Transitions: Community
Summer/Fall 2024
I’ve written before about the experiences of before, during, and after a life-changing event when I shared about the Oklahoma City National Memorial. These events can drastically alter the trajectory of our life and our understanding of ourselves. The western part of my state is recovering slowly after Hurricane Helene dumped millions of gallons of water in a short period of time. Those who lived through it will not be the same; even others who were not in its path have been drastically affected by it. Last week, I officiated at the funeral for a 21 year old who was killed by a drunk driver. One minute, life is normal. The next minute, life is irrevocably altered.
I realized as I was writing my funeral homily that I had not mentioned in this space one important resource for managing transitions: your community. All the strategies I’ve shared in this series are by and large individual, internal actions. Yet, as I shared with the youngest group of people I’ve ever seen at a funeral, what gets us through tragedies is community. It’s the people around us. The mourners gathered last Saturday were that 21 year old’s community, and they were there to support each other in their grief.
This idea is not original with me. I draw a lot from John Swinton, a Scottish mental health nurse turned Presbyterian theologian. In “Raging with Compassion: Pastoral Responses to the Problem of Evil,” he writes that “evil and suffering can be resisted and transformed by the Christian community” (emphasis his). He finds it important, therefore, to “build communities that can absorb suffering and enable faithful living even in the midst of evil.”
While my congregation that Saturday was not predominantly Christian, I reminded them that it’s important to have people you can call on for help. Community is vital for many reasons, including because it can help absorb and transform suffering and pain. This young man’s death inspired many people he had coached and their parents to write letters to his parents sharing how much their son had meant to them. Over half of my homily was reading from those letters. I shared the words of his community, because his community needed to hear their own words. Even though I was the officiant, it was the young man who gathered this community. I just reminded them that they needed each other and why.
Major transitions, even ones that don’t involve loss of life, can entail some degree of pain and suffering. Even “good” transitions involve some grief and loss over what was. The internal strategies I’ve listed during this series are good; and our external strategy is to lean on our community. It’s the people around us who get us through.
Who are the people around you? Who do you lean on for help? Who makes up the community that helps to absorb your suffering, and whose community are you a part of?