Emotions and Deep Breaths

"Haaaaa….mmmmmmm...maaaaah."

The "haaa...mmmm...maaaaah" exercise, designed to bring up sound from the diaphragm and awaken all the muscles in speaking,  is one of the staples at Virginia Theological Seminary as they prepare us for preaching or leading worship. With this recent pandemic, it has been a way for me to self-monitor my breath.

Am I drawing my breath deeply?

Am I feeling any tension in my body as I breathe?

Do I feel that I need to cough?

No? OK, good. I think I'm still good.

This has been an almost daily exercise for me since I left campus on March 12th. Not because I am going to be doing any liturgical work. But because I need to know that my body is still OK.

The news about COVID-19 keeps getting worse. New York City's hospitals are overrun, healthcare workers are ill-equipped with not enough masks or ventilators. The number of infected people is climbing rapidly every day to the point that we are now leading the world in the number of coronavirus cases.

This is not an area where we should be celebrating that we are number one.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

I had my Embodying the Sermon class today, a course that was to engage our whole bodies in preaching. But now it's an online Zoom course, and we are learning the art of how to connect with a camera, imagining it to be a person (I confess: this is hard and brings back memories of my awkwardness as a morning TV news anchor on KOMU-TV in Columbia, MO). As we checked into our bodies, minds, and souls...we were asked to choose three words for how we were feeling, and do an action to illustrate that feeling.

"I am warm," I said, wiping my brow. The office where I was doing the class gets a lot of afternoon sun.

"I am relaxed," came with dropping my shoulders and opening my hands, feeling loose in my wrists and lower arms.

Then, I clenched my fist and slammed it into my other hand.

"I am pissed!!!"

Pissed because people are dying. Pissed that the warnings signs were there that this pandemic was coming, and our president kept calling it "a hoax." Pissed that millions of people are losing their jobs. Pissed that we can no longer gather with each other and when we do, we have to stay "physically distant" by six or more feet. Pissed that some spring breakers didn't care and are now infecting other people. Pissed that every day, I am having to work harder at concentrating on assignments for classes and I'm losing that battle. Pissed that all the courses, the plans, the conferences I had been excited for this summer have now evaporated with this virus. Pissed that I had to deliver another heartbreak to my dorm residents back in Virginia that the refectory is being treated as a restaurant by the Commonwealth of Virginia; hence they could no longer gather...even six-feet apart to share a meal.

This after having spent half-the-year eating in a giant wedding tent waiting for the refectory to be remodeled.

Dean Ian Markham, the president of the seminary, started the year with a sermon in which he noted that "we are under construction".  Now, it seems, we are "under disruption."  These times are dangerous and we don't know when it will end.

I have had a lot of biblical metaphors crop up in my head for this time. My exit from VTS two weeks ago felt as if I was one of the Israelites running away from Egypt. I didn't have time to stop and do my laundry. I wanted to get home quickly, so I had left my car and took public transit to the airport. Definitely no time for the bread to rise with me! I have described this time as like being in the wilderness, wandering, with no signs pointing the way forward and only trusting that God will live up to the promise to be with us always to the end of the age.

Perhaps there is a new age that will emerge out of this one. When all is said and done, maybe we will realize that we are more interconnected--believer and non-believer, Christian and Jew and Muslim and Buddhist and Pagan--than  we dared to think before. Perhaps we will see that our care of creation--all of it and not just a piece of it--is the covenant we have with God, and that when God called it "good" we were to treat it with the same respect and awe.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.