This weekly pastoral message by the Interim Ministry Team comes out on Wednesdays. Rev. Meg, Rev. Terri and Arif will take turns writing or recording a video. 

The poet Nayyirah Waheed writes:

“feel it. the thing that you don’t want to feel. feel it. and be free.”

Waheed’s work often cuts right to the heart of things, and here, to me at least, it’s a bit like she’s reaching in and shaking me by the shoulders saying feel it. Not necessarily in a hard way, these words of hers can just as easily be soft, gentle, like a friend or loved one helping us connect to and give voice to our yearning.  

So many of us are impacted by this pandemic in so many different ways. As I’ve noted recently, this pandemic is hyper-local. Our worlds are smaller – shrinking down to the places we live, the ways we get necessary supplies, the shift in how we do or do not see other human beings. In some ways, each of us is living a slightly different pandemic as we each make choices, discern what is “right” for us, and do our best to keep ourselves and the ones we love as safe as possible. 

It is no surprise then that there might be things that we don’t want to feel. Things that we’re holding back, holding at bay, holding away from our hearts because we can’t imagine our hearts carrying any more. And still there’s the invitation from Waheed. 

Feel it. Let it in. Let it move through, so that in the moving through we can get a little more free. 

May we all find ways to get a little more free. 

— Arif

This weekly pastoral message by the Interim Ministry Team comes out on Wednesdays. Rev. Meg, Rev. Terri and Arif will take turns writing or recording a video. 

This week I was part of an 85 car caravan protesting the indifference towards workers’ safety and lives at a poultry processing plant in rural Minnesota where COVID is rampant.  The workers are largely Somali and Latinx immigrants.  It felt like very little to offer, to put signs on our cars insisting on workers safety and drive back and forth in front of the plant, but the workers appreciated the support and it was on the front page of the Minneapolis paper, so hopefully some pressure is being felt.

I sincerely hope that the caravan protest has some kind of impact.  Honestly, though, I was so grateful for any small action I could take that I needed to be there whether it did or it didn’t.  The combination of witnessing indifferent cruelty with homebound isolation is a bad one for me. I need to find paths to resistance or boil in my own rage.  I need to know other people are as angry as I am, and also ready to resist.

In this time of pandemic there is a great deal I don’t know, no one really knows.  But here’s something I absolutely do know.  There is no life that is expendable.  We are bound to one another in an interdependent web.  Our well being is in one anothers’ hands. Continue reading →