Clean the Wound
“After the pandemic is over, what practices should we keep that we’ve learned during this season?” — A question posed to senior managers at Yale Divinity School
In two weeks, Andover Newton Seminary at Yale Divinity School will host an event unlike any we have offered before. We have partnered with the Center for Career Development and Ministry (https://ccdmin.org), a counseling and coaching practice best known to our students for offering pre-ordination psychological evaluations, to provide a grief group for graduating students.
The two facilitators have been working with clergy throughout the pandemic, helping them to process all of the challenges flying at them from every direction: death and disease, social unrest, racist violence and hate, political turmoil, economic uncertainty, and the necessity of moving an entire profession and institution into a format never-before employed.
Counselors Will and Maggie will help our students to process the disappointment that has come with having had much of their seminary careers disrupted, rendered unrecognizable when compared with what they had been picturing and what they, before Covid-19, had known. The rationale behind our event is that reflective practice is crucial to the work of leadership development. Before we move into a tenuous and transformed future, we all need to heal.
Healing and leadership development are the two priorities most on my mind as I look to the immediate future for the institution I serve. These months have been a time of breaking down. Our world’s community-building muscles have atrophied to the point where we can’t just put on our running shoes and head out the door. We’ll need to walk, and then jog; but first we need to rest and recuperate. As a seminary that focuses on preparing faith community leaders, everything we do now sends a message about what our graduates ought to do in their ministries later. Like parents, we have to remember our choices will be imitated.
As we think about how to come out of this pandemic, we’re wise to take the last one into consideration. The Spanish Influenza pandemic’s end coincided with the peace negotiations that brought the Great War to a close. Some now believe that President Woodrow Wilson was particularly cruel in treaty talks because he was himself suffering from the Spanish Influenza (see Barry, The Great Influenza, Penguin RandomHouse 2004), delirious to the point where his vindictiveness overtook his reason.
Determined to leave Germany in tatters by way of punishment, Wilson argued for the harshest of sanctions against a country decimated by a war of its own making. Less than a generation later, Adolph Hitler’s rise began with an economic, not a military nor genocidal, plan. The Marshall Plan that followed World War II demonstrated that our nation learned from that experience — reconstruction is good for everyone — but had our country healed from the Spanish Influenza pandemic properly, there might not have been a Second World War.
Today, people are dying by the hundreds of thousands in India. We hear journalists and politicians debating how much vaccine the US should be providing beyond our borders, and public health officials make great arguments about how much it will benefit the US when more of the world is safe from Covid-19. We can travel! And what about those scary variants?! How I long for a day when we hear the argument, “We should share vaccines beyond our borders so as not to rot our very souls.” A comment like that would have both an eye to the future, and the present moment’s moral challenge, fully in-view.
Many leadership theories rely on a future focus. We cast a vision… out there. We imagine a future and then try to plot out steps to get to that hoped-for state. Yet here, in the present moment, we need to sit tight and pay attention. Moral imperatives are coming at us from every direction, and we need to get strong enough to face them. To rush ahead into the future is not good leadership. It’s the easy way to avoid present and painful feelings, like grief.
First, we clean the wound. Then we tend the wound. Only then can we be sure that we’re not covering it over, only to find it festering and rotting said souls. Jesus’ healing miracles have a clear sequence, whether they are reported by the physician Luke or the mystical John: healing first, invitation next. “Be healed,” says Jesus, “and follow me.”
