I don’t know about you, but for me, picking up any task these days, no matter how familiar, feels like starting all over again.  There is this great bright line between my understanding of life before COVID and now in pandemic life, and yet another one that divides these COVID times before we saw the truth through the death of a man named George Floyd and after our heart’s vision was forever changed.   The only thing that these lines in the passage of time had in common for me, I thought, was that they were deep chasms that separated me from a big part of my self-identity, the part of me that understands myself as a person who embraces every act of creativity, be it musical or verbal, to be part and parcel of the very breath of my soul.

I had nothing to say.

And if I did have a thought or even a feeling, it was so fleeting that I couldn’t remember it long enough to write it down.  Or type it.  Or even to speak it into a voice recorder.

I had nothing to say.  That is what I thought.  That is the truth that I held closely, in silence.

And that feeling grew and grew, as I watched my many creative friends make art, music, poetry and use words for all kinds of things all around me — I watched others who considered themselves to be driven by the spirit to create, well, create.  They kept on creating.  My musician friends created amazing video performances and mastered film-making.  My writer friends wrote.  My artistic friends made art.

The lies we tell ourselves.  As a culture, we are swimming in lies right now…lies and misinformation.  We are facing the truth that we have all been lied to, and that we have embraced some of those lives in the name of comfort or laziness or fear, or in the name of keeping the mythology alive that was woven into us by the lies in our history books and our cultural heritage.  We have accepted and embraced when we should have questioned and overturned.  We have denied the call to look deeply into the face of our past and our present, and deeply into our own hearts and the heart of our God for the knowledge of the truth.  The enslaved man Archer Alexander, depicted in the Emancipation Statue that stands in a park not far from my home, said to others at a prayer meeting, “By the ‘Claration of ‘Dependence all men was ekal,” and that “to trade in men and women, jess like hogs and hosses, wasn’t ‘cordin’ to gospel, nohow,” according to his biographer the Rev. William Greenleaf Eliot, the grandfather of poet and playwright T.S. Eliot (Washington Post, July 6, 2020).  That was a man who looked into the heart of God and saw the truth that he was not less than because of the color of his skin, or for any other reason. And there was Sojourner Truth’s famous question, “Ain’t I a woman too?”  Again, she looked deep into the heart of God for an understanding of truth beyond appearances.

Now, I am not about to suggest that my accidental practice of focusing my eyes on God’s creation around me as I walked each morning had nearly the importance to the world of these two saints, but perhaps it was every bit as important to me.  The events all around me shook to the core my sense of truth, my sense of equilibrium, my sense of the divine.  I am not prophet, but I was and I continue to struggle.  My problems are minute in the face of the great sorrow of the world, but I cannot lift up my small corner to create change without that equilibrium.  And there is work to do for all of us, great work and small work, work that requires us to live into the truth that God has no hands and feet but ours.  I would add to that famous statement of St. Teresa’s that God has no eyes without our ability to see and comprehend, and God’s story goes silent if we do not tell it.