This week feels a little like 2020. Everyone staying indoors. The few people outside wearing masks and hurrying for cover. The only difference is that other people aren’t the hazard this time – the outdoors is the danger.
The world is literally on fire, and the air is literally suffocating us. It can feel like too much effort to even cry for help.
In the nine months that I’ve been producing the Healing People, Not Patients podcast, my guests and I have talked a lot about situations that feel figuratively like suffocation, or like the world being on fire, where even crying for help can be too much. Addictive disorders, grief, statelessness, and yes, 2020. Through it all, I’ve been looking for ways for professional healers to learn how to hear those cries when they are stifled, suffocated, just barely audible, or in a language we don’t fully understand.
Next Tuesday, I’m excited to share another installment on this theme when my friend Rev. Dr. Anastasia Holman, Director of Spiritual Care Education at Indiana University Health System, joins me to teach us about lament. It’s a timely interview, coming just before the Jewish observance of Tisha B’Av, which commemorates the burning of the Temples in Jerusalem, first by the Babylonians and then, 600 years later, by the Romans. In addition to the Book of Lamentations, or Eichah, we also read many individual laments, called kinot. Not surprisingly, many of the kinot use fire metaphors – including one which begins, “A fire is kindled within me.”
She’ll help us understand these “prayers that come from wounds” and lead us from hearing the lament to the beginning of healing the wound. Indeed, she says that speaking the lament is itself the beginning of healing. The verse I mentioned just a moment ago comes from a lament contrasting the joy of leaving Egypt with the sorrow of exile from Jerusalem – but the line about “a fire is kindled within me” is part of the memory of joy, not sorrow. The seeds of joy are planted in the scorched earth of sorrow, just as they will be after these forest fires are out.
Be sure to subscribe to the podcast on your favorite platform – you can jump to about a half-dozen of the most popular ones from here – so you get it in your feed when it comes out. Meantime, you can catch up on the earlier episodes on this theme. I recommend Ep. 2, with Rabbi Joshua Corber, Ep. 5, with Dr. Naghmeh Rowhani and (almost Dr.) Ashok Gurung, Ep. 11, with Rabbi Kara Tav, and Ep. 16 with Nancy Zionts. Apropos the smoke, each of these episodes features at least one Canadian, all people I love a lot more than I love Canadian wildfires.
I’ll also be doing more written work than I’ve done lately, trying to keep the conversation going. Watch this space, and check out my most recent full length post, “No Pray-er There,” on this same blog page.
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