isn’t it? For some, it’s making enough this month to pay the bills; for a refugee, it’s a warm bed and a meal. For others, it’s winning one day in the battle of depression; for another, it’s surviving a night of shelling. For some, it’s being accepted by your family for who you are; for another, it’s being treated fairly and without prejudice. If you’ve survived trauma you know, there will eventually be days that all is well. They come, and will come again, in whatever form it takes. Have faith that God is holding us close.

The third quote is from author Jennifer Worth, who wrote “Call the Midwife.” As the Mother Superior counsels a young nurse who is distraught over something that happened and questioning God’s presence, she tells her this:

“God isn’t in the event. God is in the response to the event. In the love that is shown and the care that is given.”

This, for me, is perhaps the most comforting of all. Of course, God is not in events of human atrocity and cruelty. But look at the response. Look at the ICU nurses and doctors holding the hands of the dying during the pandemic, working tirelessly to save lives. Look at the Eastern European countries opening their homes to Ukrainian refugees without pause. Look at any disaster, and look at the response. There you find God. Hands-on God. Practical, tangible God!

Here is where we find hope. In each other.

These are my quotes that bring me peace of mind in troubled times. What are yours? Please share in the comments! The more we can ease each other’s hearts, minds, and souls, the better. These times can be exhausting – let’s hold each other up.

“Healing is not an overnight process; it is a daily cleansing of pain, it is a daily healing of your life.” ~ Leon Brown

I used to bide my time in quarantine wondering what life would be like when the pandemic was over. And though it’s not over, and in many regions, it is far from over, here in the United States there are glimmers of us coming out the other side. But what are we evolving into? It is becoming increasingly clear that we are not and will not ever go back to life as we knew it. Not completely.

As much as I like to imagine us all tiptoeing out of hiding like the Munchkins, with Glenda singing “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” followed by a happy chorus of “Ding Dong the pandemic is dead!” I know it’s going to be a lot messier and slower than that.

We have all been through a collective trauma, and trauma requires healing. Not healing on the back burner, but daily, active healing on the front burner. And it will not happen overnight. In her book, “The New Normal,” (highly recommend!) Dr. Jennifer Ashton compares the pandemic to an asteroid hitting Earth. That’s a good analogy. It’s a global catastrophe. It happened. It changed everything. And recovery from the fear, the monumental grief, and the loss of trust in the stability of life is something we will be healing from for a very long time.

Remember? Remember how we were just going along, living our lives, and then we heard rumors about a virus. “Oh, that’s happened before. They’ll get a handle on it, they always do.” And then, boom! Everything is closed. You must stay home. Wear a mask. Wear gloves. Wipe everything down. Wait, people are dying? How many? Oh my God. Oh my God.

And then the months of waiting, and surges, and horrific strains on our medical professionals, and farmworkers, and grocery store employees. Unbelievable images on the news, funerals on zoom if at all, loved ones sick and dying – alone.

And now here we are looking ahead to literally taking some deep breaths without masks. Getting vaccinated – moving forward. But where is forward? Where will these changes take us? Who will we be on the other side? Figuring out where we will end up depends on the care we take as we emerge.

“I think it’s important to realize that you can miss something, but not want it back.” ~ Paulo Coelho

Healing from the pandemic will be like healing any trauma. It will not be linear. It will be circular, up and down, two steps forward, three steps back. Slowly, slowly, trusting the world again. In our favor is the fact that we have survived thus far. We bring all that we have learned from the pandemic with us. We bring the gratitude, the healthier prioritizing, the appreciation of leisure and nature, the perfect simplicity of connecting with a friend, perhaps the self-knowledge we have gained.

As we move forward, we probably feel we can’t trust the future, but we know we can trust our own resilience. Look at what we have been through! Don’t underestimate it. Day to day it can feel sort of okay, but take a moment to really look at where we’ve been, what has been lost, and what has changed. Our resilience is stronger than ever. Our ability, individually and as a society, to adapt and change has never been challenged so tangibly in our lifetime. We have risen to the call. We have helped neighbors, worked food banks, stayed connected, grieved with each other, and cried and held each other up. We have prayed like never before.

We have also learned who and what we can trust in outside of ourselves, and this alone could be vastly different than before the pandemic. These are not light lessons. These are life lessons, deep and long-lasting, and we couldn’t have come to them any other way.

We have truly formed new neural pathways in our brains by surviving this era. Pathways that help us heal trauma, that help us tolerate change and adapt to it, and that will help us achieve our new normal.

“All of Western medicine is built on getting rid of pain, which is not the same as healing. Healing is actually the capacity to hold pain.” ~ Gabor Matè

The healing will be slow. It will take time to learn to trust being with others again. We will definitely tiptoe into this world, not like Munchkins, but like the wounded beings we are, cautious but oh, so hopeful! Although we won’t return to exactly the way things were before, we have the opportunity to build back differently, perhaps more carefully and more thoughtfully than ever before. I’m not ready to hold hands for this, but I will walk beside you.

You are Still Beloved.

Victoria McGee

5/14/21

Tag: hope

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