Anchors
Dear Friends:
This Sunday we will celebrate All Saints’ Day, a time to honor the people of God who have gone before us, who walk alongside us now, and who we will welcome into the household of God through the waters of baptism. It is also the day that we typically hold our annual “St. John’s Celebration” – a festive occasion to recognize the blessings of our community, feast on great food, welcome newcomers and conclude our fall stewardship campaign.
The vestry and I thought long and hard whether to continue this tradition during this unprecedented season of global pandemic, when we cannot gather easily or for long in person. But it occurred to us that even now, and especially now, it is important to maintain our traditions, however much they need to be adapted. And that is because they are the moorings we need to navigate the shifting seas that surround us.
Throughout my life I have often used the word anchors to describe those things in my life that keep me feeling grounded and steady and safe. It might be friends, or family, or a sense of purpose, or even just a neighborhood that feels like home. Often, I won’t realize how much something is an anchor for me until it’s gone. But seasons when I feel unmoored always align with the loss of an anchor or several.
We are living in a season of immense upheaval. So many anchors have been lost that we cannot keep track. People are separated from family, isolated from friends and community. Even the reliable consistency of life’s small pleasures and ordinary routines - going out to dinner and a movie, commuting to work - have been upended. I imagine many people have been feeling unmoored in these pandemic days and weeks and months.
Life as we knew it has gone, and whatever comes after this time will be a different world, a different reality, a new normal. Much like this week’s reading from the First Letter of John describes, “what we will be has not yet been revealed.” Will we tear each other apart? Will we develop greater compassion for one another, and greater awareness of the fragility and exploitation of our systems? Will we become better than we have been?
Only time will tell us. And in the meantime, let’s be reminded that even in a world upended, unhinged, uncertain, and unwieldy, we have not lost every anchor. We haven’t entirely lost our families and friends and communities, nor our capacity for small and simple pleasure. Perhaps in many ways, we are even discovering new avenues to these things, new lines to tie to them in new ways. Perhaps we are merely simplifying what it is that we rely on and take comfort in.
Regardless of all that looms before us, remember the truth that we claim when we renew our Baptismal Covenant on All Saints day: we are children of God. We know God and are known by God and claimed in love by God. No pandemic, no election, no worldly upheaval can change that fact.
In Christ,
Amelie+
