When the World is Sick

So much is happening around us and within us right now. In the business of life, we invite you to take a sacred pause and to listen to and reflect on this song. The following are some reflections provided by the musicians who performed this song together as they respond to the lyrics and to these questions. 

How do you understand the words ‘When the world is sick, can’t no one be well’? 

What dreams of beauty and strength do you hold in this particular moment for yourself, for our Union community, and/or for our nation? 

Liam Myers:

I moved to New York last October when online learning began and I live alone in an apartment in Hastings Hall. This physical distance from (most of) my classmates, my family, and even from those who live in proximity to me due to the COVID pandemic has made me feel secluded. I often fail to recognize the interconnectedness between myself and my neighbor, to those most near to me. Due to this, I linger in my own personal concerns regarding my problems. My own suffering. My sickness. 

This leads me to ask the self serving question; “How can I be well?” 

Performing this song with my classmates reminds me of our connection, of our community, and of our closeness to one another. The repetitive nature of this song holds me in a certain way, in a similar way that community holds me. The music allows me to rest, if even for a moment. The lyrics remind me that we will all feel pain until we seek to heal the pain of our neighbor. This reorients my mindset towards seeking healing for one another in community, and not solely as individuals. 

This makes me ask; “How can we collectively be well?” 

Hannah Lundberg: 

I believe that true liberation in the world is interdependent—none are truly free until all are free, clothed in dignity, and able to access everything needed for abundant life. When some are unwell due to the unjust systems around them, we all need to change. An important part of my dream for ministry is to draw communities together so that needs and resources can meet each other, and we can collectively be more well. 

A dream I hold is that this period of pandemic will help more institutions (particularly religious communities) to develop a more expansive imagination about what ministry can look like. Many churches are spending less money on Sunday worship and more on food distribution, creating worship spaces that could be more accessible to a wider community, and rethinking priorities. I hope we can keep adapting instead of just going back to normal.  

Kirsten Lodal:

I first sang this chant on March 11, 2020, the last time I set foot in my beloved UU church, All Souls-DC, during our monthly Vespers service. This was a service that, in hindsight, we probably shouldn’t have had—sitting in a tight semi-circle, singing, crying. It’s a small miracle that it wasn’t a spreader event. And, yet, this chant was a salve for my soul that night, and it has become somewhat of a mantra for me during this Covid year. A year that we seemed to come into with such solidarity, but that we’re exiting on different timetables, bearing different wounds, with vastly different abilities to just “bounce back.” While many Americans feel the rightful promise and relief of growing vaccine availability, so much of the world is getting sicker and sicker with no line of sight to herd immunity. So we must continue to keep these words, and our existential inter-dependence, front of mind. 

Drs. John Thatamanil and Catherine Keller wrote an article last April, about a month into quarantine, entitled: “Is this an Apocalypse? We certainly hope so—you should too.” What they go on to suggest is that the true ancient meaning of apocalypse is not some calamitous vision of world-ending mass death, but rather it is “a warning, a wake-up call at the edge of time.” So we have an apocalyptic opportunity now to ask ourselves: what has our pandemic year unveiled? In the rush to normalcy, how can we hold onto the critical lessons of this time? Lessons both beautiful and unpleasant. Beautiful—like the gratitude for loved ones, the gratitude for small things, the enjoyment of slower lives. And the unpleasant—the isolation, the mental health challenges, and all the inequities that the pandemic has laid bare, including our society’s unceasing assault on Black lives. Like Hannah says, what if the emotionally and spiritually sane response is not to go back to normal, but is to be forever changed? What if that happens to also be the most just, liberatory, and accountable response? As hopefully all of us get vaccinated, we’re also going to have to remember that there are all these things we can’t vaccinate ourselves against. And the fact is that the white supremacy will kill us. The environmental degradation will kill us. The inequality will kill us.

The issues we face at this edge of time are too massive to be met by an intermittent year of progress followed by predictable regression. It will take active commitment to remember all that we have learned this year — and then continuous recommitment to a different way of life, knowing that’s what the lessons of this year compel us to consider. What are the rituals of remembrance and structures of accountability that we, both individually and as a Union community, will need to put in place so that we can’t forget? So that we can’t unlearn all we learned this year, or unsee all we saw? My hope is that we will allow ourselves to be chastened and changed. 

Ned Joyner: 

As I think of this song, I am reminded of the words of William Stafford: “The darkness around us is deep.” Yet the darkness is not the end of the story—as the poets have always affirmed, it is in the darkest hour that the eye begins to see. And so I pray that we may each incline our hearts and minds to the secret duty of the pregnant darkness: to gradually awaken us to the dream of truth and beauty. For it is this dream that holds the capacity to ennoble the spirit, such that we may find the strength to midwife to a better tomorrow.