Selah

"I am speechless, but I can't keep quiet
And I am wordless, but I can't stay silent"

~Wordless (How Can It Be? ~Lauren Daigle)

I heard these words and it's exactly how I felt in regards to my conscious activity on social media. There have been a lot of words swirling in my brain. I have shared so much of others' words on Facebook that to others it might seem that I have said a lot. I have shared a lot. Information. Opinions. Knowledge. Bias. And I learned my lesson when I engaged with a troll on a comments section once. I know better. I have consumed Facebook voraciously when I know I shouldn't. But my anxiety, my need for more information in this time of uncertainty is driving it. I'm sure I'm annoying my Teacher Squad with my nagging and comments in our text thread but they love me, and I hope they know its all because I love them. During all of it, because of the nature of it, my thoughts are tremendously fragmented. My emotions, like many of us, have been a roller coaster ride. How can I possibly stay calm and sane for my children in the midst of this? How can I be anything but calm and sane for the sake of my children in the midst of all of this? The dichotomy of life right now is as mutable as the virus itself. "Every human being is made up at once of his conscious activity and his irrational experiences." ~ Marcea Eliade Life is just that. It's two fold always. It is a balance between the profane and the sacred, the corporeal and the ethereal, the touchable and the unimaginable, the things we can control and the things we can't.

In between my anxiety and rage cleaning, I've had Lauren Daigle playing via iTunes fairly exclusively. Of course I sing along because she's in my range, and I can belt it out pretty well and singing is really therapeutic for me, but there are two songs in particular that really made me stop and concentrate on the lyrics I was singing. The first one is quoted at the start of this. But there is another one that seems very appropriate for all of us Americans, global citizens that are having difficulties staying put in our homes. For many, I understand that staying put is impossible because how else are we going to feed our families. We have to have income. For quite a few, humanity's entire health and wellness is dependent on them; they have to continue about their normal life at an intensity level that rivals fighter pilots, or so I imagine. But our bigger problem as a whole: we don't know how to rest. We "work hard, play hard." We know how to consume, not enjoy. We binge, we don't watch. We produce, we don't create. I'm just as guilty about this especially after I had kids. I don't paint any longer, nor do I practice yoga like I used to. Hell I don't even breathe like I used to before I had kids. But that's a different rant. En masse, we have produced a society that does not know how to rest. Our economy is completely unable to withstand a period of rest without the prospect of crumbling. We have allowed this. We have built a nation on the breaking backs of our people without providing them with the necessities to simply survive. This pandemic has opened my eyes to the broken constitutional promises within our nation. So the other Lauren Daigle Song...This Girl...

"I've been a winding road, oh, I know You know
Sometimes a stranger in my home
Keep going back and forth through the open door
I'm still learning to be still

This girl ain't going anywhere
This girl ain't going anywhere-ere-ere
I can promise You this, now I know for sure
This girl ain't going anywhere

I've run for miles and lost sight of where You are
But You have seen me all along
Maybe I'm the last to know when I've gone too far
And yet I'm always by Your side

This girl ain't going anywhere
This girl ain't going anywhere-ere-ere
I can promise You this, now I know for sure
This girl ain't going anywhere"

I just imagine multitudes of people in their houses roaming room to room not going anywhere, wandering aimlessly right now, trying to deal with the new normal, whatever that looks like in each house, with all the kids, with no kids, conference calls, silence, Peppa Pig, celebrity story time, or rockstar homeschoolers, learning to be still. 

There have been a lot of ideas floating around about how to fill the time that we've been given. We can't ignore those that suggest introspection, no matter how painful it might be. We are in a unique time in our history of humanity. We have been given the opportunity to pause. Pause. Hmm. This idea of pause is repeating itself too.

My pastor, Rev. Shyloe O'Neal, began our Lenten worship series about Selah a couple of weeks ago, and now we are in the midst of a great pause. Selah? What is Selah? No Kanye didn't coin it. It comes from the Psalms. The best the scholars can interpret it as is a musical pause, a coda, a rest. The Psalms after all are songs of praise and thanksgiving and worship. They weren't written with chapter and verse numbers. Scholars and interpreters added those later. These were meant to be sung. But there are moments of pause, moments to catch our breathe before we rush on and cry out. Pause before we demand change. Pause before we lament our utter bleakness. Pause before we tremble in relief and thanksgiving. 

"I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, that he may hear me. In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted. I think of God, and I moan; I meditate, and my spirit faints. Selah"

Maybe, just maybe, we humans need to pause because "our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all those who need us desperately." ~Elie Wiesel 

We need each other. Human are hardwired for connection. Isolation is hard. We are experiencing this first hand now. Let's not let this shared experience go to waste. Pause. Breathe. Sit in the silence. When we reemerge, let's shake off the dust bring our dry bones to life.