Paying attention

On grief and faith in a long pandemic

I chatted the other day with my dear friend Claire, who I haven’t spoken to in many months. She’s 84, a gifted writer and a great truth-teller, whose presence I have missed deeply since the pandemic removed her from my in-person life.

She told me that sometimes she gets upset about the complications of aging, because, she said with a chuckle, “you know I’m very important, and it’s not fair”.

I replied, “It’s OK to feel sorry for yourself now and then.”

Her wise answer: “Well yes. If you don’t grieve occasionally, you’re not paying attention.”

Amen.

This is not an easy thing, though. Paying attention, and the grief that follows, is often painful. I find that my fellow believers skirt this with cherry-picked Bible verses about God riding in as a conquering hero or saving the righteous (us, preferably) or what have you, forgetting that we believe in a tortured, despised savior, who saved sinners.

Mary Karr writes in her stunning memoir, Lit, that she was drawn to Catholicism when she becam…