I Feel Lost.

I am feeling utterly lost. Last week I spoke with three of my closest mentors. I described to them a sense that I was in a boat, lost at sea. I don’t know which way to row the boat. I meant every word of it. Y’all, I haven’t felt so gosh-darned uncertain and confused in all of my life. When I’m driving around, dropping off my kids at school, all I can think about is, “what in the heck are we all doing?” or “what is going to happen to all of us?” 

The temptation, in moments like this, is to be a narcissist. I must be alone in my uncertainty. What my mentors reminded me of was this: I am not alone. 

Maybe the mental image is that of the poor souls rowing in the frigid ocean after the Titanic sank. I doubt any of them were all that worried about sinking while they flaunted expensive formal wear at dinner parties. The boat was safe enough. It provided as much certainty as they needed. Until it didn’t. And, in an instant, they were wearing the same gowns and suits in a wooden dingy watching the thing that was certain just moments ago sink to the bottom of the ocean. 

There was a day when I arrived at my kid's school, and they each handed me a trash bag. Inside the trash bag were all of their personal items from their cubbies. Extra clothes, rain gear, art projects. We walked out of the door and one of the teachers said, “We hope to see you in a couple of weeks.” We never stepped foot in that school again. At some point in early March of 2020, my kids went to their last day of school and had no idea. The certainty of their lives, the classroom, and the teachers they found comfort in sank. 

Just. Like. That. 

Over. 

That happened for billions of people in some fashion in the late winter and spring of 2020. At my Quaker meeting, we went from throwing a party to celebrate the last Sunday of service for our interim pastor, to locking the doors on our Meetinghouse for years. We had un-ceremonial endings to so many of our normal lives. What we thought would be temporary became permanent. 

We don’t experience something like this as a human family without consequences to our psyches. Right now, there is a collective sense of being lost at sea. We have all been thrown into uncertainty, some more than others, but all of us experiencing our share. 

The analogy of being in a boat, rowing is not lost on me as we also find ourselves desperately hopeless about the health of our planet. As our climate continues to warm, there are people in the world who are literally going to have to get in boats and flee their homelands because the ocean is going to swallow them up. 

A global pandemic and a global environmental crisis feel like the one-two punch to knock all sense of hopefulness out of our weary hearts. My friend Claire Nail said to me, “The losses have been great. They need to be grieved.” I’m not sure we have even done the work of acknowledging the collective human losses adequately. Perhaps this prolonged sense of hopelessness has made us callus. Maybe we now all carry the Kurt Vonnegut attitude “so it goes” as our collective coping mechanism. 

My own sense of being lost is rooted in the state of my Quaker Meeting. We, like many faith communities, are trying to figure out our purpose. Our community is especially steeped in this as we have been in a transition following the departure of our beloved founding pastor, who served the community for close to 30 years. For the last several years we have been trying to find our way. 

As a pastor in this community, I admit that at times I feel like it is my job to figure it out. I often feel like I just need to find the next big idea. Maybe there is this new and radical way of being a church that I can dream up that will make people want to be a part of our community. I sometimes feel like I’m R.R. Martin, and my congregation is earnestly waiting for me to write the next Game of Thrones book. 

But, I’m a Quaker for a reason. I didn’t get into ministry work because I craved the celebrity or CEO role so many getting into this vocation end up falling in love with. As an anxious person, a person with low self-esteem, and a woeful lack of confidence, the spotlight is not a comfortable place for me. Quakers are fundamentally collaborative. Their leadership model rightfully keeps megalomaniacs in check. I am at home here and that is why I’m still confused about why I still think everyone is waiting on me to save the church. 

I’m not interested in answering the question, “what do you dream for our community in five years?” Because even if there is overlap in my and God’s dreams for the community, they are not the same. I am becoming more clear with myself that the role of a Quaker pastor is not to be at the helm. My role feels like constantly reminding fellow Quakers what our work is…listening for what the Divine wants for us. 

But, what I’m realizing, is that we may be as unprepared for this work as ever.  We are people in languishing right now. We are right to be wary of hope. We thought our kids would be back to school in two weeks, not two years. I know young people in their twenties who longed to be parents but have decided it would be too cruel to bring a child into this world. They are peering into the future and imagining a world in which food and water are scarce for their yet unborn children. They have already made the ultimate parenting decision, to protect their children, by not even having them. 

So, imagine inviting a bunch of Quakers to a meeting where we all sit and silence and ask God what direction they are leading us. How do you honestly open up your broken and weary heart enough to actually receive something that feels hopeful? Listen, I feel way more empathy for that seeming impossibility than you’ll ever know. 

So the question is, how do languishing and weary people find enough hope to imagine there is a future for their faith community when they are dealing with more than enough of their own personal uncertainty? What I wouldn’t give to have been a follower of Jesus after his crucifixion, because they only had to wait a few days in this upending uncertainty, of hopelessness, before their purpose/meaning/hope was restored by the miraculous presence of their resurrected teacher and savior. 

It seems that when we go into group discernment about the direction the Divine is leading our faith communities, the first thing we bump up against is our fears and worries. Sometimes (maybe more often than not) we easily mistake the voice of fear/worry as the voice of God. Our caution and hesitancy are loud voices in our heads. It is really hard to listen beyond that. It is hard enough in normal times. It is even harder now, in not normal times. 

My pastoral instinct is to leave this piece off with hope. I really hate to imagine you getting up from your computer and exhaling and saying, “geez Mark! Thanks for that healthy dose of gloom!” What I hope this piece is doing is what my mentors did for me…reminding me that I’m not alone in this confusion, and feeling lost. I think we are all feeling that right now. I think we should be giving ourselves, and the communities we are a part of an absurd amount of grace. It is hard to imagine a future right now. It is hard to imagine a future always. 

Perhaps that is the way forward right now, the role my church, and other communities can be fulfilling for people. We know that the losses have been great, and we would be wise to grieve them adequately. We don’t need to rush back into “normal” church. We can be honest about how languished we feel, about how unsure and lost we feel. We can be that together because being lost alone sucks a whole lot more than being lost with others. Maybe, just maybe, when we begin to hope again, we don’t need to flaunt it or make others feel bad for not feeling it, but we can all gather around the warmth of that person’s hope.