"Hold Hands with Strangers"

It's 4:30 PM on Monday. I pull off the highway that leads to one of our local grocery stores, hoping to see the nearly empty parking lot I found last time I came three weeks ago. But I've arrived at a bad time. The lot is packed, and people wearing masks in different haphazard ways are pouring in and out of the store. Once inside, shoppers try in clumsy fashion to navigate carts down narrow one-way aisles. It's confusing and impossible to follow road rules with such congestion. Don't cough, follow the signals, make wide berth for the woman in the electric cart who travels in all directions down the aisles, seemingly unaware.

Shelves are empty of pasta, the dairy case is almost entirely scoured of cheese. An aisle of chicken is picked over and unappealing. This time there are eggs, at least. No one talks. People eye each other with suspicion. Everyone looks tired. A woman gets uncomfortably close to me while I wait twenty minutes in a long line that snakes from the registers down the frozen dessert aisle. Her closeness sparks in me a now familiar irritation and anxiety. This is the new world, crowded and lonely all at once.

"I'm so bored, Mom," Emelyn confesses to me Thursday afternoon. She is a child who is never bored. "I miss my friends." And so Friday, we bend the rules to allow our girls to see their besties for the first time since March. Emelyn and her friend M ride bikes from M's house to ours, stopping at the community center to climb ancient trees a safe distance apart. "Don't touch each other," we warn before they leave. "Make enough space on the sidewalks for others to pass." "Don't climb too close." "Don't loiter at the community center too long." The list of warnings seems endless. But they pedal off happy just to be together. Audyn and her friend E play outside at E's house. Even though it is cold and rainy and the wind whips at their ponytails, they can't stop smiling together. They hold a seven-foot-long branch between them that Audyn dragged out of the woods at our house and loaded into the minvan for the occassion. When they tire of that, they tie themselves together with a six-foot rope and hobble around the yard in the drizzle. They are quite literally bound together. It's not the same. But it's something. The girls come home happy and energized.

John Kachioko of the University of Chicago has conducted extensive research on the condition of loneliness and has concluded that the need to belong is literally a part of our DNA. Long before the human genome is mapped, Jesus recognizes our God-designed need to belong, as well. In his three years of ministry, Christ makes it his mission to gather in the men, women, and children who live on the margins of society. He calls them to participate in something bigger than their limitations, illnesses, age, gender, or social standings. He gathers them in for Love.

Speaker, author and researcher Brene Brown says that belonging is the deeply held belief that we are inextribcably connected to one another by something that is greater than us; the something greater is rooted in love and compassion. It's a natural human connection that cannot be severed.

All over town, stuck at rakish angles in soft, spring soil are signs thanking medical and service workers. Neighbors stand at the end of their driveways talking to one another across the road. We've seen many fire and police department-led birthday parades. Horns blare, brightly-colored balloons and signs flap in the wind, children pop out of sun roofs like jack-in-the-boxes, full of unused energy. These gestures small and large manage to keep us connected, at least in spirit.

Every morning, I scroll through headlines on NPR, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal. I can't help but notice the contrast between the banding together happening in our local areas as compared to the infighting going on in the poltical arena. People are angry. Conspiracy theories are alive. The strife is real.

Instead of national grief, there is national anger. Blame. Cheap shots. Maybe under it all, fear.

When the coronavirus wrapped itself tightly around our lives back in March and promised to stay awhile, many people in my own social circles hoped that in the wake of its devastation some good would transpire. In an interview with On Being podcast host Krista Tippet, Brown calls our culture a "high lonesome culture," arguing that we are more "sorted" than we have ever been, living in ideological bunkers, and this tracks with our increasing rates of loneliness. Why? Because shared hatred is not belonging. And fear makes us forget our humanity. It makes us less human to one another.

I find myself stunned into silence these days, and at times, deeply sad. What can be said, afterall, when truth no longer seems to matter to the members of our highest offices? What can be said, when so many have taken ill, lost their jobs, been cut off from the spaces to which they belong? What should we think when men and women are still gunned down in their neighborhoods for the color of their skin? What can be done when instead of joining hands across all our dividing lines, it feels as if we are redrawing the lines, darker and deeper than ever.

We hoped for unity in the face of a global pandemic, but that, it seems, is not what we've accomplished. Maybe the national wounds were already too deep, division having severed us to the point of forgetting. Forgetting our most basic connection: We are all just people. Fearfully, wonderfully made.

There is nothing more dangerous than fear and forgetfullness hand-in-hand. "We are the most dangerous version of ourselves when we are in fear," says Brown. "Most of us are brave and afraid all day long at exactly the same time," she continues. Teaching our kids to hold fear and courage together, grief and joy together, victory and failure together, are perhaps some of the greatest lessons we will teach them. If we teach them.

When we look back on this pandemic, five, ten, fifteen years from now, what do we hope to remember? What do we hope our kids will remember? I hope mine will remember slow, easy, dinners around the table, long walks in the woods, family movie and game nights, laughter. But I also hope they'll remember how hard it was. What we lost for a time. What we grieved. That we were bored and lonely and incomplete without connections to the people who matter most to us. I hope they will remember the unsettling, unnatural feeling of needing to distance yourself from neighbors and even perfect strangers. Once upon a time, for example, it wasn't uncommon for the occassional shopper to request my assistance reaching an item off a high shelf at the grocery store. When I saw someone struggling with a top shelf item recently, my instinct was to stop and help. But instead I kept walking. And it felt wrong. I don't want us to forget what that is like, because if we remember, then maybe we can also remember why it is so very important to move in, get close, be vulnerable, maybe most especially to those with whom we seem to share nothing in common. And always keeping our fears held in the same hand as our courage to act justly and to love mercy.

Remembering this pandemic might teach us to reach across those deeply drawn lines, so as to become less "sorted," recognizing that we are inextricably connected  not by shared viewpoints or shared hate of the same people or shared skin color, but by something much deeper: our shared humanity.

I hope it will teach us, finally and again, to "hold hands with strangers" (Brown). I hope it will teach us to listen.