“Hate Mail” and Grief with Amy

“Hate Mail” and Grief

For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (2 Cor 6:16)

Nothing stays the same. Nothing.

We know this, of course.

Our bodies age, our abilities change, our families, neighborhoods, communities, schools, and even our beloved churches change and when that happens, it is still a shock. Our intellectual knowledge that all life changes meets the reality that the changes we experience in our own lives mean loss, pain, anguish for us and for those people and institutions we love.

St. Francis recently received an anonymous letter that expresses this anguish at the changes in the Episcopal Church. Personalized to specific leaders and specific actions at St Francis, this letter writer seemed to need this anonymous outlet to express the bewilderment, anger, pain, and fear that so much change in America and in the Episcopal Church has stirred up in them.

Though it was hard to read this letter, I read it with a dawning sense of recognition.

I, too, have been bewildered at decisions made by leaders in the Church and in the institutions that I have been formed by. Why can’t these institutions, why can’t my country, my family, why can’t all that I have known and loved stay the same?

Does so much change mean that God is not the same? If I can’t trust in the stability of the institutions where I met God – church, school, family -  can I trust in God at all?

It’s so human to want to blame someone or something for our loss and our pain and our fear.

When I feel this arise in me, I turn to my community, my fellow people of faith, to share this pain, to seek guidance and comfort. I turn to Scripture, the history of God’s people struggling with the exhilaration and joy at following the Living God while at the same time feeling that same fear and hesitancy that following that same Living God engenders in all of us who seek to follow across time and cultures. 

God doesn’t change. God keeps God’s promise to be with us until the end of the age. For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will live in them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. (2 Cor 6:16)

A picture of the construction and change currently at the JHU campus, as described by Amy in her video.