In the last week I’ve worked my way through the new Amazon Prime series called As We See It. The show is about three young adults living with autism and working toward becoming independent. For those of you who are unfamiliar with autism, social skills are often difficult for them. They frequently don’t pick up on the natural social cues that others learn to attend to in childhood and adolescence. Their social skills have to be taught, practiced and honed with intention. It takes work.

As I sat down to write today I noticed an icon on my desktop. It’s been there since early 2020 when wearing face masks, social distancing and remote work was a new reality. The icon was a link to an article in Harvard Magazine by Jacob Sweet entitled The Loneliness Pandemic. In the beginning of this pandemic, the challenge was loneliness and disconnection. A year and a half later some of that remains, but if I were to write a new article, it’d be entitled, The I’m Just So Sick of This Pandemic Pandemic!

I’m writing this on the day after Thanksgiving while sitting in the sunroom at my brother’s home. Twenty-one members of my extended family gathered around a table yesterday and enjoyed a bountiful meal prepared by my sister-in-law. The group spanned three generations, my own being the oldest. After a year and a half of COVID-19 social distancing and isolation, we were happy to be able to gather. I’m sure many other families were feeling the same way.

Over the last week, I’ve had the privilege of hearing about people’s spiritual opposition to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The law requires that reviewers judge the sincerity of a person’s beliefs without judging the validity of the belief itself. Many of the people we interviewed who were applying for a religious exemption were, or had been, Christian.

Recently I attended a presentation on “how to disagree”. The presenter said that disagreeing wasn’t a time to debate a better idea. It wasn’t a dismissal of another’s thoughts, beliefs or values. It wasn’t a time to dispute an issue or dissent. I liked his use of alteration, with all the d’s (decline, dismiss, dissent, dispute, debate). Very cool, and I liked his definition of what he thought it meant to disagree. “The process of uncovering where, how and why we part ways with someone’s conclusion or perception.” Through that simple act of redefining, he reframed a potential argument into a mutual task of discovery. Also cool … and difficult.

Recently I was making a presentation to a class of social workers taking a required course in Spirituality in Social Work. First of all, I was impressed that this was a required course. Go Roberts Wesleyan! Second, I was impressed with how many felt spirituality was an important aspect of care. Silly me, for thinking they would think otherwise. After I had run through my slide show, the instructor asked me how I might respond to someone who asked, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” I started by saying, “Why do bad things happen at all?” and “Who is a bad person?” That was a rabbit hole I began digging all on my own.

We’re launching a new training for Spiritual Peers. Over these last 16 months, many people in positions of trust in faith institutions have been asked to “check up on” fellow members of their faith communities. You volunteered to be a trustee or governing board member, and you find yourself making phone calls to folks in your congregation who are anxious, or grieving, or confused. Last year we conducted a survey of clergy and laity in the Rochester area and asked about the training people were receiving. The results were a bit startling.

Graduations are times of transition. This group had finished all the clinical time, classwork and final self-evaluations several weeks prior to the graduation. On Tuesday they were excited and greeted one another with hugs and shouts as they came together in a small Presbyterian Church in rural Hector, NY. Every group is different. Every group is unique. This group was no different.

Greg Kremer was a student in our first CPE unit. Even though he had been working in the church for several decades he was learning to live into his newly ordained life. His CPE experience was an opportunity for reflection on the past, understanding the present and discernment for the future. Sometimes what we discover surprises us.

As we’re approaching July 4th, the celebration of our nation’s liberation from English rule and our national day of independence, I want to believe that every American shares in this liberation … yet if nothing else, the past year has taught me differently.

When we encountered the shut down from the COVID pandemic in March 2020, I scrambled to find resources that would help me help my students address the spiritual and emotional fallout. Everyone was talking about “the disaster cycle”. I had a lot to learn.

I had a colleague once tell me the doctors in my hospital don’t really know what we do. They have a patient in distress, and they just say, “go in and work your magic”. It’s not magic …

Crossroads of Caring began with an idea, an idea that grew out of my work in a small urban parish in Rochester, NY. At St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church there was a small but mighty contingent of dedicated folks who understood community.