Burdens

In case you haven’t gathered from the last few blog posts I’ve written, hope is in short supply here. We’re still stuck at home, the grownups are at the back of the vaccine line, our kids don’t know when they can be free with friends again, and to make it worse, everyone is tired from losing an hour of sleep on Sunday. We are just plain down in the dumps.

A few weeks ago, I bought a book called “Every Moment Holy” on the rave reviews of an old friend. It’s a collection of liturgies for every day life. Instead of the normal events that we celebrate as sacred, like Epiphany, Pentecost, and Lent, this book has liturgies for “The Preparation of a Hurried Meal” and “The Ritual of Morning Coffee”. (My favorite ones, albeit no longer useful, are the not one, but two liturgies devoted to the changing of diapers.) I’ve kept the thin volume on my kitchen counter and grab it once or twice in the many domestic moments of the day.

I was reading one the other day about the preparation of an artisan meal, and it talked about how when we put time and care into making delicious food, we are, in some ways, connecting ourselves to a spiritual desire for a world filled with truly good things, things that are without downsides, without pain or fear or exhaustion. And there was a line in there that has been running through my mind ever since, as poetry often does.

“Life will not always be so burdened.”

It keeps coming to mind in the many, many hard moments we’re having these days. When I’m trying to make yet another pandemic birthday special. “Life will not always be so burdened.” When I’m looking at a blank page and trying to put all the noise of the family out of my mind and write already! “Life will not always be so burdened.” When that childhood mental health crisis starts getting real here with dark thoughts and hopelessness in our smallest family members. “Life will not always be so burdened.”

It’s been so long that we’ve felt burdened that many of us have forgotten what it feels like to be free. Some of that is on us. We choose to look at the dark, distressing parts of life without seeing the positives. We watch the news without making time for the individual relationships that remind us of the collective goodness of humanity. We allow ourselves to fall into the ease of cynicism instead of the difficulties of gratitude. We look at only the flaws instead of the gifts of the people and the world around us.

But any reasonable person would feel less than free right now. In some ways, that burdening is an act of love. I am burdened by my concern for my family. I am burdened by my efforts to check in on my friends. I am burdened by my desire to help create a more beautiful world. Not all burdens are bad. But it can be exhausting.

And that’s where remembering that life will not always be so burdened is so simply saving my sanity right now. Birthday parties are not gone forever, the blank page will get filled one way or another, and I truly believe that we will all, young and old, come out of this with more resilience than we had before. And maybe that’s the capital T “Truth” of that line. Life will not always be so burdened…because we will get stronger. What burdens us today may go away. But if it does not, we can grow to meet it, we can build our support networks, we can endure until the burden becomes livable again.

And if that isn’t cause for hope, I don’t know what is.