A few years ago, my husband and I went on a pilgrimage with a small group of friends. We journeyed by foot for 115 miles of the historic pilgrim route, el Camino de Santiago, in Spain.
One day, we faced our steepest trail. It was muddy, difficult and to be honest, miserable. But it was worth it because we anticipated getting up the mountain, then the rest of that day’s walking would be easy. The whole way up, our mantra became: “it’ll be all downhill soon.”
We were wrong. We got to the top and instead of a leisurely hike down, we discovered our journey was going to take us downhill for a little while, but then up an even steeper and more difficult trail. Lately I have been reminded of that gut-wrenching discovery. Maybe recently you have also experienced this feeling.
I think that many of us have spent much of the last year and a half with the same naïveté of my hiking companions and I on our journey up the mountain. As a culture, we told ourselves that once we got vaccines, once businesses reopened, once things looked “normal” again, it would all be downhill and easy from there.
We thought that at this point in the pandemic, we would easily be coasting comfortably to normalcy. Instead, what we see in front of us is not a downhill leisurely stroll, but rather another mountain to climb.
Nothing in my training as a pastor prepared me to lead a church through a pandemic such as this. Nothing as a parent prepared me for raising teenagers through this time. I’m guessing that nothing in your training for your job, or in your personal life, prepared you for this kind of a pandemic either. Here we are, ready for the downhill time, ready to rest, to coast, to recover. So why are we finding it so hard, after so much anticipation of ease?
On the one hand, we can talk about vaccine hesitancy and other factors that are continuing to spread the virus itself. But even if COVID magically disappeared tomorrow and we no longer had to worry about variants and breakthrough infections, we would still find ourselves climbing yet another mountain.
Until we grapple with the losses we have endured, we will not be able to discover normalcy in our lives. I am not only referring to the direct loss of life to COVID. We have all carried the burden of this public health crisis. As LGBTQ+ people, we experience loss and trauma differently. This is not the first public health crisis that has devastated our lives. As a community our cultural milieu was fundamentally shaped by the HIV/AIDS crisis.
In this pandemic, again, we have sacrificed, we have struggled, and we changed nearly everything about our lives. This time around, we have learned to do our jobs in new ways, we have learned to shape ourselves into new people.
Each of us experiences this differently. Some of us live in households with multiple people, in which we have rarely had moments alone or the luxury of an uninterrupted train of thought. Others were thrown into gut-wrenching solitude, from which they are only now starting to emerge.
We look to our history for ideas. What our community learned during the height of the HIV/AIDS pandemic was to pull together, to join, to physically be with one another, hold each other, cry together, fight for our lives together. In this pandemic we have learned to stay apart. While epidemiologically necessary and absolutely the right thing to do, the impact of this distance on all of us is likely greater than we realize.
Now we need to relearn connection. If you aren’t feeling ready to socialize in person, please do whatever you need to do to feel safe, but still connect. Connection does not have to be in person, but it does have to happen. Even for us introverts, the only way to find healing from this ongoing stressful time in our lives is to connect.
I know that you might be exhausted. As we come back together in society more and more, it can be very overwhelming. Now is not the time to pull back. Now is not the time to skip out on chances to find and join community.
So many things have been postponed. Weddings, parties, and celebrations have been scaled down, cancelled or put on hold. We have nearly forgotten how to celebrate with one another.
This very month, we should be celebrating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the church where I serve as a pastor, the Metropolitan Community Church of Tampa, the first LGBTQ-affirming organization in the Tampa Bay area. Don’t worry, friends, we will still be having a huge party, but we’ll be doing it in January. Because now we are focusing on rebuilding and reconnecting. Now we are focusing on healing.
Whether you attend MCC Tampa or some other faither community, now is the time to participate – online or in-person. Religion isn’t for you? No problem, now is the time to join or rejoin whatever social club or community helps you feel grounded and connected.
Now is the time to acknowledge that while this journey through pandemic life is not over, it is not all downhill from here. But as we approach this second mountain, let’s not do it alone.
Rev. Jakob Hero-Shaw is the Senior Pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Tampa, MCCTampa.com. He and his husband are the proud fathers of two wonderful children.
