Overwhelmings

 “Overwhelming” is a word which I may have heard daily over the last two years. At their worst, overwhelmings paralyze, injure, and confuse. They knock us off course or at least off the course we thought we ought be on.

And yet as I take stock of some of the experiences and learnings from the last two years, I cannot help but feel that there is something valuable and formative in the overwhelmings of the pandemics. And I am trying to discern what they might be…

In his book The Shape of Living, theologian David Ford introduces his theory of shapes of living as emerging from the overwhelmings of life: sex, money, war, crashes, disease, death…To his list I now add pandemics: viral and of social injustice. 

What shapes are our lives taking now? Have we closed in on ourselves? Are we emerging with tentative stop and start like hyphenated fits? Are we racing to a “top” because we feel we must before the next “crisis” occurs?

I am working on a slow gentle arc of a shape. One which feels like the mark where the ocean meets the shore, from a distance beautifully curved and close in, intricately various. 

There is an eternal continuity as my life’s shape meets all others. There is discomfort and stillness feeding each other. The overwhelming dissipates, never leaves entirely. It becomes bearable and porous.