Y’all, we are spending a reee-dic-u-lous amount of time on social media. Totally reee-dic-u-lous. And for those of us who are have lived longer than a quarter century, we are especially drawn in by Facebook. The intensity of spending that much time online has forced me to cull the groups I follow. I’ve finally got the list down to a small selection that is mostly thoughtful and sometimes entertaining, and one of those groups that made it through the recent round of eliminations is one that has me entirely wondering about our world. It’s a group made up of “rev gals” – a.k.a. female pastors – and it is an introspective space where these clergy ladies can share their hearts. And I mean REALLY share. I mean like Dr. Phil and Oprah tag-team share.
Like the other day, for example, this super sweet, Episcopalian priest posts this thought: “Believing this to be a safe space, can I ask am I the only person living alone during this lockdown craving physical contact? Last time I actually touched another human being was 10th March! …twice now I have hugged a tree … and found myself moved to tears.”
I had to reread her post several times. She hugged a tree.
Twice.
My heart breaks for her. But it also breaks for every other person just like her right now who doesn’t have the outlet or the chutzpah to share the same heart and vulnerability that this rev gal did. And how many others like her are there? How many other people are there in the world right now who haven’t touched another human being for nearly two, full months?
And while I’m asking questions, I want to know… What happens to a world in which so many people have gone without human touch for – by the time the pandemic passes – a quarter or a third of a year? What happens to humanity, to mental health trends, and to our hearts themselves?
Right now, though, not everyone is without human touch; there are those who are in isolation with family, so they technically have human contact. But many of those folks are struggling with other issues – issues that we might never have considered a few months ago – like rampant unemployment, like worry and anxiety over the future, and like an extreme condition I learned of the other day called compassion fatigue.
The last of these – compassion fatigue – happens when a person becomes overwhelmed by human suffering and cannot respond compassionately any longer. Instead, the sufferer’s heart becomes numb to sadness, to loss, and to hurt; this type of fatigue forces sufferers to grow protective coats around their hearts so that they don’t shatter. With compassion fatigue, folks become callused and distant and embrace even more fully this entirely American idea of sucking it up and toughing it out. (Read more about this relatively new condition here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/high-octane-women/201407/are-you-suffering-compassion-fatigue.)
Maybe I found myself fascinated by this condition because I think I can feel this type of fatigue settling in myself. The truth is that the COVID-19 numbers scrolling across the news screen are no longer personal to me. They don’t represent people anymore; instead, they only have cause-and-effect, curve-flattening, statistical significance. Less and less, am I taking note of the heart-wrenching stories in our midst, and, more and more, I find my head a jumbled montage of ridiculous memes and awful, end-of-life anguish with very little kindheartedness mixed in there at all.
It’s just a weird space in time, in history, and in the world right now: We have so much contact but no touch, so many stories but no mental capacity to truly process them all, and so many options but so little freedom.
We have all that weirdness, but we don’t know what any of it means. We have no apparent frame of reference. Never has there been an episode of this scale that would show us how to navigate so many unknowns. In many ways, we are just lab rats, and no one knows how this experiment will end. We have to just keep running like mad on these tiny, spinning wheels until someone or something jolts us off.
And yet, somehow – deep down in my cro-magnon, amygdala brain – I know we’ve been here before. In the midst of the sadness and the fatigue and the isolation, I know humanity has walked this weird path in the past, more than once, and I know that we have done more than just make it through; we have survived and even thrived. I have to think that, somehow, the secret to surviving has been imprinted on our DNA; somehow, it has seeped into the very marrow of our bones so that we can find hope even while surrounded with only trees to hug and hearts semi-hardened.
One day in the maybe not too distant future, we will have group hugs… and handshakes… and pats on the backs… and human touch countless times a day. We will weep openly at not only every Super Bowl commercial and Hallmark movie we see but also once again at the broken, awful stuff of our world. Our isolation will ease, our tiredness will lift, and our compassion for ourselves during this dark time will be gracious and bold because we knew all along how to do this.
Even when we didn’t know how to do this, we knew how to do it.
Until then, I’m going to go hug my kids. Twice.
Y’all stay safe out there…
“Jesus reached out his hand and touched the man.
‘I am willing,’ he said. ‘Be clean!’
Immediately he was cleansed of his leprosy.”
Matthew 8:3 (NIV)