Connections: Patterns and Responses

Easter Season 2024

I lead a Grief Support Group in my current job. It runs for one hour a week for ten weeks, and after we practice active listening during introductions, we begin the content by talking about connections and disconnections. Life begins connected, and the cutting of the umbilical cord is the first separation we experience. This pattern recurs throughout life, the ebb and flow of connection and separation. Disconnection is often experienced as loss, and so it is natural to grieve that change. From there, the group moves on to discuss different kinds of loss and make connections between the various types of loss and examples from the participants’ lives.  

As Grief Group continues, we look at who supported the participants during their experiences of loss. Often, the reason that the individual is in Grief Group is because it was their main support person who died, and they now lack support. We identify patterns and themes in the ebb and flow of connection and disconnections throughout their lives. Sometimes, we react to a recent loss the same way we responded to the earliest loss that we remember.  

My earliest loss that I remember is a move. Part of my story is that I moved six times while growing up. As I’ve reflected on this earliest memory, it was the first day in a new school, my first day of school in the U.S., in fact, having just returned from living abroad. The fact that it was a “return” move obscured the impact the move had on me for a long time. We moved back to our old house, returned to the same church, and my parents returned to their previous places of employment. However, unlike my parents, I did not return to my old school, or previous classmates, or even a previous way of doing school. I was two years old when we moved away and began my education in a foreign setting. The Midwestern preschool I attended for a few months just before kindergarten also felt like a foreign culture. My parents were reconnecting; I was connecting for the first time.  

I responded to this loss of familiarity and change in culture by being quiet. I knew how I was supposed to act based on my previous preschool and I sat quietly at my table until the teacher gave instructions. My new classmates, in contrast, were mostly all out of their seats and gathered around one table. I talked differently and I knew different cultural norms of behavior; I stayed quiet.  

I am still prone to be quiet, especially in groups or unfamiliar settings. Often, I respond this same way when I experience disconnection or am making a new connection. Introverted and an internal processor, I continue to be more likely to be quiet for a time before speaking.  Making observations first is part of how I have learned to connect. 

The Christian life is a journey of connection, disconnection, and reconnection.  We are halfway through this season of Easter, a time of connection, that culminates with a disconnection on Ascension Sunday and a new way of connecting, a reconnection, on Pentecost. What are your patterns of connecting and ways you handle disconnection? I’d love to hear, if you’re willing to connect publicly with a comment or privately via email.