Monday Reflection
On Sunday, our worship service ended by singing the song, It is Well With My Soul.
When peace like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
“It is well, it is well with my soul.”
Horatio Gates Spafford, the writer of It is Well With My Soul, wrote this text out of the experience of intense tragedy. Just a few years after losing his young son, all four of his daughters died at sea making a voyage to England. Spafford traveled to meet his wife in England–the only one of his family to survive the trip. He wrote these lyrics while passing the place where their ship went down.
It is well with my soul;
it is well, it is well with my soul.
In this season of Lent, we are doing the hard work of naming emotions like grief. We’re recognizing how hard emotions can live simultaneously with emotions like peace, joy, and celebration. When we know Spafford’s story, we see this by example. Grief doesn't disappear in times when we feel divine peace; gratitude emerges. This divine mystery appears amidst the ongoing journey of grief.
I felt this deeply for HCUCC as we read the poem Adrift by Mark Nepo on Sunday. One beloved in our community started reading:
Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief…
The real grief in that moment hung in the air. No longer words on the page. Every person in the room heard the truth in those words–emotions filling the room in full honesty and vulnerability. What a gift to be in the presence of the honesty of grief.
At that moment, community accompanied grief. Reminding us again that our hard emotions don’t exist in a vacuum. Reminding us that presence in our grief or sadness is powerful.
This Lent, we journey together following our own paths. We know that grief and sorrow will show up and hope that peace and joy are around the corner. And in the waiting, we commit ourselves to the hard work of being a community. We listen and connect. We sit in silence and offer words of support. We walk together.
May it be so.
