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COVID-19 as spiritual moment, Part 2: the community

This is the second in my three-part series about a spiritual and political response to COVID-19. The first centered on our personal needs and self-care. The third will attend to public/political policy and ramifications. Today, my focus is on community.

The community

Every spiritual movement of which I’m aware focuses on connectedness and community. It’s hard to imagine that anyone could nurture a spiritual consciousness without also being aware of and concerned about all of humanity.

“Community” can refer to the people who share your home, your neighbors, or people who live on the other side of the globe. All of us inhabit the same planet; all of us have equal value as human beings.

Some gatherings of like-minded people are faith groups, or those who hold certain ideals in common. Such affinity groups can be important to our spiritual development and even to our humanity. However, it is also essential that we look beyond those with whom we feel a particular bond. In difficult times like these, we recognize – if our eyes and hearts are open – that we are all connected, interdependent, and that we must focus on what is good and right for everyone.

Here are a few guiding principles for difficult times in community.

  • Don’t be an a-hole. It isn’t all about you. The things you do affect everyone. So…
    • Stop hoarding. Just. Stop. It. You have enough TP. When you realize that you have more than you need of something, call local food banks. They accept food, and also toiletries and personal products. Many unemployed and underemployed people are in desperate need of everything right now.
    • Don’t call it the Chinese virus or the Wuhan virus. Doing so is a lame attempt at saying this pandemic is someone else’s fault. A virus is no one’s fault; it’s just biology. Bad things happen, and laying blame on a specific country or race simply divides us at a time when we should be more united than ever to end this disease.
  • Do the right things. Remember that social distancing isn’t just a healthy practice for you; it’s good for everyone and even saves lives. The more we care for each other now, the sooner we’ll be back to normal.
  • Stop meeting in public gatherings, including for worship. When you gather for religious (or any other) purposes, you’re defying your spiritual tradition’s admonitions to care for others, especially the most vulnerable. All of us have heard of COVID-19 outbreaks, including some deaths, resulting from religious meetings.
  • Find out who is in particular need and what you can do about it. You don’t have to leave home or put yourself at risk to donate to a non-profit that is working to alleviate suffering.
  • Don’t assume your experience is universal.
    • Are you struggling to get your kids to participate in Zoom classes? Remember how many households don’t have internet access.
    • Frustrated about working from home? Consider those who’ve lost their jobs, or those whose jobs have greatly increased.
    • Are you feeling cooped up? Remember people who are confined to their homes or institutions all the time, or those who are quarantined with their abuser.
    • Tired of cooking? Recognize that many have lost income and aren’t sure how they’re going to feed themselves and their families.
    • Missing your friends? Keep in mind those who are ill or elderly and suffer far more deeply from social isolation.  
  • Celebrate those who keep us going:
    • Those who work in every sort of medical assistance, including those who work service and low-wage jobs at medical facilities;
    • People who grow and harvest our food and those who transport it, stock grocery shelves, cook and deliver meals;
    • Trash collectors, postal workers, delivery drivers, and others who perform public services;
    • Factory workers who manufacture and package essential items;
    • Politicians and bureaucrats who try to effect policies to keep us safe and flatten the curve;
    • Teachers who create new ways of learning remotely, and who are concerned about all the needs a student may have;
    • Persons who risk their own health to provide for our needs.
  • Find ways to honor the connectedness of humanity. Whether your family, your neighbors, or people you will never meet, be grateful for the relationships inherent in being human.

Pray or meditate, if that is your thing, and lift up individuals and groups who are in tremendous need. Then turn your imagination to ways in which you can serve them now, and ways in which you can serve them later when social distancing restrictions are lifted.

In our generation we may never experience another event like COVID-19. Horrible as it is, it’s also an opportunity to learn, or to relearn, how connected we are.

That is the only way we will get through this together.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2020

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COVID-19 as spiritual moment, part 1

“We are in uncharted territory.” That’s a statement I’ve heard and read many times in the last few weeks, and it’s true.

My husband and I once unintentionally sailed through uncharted waters. We actually had a chart, but recent storms had shifted the channel (deep passageway) and we ran aground. It was unexpected. It was disorienting. It was a bit frightening because we no longer knew the parameters of our safety.

The entire world has been thrust into an unexpected situation that is disorienting and sometimes frightening as we face a brand new virus.

What could be spiritual about a virus? Probably nothing. Not everything that touches our spiritual nature does so positively. But any moment in which we are engaged encompasses spiritual elements.

This blog begins a three-part series to explore the personal, community, and public/political intersections between coronavirus and spirituality. I hope you’ll enter the conversation and comment with your own discoveries and impressions.

The personal

Around the globe, many people’s lives have been upended by this pandemic.

The number of sickened and dead is still climbing. Thousands (maybe millions) have lost their jobs or are in fear of that eventuality. Others have found their jobs maximized in terms of hours or risk, or both. Schools have closed, visits to the ill have been limited, businesses and faith gathering spaces have been shuttered for the time being, distancing is encouraged or mandated. So much has changed, and part of the uncertainty is not knowing how long those changes will remain in place or if they may even be intensified.

In all of this, we need to care for each other and for our communities. In order to do that, we have to pay attention to what’s going on within ourselves. Like the airplane instruction that reminds us to put on our own oxygen masks before assisting someone else, self-care is an essential element in caring for other people. We should not be selfish (more about that in part two), but wealso remember that the health of our own bodies, minds, and spirits contributes to the health of the bodies, minds, and spirits of those around us.

Here are a few general principles about self-care (physical, mental, and spiritual – all of which are interconnected and inseparable) during a time of crisis.

  • Allow yourself to feel what you feel. Are you angry? Afraid? Bored? Anxious? At the end of your patience? Hopeful? Frustrated? Faithless? Grieving? Relieved that you and your loved ones are healthy? A mix of emotions is normal. Don’t repress them.
  • While acknowledging and paying attention to even the most negative emotions, lean on the more positive ones where you can. For me, gratitude is always a movement toward the healthy. I try to keep a mental list of the things and people for which I’m grateful, and I access that list when darker times and emotions threaten. During these times, I keep adding to my list: people who are working so hard for all of us to keep us healthy, or fed, or our utilities working; basics like clean water and shelter. Oh, and toilet paper.
  • Seek help when you need it. Are you being overwhelmed by depression, anxiety, hopelessness, fear? Contact a therapist; many of them are working online or by phone to help people just like you.
  • Exercise compassion toward yourself and others. This will help to calm you.
  • Limit your exposure to constant news sources, while staying abreast of what’s important and essential.
  • Stay as physically active as you can.
  • Focus on things that bring you comfort, joy, or calm. It’s early spring in Kentucky, so I’ve been spending my off time cleaning out the asparagus bed, shoveling compost, and planting seeds and seedlings. For me, gardening is tangible hope—looking forward to the future of harvesting and cooking what’s being planted.
  • Engage. Social isolation is hard on your soul. It’s a strange time when it’s inadvisable to hug, shake hands, or even be in the same room together. Find or make community when possible. Connect by phone or social media. Check on those who are physically or socially at risk. When possible, make those connections “face to face” through electronics. This week I’m coordinating Zoom gatherings of two sets of friends—I need their company!
  • Reflect. Meditate. Whether it’s a way of claiming some of your newfound extra time, or something you squeeze in on your way to another shift at the hospital, paying attention to your breath and calming your thoughts will certainly feed your soul, your mental health, and your physical well-being.
  • Laugh.
  • Share what you’re learning. I hope you’ll do that in comments here.

We’re in this for the long haul, it seems. Take care of yourself, and be well.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2020

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Greta Thunberg, climate change, politics, and spirituality

Surely you’ve seen the news that teenaged climate activist Greta Thunberg of Sweden was named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019. (If you haven’t read the excellent accompanying article, check it out here.)

The interest around Ms. Thunberg’s amazing journey as a spokesperson for the earth has helped to focus people around the world on the urgency of environmental preservation. Because the topic is both political and spiritual, my blog and podcast will return to it often.

Of course climate change is a political issue. Witness governments that are adopting new climate policies, and administrations (like ours in the US) that are resisting those policies and withdrawing from treaties designed to protect the environment. One of the most interesting aspects of the politics in the United States is that governmental agencies often issue—and sometimes then bury—reports that disagree with the official statements and policies of the administration.

As far as being a spiritual issue, I can’t think of any religion or spirituality that doesn’t believe in caring for the earth. (If you know of one, please send me an email.) From the Hebrew scriptures that speak of a created universe in which humans are given the honor and responsibility of being stewards, to indigenous religions that revere plant, animal, earth, and sky, faith groups have historically treasured the great gifts of our planet. Those who consider themselves spiritual but don’t identify with a particular religion often connect deeply with nature.

As we enter a new year in the Gregorian calendar, many people consider making resolutions. What if, once each month, you resolved to do something to support the environment, reduce global warming, and draw attention to how our actions as individuals and nations affect the earth, the air, and human lives.

  • Call or write your elected officials about environmental policy, especially regarding particular legislation.
  • Send a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, write a blog, or post in social media about climate change.
  • Research how you can make an impact by recycling, reducing your carbon footprint, consuming less.
  • Work with your faith community or another organization to imagine how they might initiate positive change.
  • Invest in companies that demonstrate care for the environment.
  • Attend an event that supports the earth.
  • Get into nature to appreciate what we are in danger of losing.

The environment. Global warming. Climate change. These issues are essential to the survival of our planet and its population. These issues are political. These issues are spiritual.

Let’s move forward on them in the new year. Let’s live in the same spirit as Greta Thunberg and try to make a difference.

The Blue Ridge Mountains

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2019

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Lynching as metaphor

Last week, President Trump made news by using the word lynching in a tweet to describe how he feels about the impeachment inquiry:

So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the president, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here — a lynching. But we will WIN!

After the President received some pushback over using that term, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) chimed in by saying:

Yes, this is a lynching and in every sense this is un-American. I’ve never seen a situation in my lifetime as a lawyer where someone is accused of a major misconduct and cannot confront the accuser or call witnesses on their behalf.

Then, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden condemned Trump’s use of the word. Within a few hours, a video began circulating of Biden saying this about President Clinton’s impeachment in 1998:

Even if the president should be impeached, history is going to question whether or not this was just a partisan lynching or whether or not it was something that in fact met the standard — the very high bar that was set by the Founders as to what constituted an impeachable offense.

Biden has apologized. Is an apology enough? I don’t know. It’s certainly better than not apologizing. It’s also worth noting that these are three wealthy white male politicians who didn’t blink at using a word that conjures up a horrific history that affected a huge minority of Americans.

Here are the lyrics and a recording of “Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol and first recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939, while lynchings were still being committed in the United States.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolia, sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop

If you don’t get the horror of that part of our nation’s racially motivated terrorism, you should be required to visit the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

As the memorial’s website states, More than 4400 African American men, women, and children were hanged, burned alive, shot, drowned, and beaten to death by white mobs between 1877 and 1950. Millions more fled the South as refugees from racial terrorism, profoundly impacting the entire nation. Until now, there has been no national memorial acknowledging the victims of racial terror lynchings. On a six-acre site atop a rise overlooking Montgomery, the national lynching memorial is a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terror in America and its legacy.

Truth-telling. Reflection. Racial terror. Refugees. Murder.

Sacred space.

Lynchings were celebrated by entire white communities, while African Americans fled or lived in fear, as whites intended. This is the dark history that is part of America’s history and heritage. Using that history as metaphor to describe a legal process—a process that includes no physical threat—demeans the terror and panic experienced by an entire population of targeted Americans.

As a writer, I’m always looking for powerful metaphors. But I’m also aware that certain metaphors are inappropriate or out-of-bounds because of what they conjure. I remember my embarrassment and shame as a young pastor joking about how something “nearly gave me a heart attack” while speaking to a woman who’d just lost her spouse to cardiac arrest. I apologized, but the hurt of my use of that particular metaphor couldn’t be retracted.

Using lynching as metaphor is outrageous. Pretending to be a victim in the same way that people were real victims of violence, assault, murder, and terror is wrong. The only appropriate way to recall the terror of lynchings is through a memorial like the one mentioned above. We honor victims through a sacred space. We give dignity to their memory by vowing that we will never allow that part of our history to be repeated. And we should never use their experiences to exaggerate our own.

Words matter. They matter especially when elected leaders use them flippantly in ways that harm entire groups of people. Disrespect is not a responsible way to lead.

Words matter. Sometimes there is a word that needs sacred space around it.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2019

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The Attorney General of the United States, and religious liberty

Sometimes I just can’t believe my luck. After starting my Political and Spiritual website and blog last week, what a surprise that William Barr, US Attorney General, made a speech about religious liberty at Notre Dame University. It’s a perfect illustration of some of what has become backwards and upside down in our country. You can read his full speech here. Here’s my critique. I apologize in advance that’s it’s lengthy, but—oh my—there’s just so much to say.

  1. The Attorney General has the religion clauses of the First Amendment only half right. Or less than half. I’m no lawyer (and I don’t even play one on TV), but I have studied much over the years about the First Amendment’s relationship to religion. Here’s what the amendment says: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Barr only seems to need and want the second clause that prevents congress from prohibiting the free exercise of religion. I don’t know of anyone who disagrees with that clause. The freedom to worship and believe is at the heart of our country’s foundations.
    1. a. It’s the first clause to which Barr gives brief lip service but apparently doesn’t like—no establishment of religion. This first clause was extremely important to our founders; they had seen the abuse of state-sponsored religion. In Europe, state religions led to discrimination against other faith groups. This pattern reasserted itself in the colonies. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, among others, took the lead in keeping that abuse from being a part of our foundational documents. Madison was behind a change in the Virginia Declaration of Rights that concerned religion. The change from “full Toleration” to “free exercise of religion” marked the difference between having a state religion (Anglicanism) in Virginia that would simply permit other faiths, and granting rights to individuals to follow their consciences with vigor and equality, and without interference. Madison later wrote to Jefferson: I flatter myself we have in this country extinguished forever the ambitious hope of making laws for the human mind.
  2. That Madison quote is compelling, because Barr claims that “secular humanists,” as he calls them, would do just that—make laws that govern others’ beliefs. Barr is not only wrong about that, it’s actually his own combination of law and faith that wants to govern and curtail the beliefs of others.
    1. a. The Bill of Rights (the first ten amendments to the Constitution) was designed to protect human rights—individual rights—from government overstep. Yes, this certainly includes religious rights, but also includes the rights of those who are not religious. It definitely isn’t just for the protection of the rights of conservative Christians, which is oddly what Barr seems to advocate. It’s admirable and understandable that AG Barr believes his personal faith is the best and most important expression of right beliefs and morals. It is wrong when the government’s highest legal official makes this a public policy stance.
    1. b. Freedom to exercise one’s religion in America isn’t confined to Christianity. As a matter of fact, all Christians don’t believe the same things, and many Christians don’t conform at all to the beliefs contained in Barr’s talk.
    1. c. Barr either fails to understand or refuses to acknowledge that the founding documents, including the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, were informed not only by Christianity but also by those who espoused Enlightenment ideals and/or Deism—two related philosophical platforms. Deists talked of God, and by that they meant a creator who set things in motion and then stepped back as the universe ran on its own (like a watchmaker building a timepiece). Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Washington, Franklin, and others identified as Deists or followers of the Enlightenment, or some mashup of the two. Both Enlightenment principles and Deism focused on laws that flowed from both reason and morality.
    1. d. So, if the AG is going to disparage “secularists,” he needs to start with the secularists who wrote the very founding documents he uses to support a different view from what they intended.
  3. Secularism vs. faith? This isn’t a reasonable division. Barr is a conservative Catholic, and many other Catholics have already expressed disagreement and dismay at his comments. The Attorney General speaks of an orchestrated scheme by secularists. He says: This is not decay; it is organized destruction. Secularists, and their allies among the “progressives,” have marshaled all the force of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values. What’s interesting is that the people he calls secularists and progressives are the ones who are fighting for the rights of all people, including all religious people and the rights of those who do not belong to a particular faith—not just the rights of conservative Christians. Though Barr speaks often of “religion” in his sermon (yes, it’s a sermon—I know a sermon when I see one), he plainly does not mean any other religion besides conservative Christianity. That view is the opposite of what our founders intended.
  4. And there’s more. Barr goes on: Similarly, militant secularists today do not have a live and let live spirit – they are not content to leave religious people alone to practice their faith. Instead, they seem to take a delight in compelling people to violate their conscience. Wow. Really? Because from where I sit and stand and preach, it’s people like Mr. Barr who don’t want to live and let live. They want every person to conform to their beliefs. I say beliefs and not actions, because their own actions often don’t conform to what they say they believe. And “militant” secularists? What does that even mean? It recalls the days when women who stood up for their rights were called “militant feminists.” Maybe we still are called that and I haven’t noticed?
  5. Men. Several times Mr. Barr uses the term “man” or “men.” Like this one: Men are subject to powerful passions and appetites, and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community at large. While I don’t disagree with that theology, and though I acutely appreciate his accomplished alliteration, I am both surprised and relieved to know that I’m not included in that sentence. I’m not a man. Mr. Barr, please note that while referring to all people as “men” may have been socially acceptable when the Constitution was written, it has been neither socially acceptable nor good writing/speaking for a very long time.
  6. Your freedom to swing your arm ends just where the other person’s nose begins. This famous quote was taught to my first grade class by Mrs. Pippin, our teacher. No lie. On the first day of school she was talking about rules, and the way she told her example story—or the way my 6-year-old mind remembered it—was that a person claimed he hit someone else in the nose because “it’s a free country.” The injured person replied, “Your freedom ends where my nose begins.” Why use this expression in a blog about religious liberty? To remind you that while you have all the freedom you need to express and practice your religion, you may not swing your arms of faith so as to impede someone else’s freedom.


The bottom line. Secularism has never been an enemy to democratic principles, and secular people were a driving force in the foundational documents of our country. Far more dangerous are the ideas of those who want to defy our Constitution and laws by claiming their own faith rules for everyone.

I have stood proudly, and will again stand, shoulder-to-shoulder with people who profess other religions or no religion, as we demonstrate for human rights and freedom for all. This is what the framers envisioned.

© Melissa Bane Sevier, 2019