The late Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and scholar of the world’s religions, wrote that we are living in a time of trouble “because we are in between stories. The old story sustained us for a long time - it shaped our emotional attitudes, it provided us with life’s purpose, it energized our actions, it consecrated our suffering, it guided education. We awoke in the morning and knew who we were, we could answer the questions of our children. Everything was taken care of because the story was there. Now the old story is not functioning. And we have not yet learned a new one.”
When I read this passage, I had to stop my reading and just ponder his comment. For me, it was as if Berry had captured the essence of what had happened this spring and crystalized it into powerful insight. We are living now between two stories and the new story has not yet been written.
Many writers and commentators are calling this spring an inflection point, a decisive moment in the course of our personal life and collective life that marks the start of a significant change and that has the potential to take us in a different direction. I am not sure this is an inflection point for many people, because as states, cities and towns reopen after being closed, people are racing back to living their lives in the same manner as before COVID. People are desperately seeking normal, i.e. the feeling of control, order and predictability in their lives. On one level, going forward for many people is a return to a past way of living. In short, they want the old story to function once again.
However, for those of us whose lives have been touched by this global pandemic on a personal level, there really is not a way to return to “normal.” What happened changed the way we see the world, the way we see our country, the way we see our community, the way we see our family and, for many of us, the way we see our life. Having lost a loved one to COVID, I can not go forth blindly and think nothing really happened. It did happen and it’s impact has shifted my perspective.
For me, this is not an inflection point. I am not seeking to change the direction or purpose of my life. Instead, my life has turned into a series of reflection points, where I need to pause and deeply consider what new choices I want to make and what old, pre-COVID ways I want to continue. It is in these periods of quiet reflection that I am rediscovering a deeper story.
The late Joseph Campbell, an American professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and religion, wrote “The world is different today from what it was fifty years ago. But the inward life of [a person] is exactly the same.” Given what happened this spring, we all have struggled with fear and anxiety about the present and the future. We also have gained new insights about who we are, and what is important in our lives. The outcome of this individual and collective experience is that we can choose now to build a more deeply centered and more meaningful spiritual foundation for living.
It is in this new story that we can reclaim our ability to wake up in the morning and know who we are. We can answer the questions of our children and create our life together accordingly. We also can trust the journey through this time because our new story is not solely defined by outer circumstance as much as by inner clarity and connection.
While we are living between two stories, we must remember that our life is not just a physical journey but a spiritual quest to greater wholeness, compassion and integrity. As Joseph Campbell wrote: “People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re seeking. I think that what we are seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that actually feel the rapture of being alive.”
My hope for you today and during the coming weeks, months and years is that you will find your new story and through the process experience the “rapture of being alive.”
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