You are Not Alone

Where can I go from your spirit?
    Or where can I flee from your presence?
--Psalm 139:7 NRSV

Each Sunday in worship, after the musicians have led us in praise music, I step to the pulpit and say pretty much the same thing. I say something along the lines of “Even though we are separated because of the pandemic, we remain one church, because the Holy Spirit binds us together.” I look at the fifteen to twenty socially distanced and mask-wearing people scattered around the sanctuary and glance at the cameras streaming the service online and I try to imagine all of the different church folks watching from their dens, living rooms, decks and who knows where else on laptops, TV’s phones and tablets. In my mind, I imagine all of us connected by an invisible web of the spirit connecting us together as a faith community.

I’ve repeatedly said that my current ministry gig, interim minister, is the weirdest one I’ve ever had. Because of COVID-19, I still haven’t met most church members face to face, so I imagine what they look like, where they are and what they are doing. Even though our connection takes an act of imagination on my part, I really believe we are connected by the Spirit. I really do.

Episcopal priest, Rev. Crystal Hardin writes, “While fear wants us to believe we are alone, faith knows differently.” There’s so much to be afraid of right now, and there are political entities, media empires and self-aggrandizing pundits doing all they can to spread fear this election season. We can choose to believe only what seems real, namely that each of us is alone, isolated at home and separated from one another, or we can be reminded of our faith which says otherwise. We are never alone. God is always with us.

The wonderful spiritual writer and nun, Joan Chitister tells this story.

Once upon a time, the story goes, a preacher ran through the streets of the city shouting, 'We must put God into our lives. We must put God into our lives.' And hearing him, the old monastic rose up in the city plaza to say, 'No, sir, you are wrong. You see, God is already in our lives. Our task is simply to recognize that.'

It’s the same truth the Psalmist sings about: there is nowhere we can go where God is not present with us.

Where can I go from your spirit?
    Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
    if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
    and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
    and your right hand shall hold me fast.

Because God is always with us, we are always with God whether we realize it or not. Because we are with God and God is with us, through God we are connected with one another. The Apostle Paul wrote about the Christian community as the “Body of Christ”, but he went further in his letter to the Colossians describing Christ connecting everything and everyone.

[Christ] is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 

Through the Holy Spirit we really are connected together no matter the circumstances that keep us socially distanced or divided due to politics. It’s this kind of interconnectedness that the mystic writer and trappiest monk Thomas Merton tried to describe in his classic work, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander:

In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness… This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud…

For many years, maybe most of my life, I had no idea what Merton was talking about. I was so invested in my own individualism I couldn’t imagine feeling this kind of connection with anyone but my closest relationships. Yet, his words have been making more and more sense to me in recent years.

Maybe it’s because the forces at work in our culture seeking to divide us one from another seem more vicious than I’ve ever known that I feel the Holy Spirit drawing my attention to our connectedness with one another rather than believing the voices of fear and rancor.

Maybe it’s because COVID-19 has caused us to be separate from one another in a physical sense—even a handshake or a hug has become potentially life-threatening—that I am all the more aware of how much the human touch and the physical presence of others matter.

Whatever the reason, I find myself drawn to the truth more than ever before that our separateness from one another is an illusion and God seeks to expose that illusion for what it is.

You are not alone. God is with you. So is a cloud of witnesses greater than we can imagine. We are all connected.

Grace and peace,
Chase