Now enter a conversation of compassion and empathy. As a counseling professional, I have been raised on a steady diet of empathy. As a category and a construct, empathy has shown up in many counseling texts: those that taught me counseling theories, counseling skills, and set the larger frame of the counseling profession. I didn鈥檛 have much reason to give this a second thought until I ran across the work of Martin Buber, whose I and Thou (1971) does not necessarily tolerate empathy as an option if one is seeking to be present and to engage in a holistic dialogue with another. As I listened to Buber鈥檚 call to 鈥渢he space between鈥� the I and the Thou wherein 鈥渙ne person happens to another鈥� and where all of meaningful life and existence is found in the moments of meeting between one and the other, I found myself asking the question: what is the difference between empathy and compassion? Might a pursuit of empathy exclude the moments of meeting Buber pointed to? Might compassion, or that which Jesus seemed to live and breathe in the Christian scriptures, offer a greater likelihood of the meetings of mutuality and reciprocity that Buber envisioned?

In asking that question, a group of students and I completed a review of the counseling literature pertaining to empathy and compassion, and we found that the field and its constituents seemed as uncertain as I was. Sometimes these terms were used interchangeably, but other times they seemed to reference rather different things.

As a counselor-educator, I began to wonder about the efficacy of teaching and learning one over the other, and as a Christian, I couldn鈥檛 run from my understanding that Jesus did not teach empathy, but rather, compassion.

The word compassion comes from the Latin compati, and it means to 鈥渟uffer with.鈥� In surveying the literature on compassion, it is the 鈥渨ithness鈥� that is made possible in and through compassion that I find to be the most compelling. Researchers (Bibeau, Dionne, & Leblanc, 2015; Fehse, Silveira, Elvers, & Blautzik, 2014; Fernardo & Consedine, 2014; Greenberg & Turksma, 2015) have tethered compassion not just to a felt experience, but also to a desire to move towards and/or to connect with another who is experiencing pain and suffering.

Empathy is, in part, about the alleviation of pain for the person providing it, whereas compassion extends to affiliation and the rewards of social connection (Klimeckii et al., 2013; Stickle, 2016). Can you hear the significant difference here? One alleviates the pain of the 鈥済iver鈥� (not the receiver!), and the other brings reward through connection (withness).

The everyday definition of empathy I鈥檝e been handed through the years is a willingness to place oneself in another鈥檚 shoes. Even though empathy can be both simple (cognitive) and complex (affective) (Bussey et al., 2015), I can say my working experience with it through the years has trended towards the simple or cognitive, with its task being largely to understand the experience(s) of another. If one surveys social scenes across the United States of America, they may see cultural awakenings happening in places where people are acknowledging the impact of Western colonization and the ways it has led to the , including (but not limited to) BIPOC folks. What is more, if one looks at the scientific methods used in the West, one will also see the privileging of understanding over experience, with the former resting on the laurels of data quantifications, and the latter dismissed as 鈥渨oo woo鈥� or nonempirical. Pair an impulse to colonize with a tendency to reify (to see a piece or part of someone as the whole of who they are) by way of empiricism and one might just get a field of helping professionals who see it as their job to empathize with those folks they serve, rather than a field full of folks who have purposed to move with the withness of desire. Empathy may end up as another (intended or unintended) casualty of colonization and of oppressive systems bent towards maintaining the status quo of power. The helping professional鈥檚 felt sense of spirituality in their work may dissipate, leaving them with little but a hollow shell of roles and obligations.

Common to the helping and healing professions is the , or what has been commonly referred to as compassion fatigue. My wondering is whether this may be a misplaced construct and if the greater likelihood is that one would experience empathy fatigue, rather than compassion fatigue. If empathy requires me to leave my own sense of locatedness and join with another where they are, then I may run the risk of leaving my own personhood behind. This was Buber鈥檚 contention (1971): to engage with another (鈥渢hou鈥�), one must locate oneself firmly in an 鈥淚.鈥� Dialogue can only emerge in the spaces between two people who are firmly rooted and rooting in their own experience(s). Empathy may require less of an 鈥淚,鈥� and more of a 鈥測ou,鈥� which could very well drain the system of the person looking to afford care. What is more, the 鈥測ou鈥� of another can quickly turn towards objectification (reification), with empathy becoming a moment of object-to-object transaction rather than a subject-to-subject experience.

I find great encouragement in Brene Brown鈥檚 findings (2015), that levels of compassion positively correlate with healthy . In other words, the withness of compassion can bring or perpetuate a sense of health and wholeness within a relationship. When two people get to be people and to experience the belonging that such withness affords, the possibility of health, healing, and restoration grows. I believe the realities of COVID-19 have opened a wormhole wherein helping professionals will be required to engage with a sense of withness that pre-COVID practice did not require. Though I don鈥檛 know all of what this will mean or may look like, I already find it happening in my conversations with others. Maybe the crisis of pandemic is the very thing that has been needed to (re)orient a field that has skewed in the direction of power (empathy), rather than desire (compassion). Maybe, when it comes to helping professionals, the urgency of this pandemic will necessitate attention and care first for oneself so as to promote care for another (Bibeau et al., 2015), thereby opening spaces for those helping professionals to move past the alleviation of pain that empathy offers to the reward of affiliation made possible through compassion. Pandemic seems to (re)turn each of us to ourselves and to the potential to (re)orient to our desires, and my hope is that it will also (re)orient and (re)turn the fields of helping professionals to their constituents with the health made possible in and through the withness of desire that sits at the heart of compassion.

References

Bibeau, M., Dionne, F., & Leblanc, J. (2015). Can compassion meditation contribute to the development of psychotherapists鈥� empathy? A review. Mindfulness, 7(1), 255-263. doi:10.1007/s12671-015-0439-y

Buber, M. (1971). I and thou. (Walter Kaufmann, Trans.). New York, NY: Touchstone.

Bussey, K., Quinn, C., & Dobson, J. (2015). The moderating role of empathic concern and perspective taking on the relationship between moral disengagement and aggression. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 61(1), 10鈥�29.

Brown, B (2015). Rising strong: The reckoning, the rumble, the revolution. New York, NY: Random House.

Fehse, K., Silveira, S., Elvers, K., & Blautzik, J. (2014). Compassion, guilt and innocence: An fMRI study of responses to victims who are responsible for their fate. Social Neuroscience, 10(3), 243-252. doi:10.1080/17470919.2014.980587

Fernando, A.T. III, & Consedine, N.S., (2014, August). Beyond compassion fatigue: The transactional model of physician compassion. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 48(2), 289-298.

Greenberg, M. T., & Turksma, C. (2015). Understanding and watering the seeds of compassion. Research in Human Development, 12(3-4), 280-287. doi:10.1080/15427609.2015.1068060

Klimecki, O. M., Leiberg, S., Ricard, M., & Singer, T. (2013). Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience,9(6), 873-879. doi:10.1093/scan/nst060

Stickle, M. (2016). The expression of compassion in social work practice. Journal of Religion & Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought, 35(1-2), 120-131. doi:10.1080/15426432.2015.1067587

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Fast forward 6+ months and the tenor of conversations have shifted. Disaster models now predict high levels of anxiety, depression, and as we move through this stage of our nation鈥檚 current plight. Home-based school startups have gobbled up the time and attention, if not hope, of many families throughout the United States. Parents are tired and overwhelmed, and kids are often overly energetic, listless, or both. Deep-seated tensions between partners have nowhere to go but out into the air that is already rife with fear and anxiety, grief and loss. Many single folks have sunk further into the isolation and loneliness that already resided within them, craving even the basics of touch, of a non-virtual smile (one would have to take off their mask to provide such), and wondering when and how opportunities to connect will again be available.

No matter your place, . This pandemic is taking our breath away, both literally and metaphorically. In the face of such a crisis, how do we engage a conversation about self-care?

For years now, I have been giving lectures and talks with titles such as this one, claiming the deadness of self-care as it is often conceptualized and sometimes practiced (or not). Like so many 鈥渢hings鈥� in the West, self-care has been commodified, commercialized, objectified, and turned into an accomplishment. Either that or it has become code for sleeping in or finding other means of shutting the proverbial world out: distraction, if not dissociation. What we truly need鈥攑urposeful, personal, and process-oriented engagement鈥攃an be scant.

In working with the literature on self-care for helping professionals like myself, I鈥檝e come to my own working definition of self-care. Self-care is the working out of one鈥檚 need and desire to experience belonging and connection. But are belonging and connection even possible in the midst of a pandemic? In particular, how about for those folks who face the intersectionality of multiple pandemics: COVID-19 and ?

As a counselor, I鈥檓 aware that conversations about self-care are typically tagged to terms and experiences that bear a negative connotation, such as burnout, vicarious trauma, or compassion fatigue. In other words, practitioners often start to talk about self-care once it鈥檚 鈥渢oo late鈥� and they鈥檝e run out of steam; self-care becomes something to pick up at the corner store on the way home from work. What is more, because as a society we have problematized our pain, many self-care strategies and practices are meant to medicate one鈥檚 pain. Rather than learning to listen to our pain and to where it might lead us, self-care roadmaps point to unrealistic, pain-free destinations full of trim bodies and Zen-like temperaments. For those of us that have spent any time in the church, our sense of the word 鈥渟elf鈥� may have also been skewed, becoming something to give away (鈥渂e selfless鈥�) rather than something to be filled and stewarded.

My belief is that if conversations around and practices of self-care are going to gain any traction, especially in a pandemic, we need to refresh our understanding of the following elements: self, need, and desire.

We now know enough, through the work of epigeneticists and those who study the impact of generational patterns (traumas, 鈥渟ins,鈥� and related genetic predispositions) to say that our sense of self is deeply embedded in our people: in who we were, where we were, what we鈥檝e experienced, and how we鈥檝e gotten this far. If you come from a people whose humanity was stripped or maligned in some way, then your efforts to live as a self will bear such marks. If you come from a line of 鈥済ivers鈥� who have taught you that ministry and service are godly and required, then the infilling of one鈥檚 self will seem perplexing if not problematic. In other words, the code to (self-)care to some degree resides in the light switches in our DNA. To that end, we could think of self-care as 鈥渃ellf-care.鈥� Our lives and the lives of those who have come before us have turned on/off possibilities for engagement often before our conscious minds have even had a chance to orient or chime in. In such times and in such cases, self-care is over before it begins.

As I look at the differences between needs and desires, I see a blend of what connects us and also what differentiates us as image-bearers of God. Needs are common to us all: We eat, we sleep, we defecate. Needs are designed to be met. We need a place to connect and to belong, and we will go to great lengths in search of such. It is our needs that reveal our commonality or oneness as beings that are interdependent and interconnected. Everything connects to everything, and everyone (every body) connects to everyone (every body).

In contrast, it鈥檚 the particularity of our desires that make each of us who we are. Desire is at the root of personhood and personality. It鈥檚 what gets us up in the morning, and it鈥檚 what puts us in touch with that which is larger than us. Desire embeds itself with meaning and purpose. And if the purpose of desire is desire, then the wheel of desire is always moving in the direction of regeneration, transcendence, and making contact with the Infinite/Eternal. It is at the heart of what it means to be a spiritual being.

Contrast desire with expectation. Expectation is hollowed-out desire. Expectation turns gift to guilt. In a season of so much loss (pandemic), capitalism revs its engine of dissatisfaction and signals us to ramp up our expectations of ourselves and how we鈥檙e navigating this season. Many people (at least to whom I鈥檓 talking) end up worse for the wear, and further separated not just from the or taken, but even more so separated from the lifeline of their desire.

We can do better than this. Or better said, we can be kinder than this. When we downgrade desire from its seat with the Divine to that which consumeristically compels us, we end up with a bunch of nice smelling bath salts and soaps that we are often too tired to use (and who has a bathtub clean enough for that, anyway?!). In my mind, we need to begin to track differently the trail of clues our system (mind/body/spirit) offers us as we seek to steward our needs and desires. WiFi connections have disconnected us from heart centers and minds that are designed to mirror each other, and we鈥檝e been left to respective worlds wherein much of our experience can be described by Sherry Turkle鈥檚 term (2011), 鈥渁lone together.鈥� We must (re)orient to our pain and see it not as something to be put off or fixed, but rather as a voice worth listening to.

I鈥檇 like to propose that a pandemic is not the time to try to enact 鈥渢raditional鈥� practices of self-care. Such propositions bring guilt, not rest, recovery, or any sense of belonging. As we head into the darkness of a pending fall and winter without a vaccine, I鈥檇 like to suggest the following:

• Remember who you are by way of the stories of your people: What pain has come to you by way of your lineage? How can you interact in such a way that honors your ancestors and therefore your self in the process?
• Toss out expectations: Place them in the recycling bin or compost pile where your desires can (re)emerge as that which orients you and brings you life. That said, don鈥檛 reach for tomorrow, today鈥檚 got enough troubles of its own.
• Obligatory plans for the holiday season should be replaced with a focus on today, and on what might bring you a sense of fulfillment in the now.
• Consider adopting a pet, or if you have one, reach out to them as much as you can! The touch of another living being is what we鈥檙e designed for.
• Allow the phrase 鈥淚t鈥檚 going to be OK鈥� to turn from a promise that things will work out to an offering of connection and belonging with those you love.
• Listen to your pain and allow it to guide you. Trade fixes for fondness. Practice saying, 鈥淭his is me鈥︹�� as you interact with the parts of you that struggle with the dis-ease that鈥檚 in the air and in our bodies.
• Practice acknowledging your limits, for limits remind us of our need and desire for belonging and connection.

This is not a list of 鈥渢hings鈥�-to-do鈥攚ho needs another one of those? What I offer instead are processes to engage and take part in: practices in remembering and reconnecting. As we say in my house, 鈥減ractice your patience鈥� when needed and continue working it out.

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As this Pandemic has spread, it has exposed and exploited the wounds and fissures of our society, revealing what has been here all along but many of us have refused to see. The true virus plaguing our country is one of systemic racism, systemic poverty, criminalization of poverty, and our refusal to address these things.*

Before * was even dreamt up, we were on Aurora Avenue here in Seattle, Washington. We were learning, listening, and lamenting. The more time spent, the more moments shared with our unhoused neighbors, the more love was propagated and proliferated and with each new year, this web of connection has grown and so with it has the habitual, exasperated grieving of unnecessary death.

Unnecessary death.

Let me write it one more time鈥�

Unnecessary death.

Watching precious human beings, with a name and a heartbeat, wither away before our eyes slowly or suddenly, is something we have had to learn to bear witness to at . We unabashedly mourn the precious lives lost, the lives our society has named as 鈥渙ther鈥� or 鈥渆xpendable鈥�; the casualties of the exploitative capitalism and consumerism that we have inherited, that has co-opted our churches, our theologies, our priorities and every other aspect of our life.

It is because there are gaping, bleeding wounds in our policies, structures, and hearts that precious human beings die unnecessary deaths every moment of every day.

For us to bear witness to another death due to…

Skin color

Lack of identification

Access to adequate care

Racial Capitalism

Hate Crime

Stigma

Criminalization

Lack of Housing

Gender identity

Victimization

Mental health issues

Sexuality

Diagnosis

The cost of medication

Discrimination

Exploitation

The 鈥渨ar on drugs鈥�

Felony charges

Survival

Food insecurity

You simply cannot understand what is going on in these streets across our nation today until you recognize the compounding weight of unnecessary death and how it impacts precious people.

The hard truth is that every single one of us has accepted the unnecessary deaths of our Black and Brown neighbors for far too long. Despite our good 鈥淐hristian鈥� intentions, we allow death policies and politicians, law enforcement, our own ideologies, fears, and the privileged powers to be the hands of our moral compass, and this cannot go on any longer.

This current movement was infused and animated by folks who have not had the privilege to ignore unnecessary death. They stand on the shoulders of a long line of ancestors. From the homes with a lack of clean water in Detroit, Michigan to 鈥淪teve鈥� from the Commons who cannot afford his diabetic test strips. From Treasure who was murdered two weeks ago to 鈥淒鈥� who was a social worker but is now stuck in the cycle of untreated mental illness and living on the streets. There is a holy lament and call for change. A prophet of our time, Rev. Dr. William Barber, says to mourn in public is to shock this nation鈥檚 conscience. The system is failing our people and millions more every day so the venerable shaking of the fist and rumble of feet pounding these streets, yes, is the right thing to do.

But it must be more than that. We, all of us, must acknowledge our proclivity towards the public discourse of our minds and not the profound revolution of our hearts. For how can you get the power structures of our nation to say 鈥測es鈥� when only your mind is connected and not your heart.

We need to be committed to decolonizing our minds and hearts; allowing the experts (the precious people within our midst, who have lived experience) to lead us, guide us, dismantle us. We must be committed to living into an economy of interdependence. And as we continue on in this commitment, we MUST allow this love to be what takes us to streets and we must take to the streets because our highest calling is to love the thousands upon thousands of precious human beings who have and will die unnecessary deaths. And we must not be silent anymore!

Dearest people, followers of Jesus, you must keep on.

Please keep on鈥�

And may we keep on until there is no more bread line.

The post What Will We (You) Do With the Unnecessary Deaths of God鈥檚 Precious People? appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

Let the sun wake you up. Grind the beans, heat the water,
and make your cup of coffee. Enjoy it. Drink it slowly. Notice how your
pour-over tastes much better than the drip brew at work.

Don鈥檛 make the news your lectionary. Give
thanks. Meditate. Pray. Pause before you
open your device. Listen to the birds outside
of your window.

Work hard, but take breaks. Pay attention to your body. Get
out of the stiff kitchen chair at your makeshift desk. Stretch.
Breathe. Make a cup of tea. Go on a long walk in the middle
of the day.

Let your son distract you. Let your dog rest her head on your
lap. Pressing send one more time will not change the world.
Replacing your anxiety with presence just may though.

Breath in,
鈥淭his is not…,鈥�
Breath out,
鈥渁ll up to me.鈥�

Breathe in the air shared by every other human on this earth.
You are not alone in this wildness.

Stop working and disconnect. Dig your hands into the soil. Call that
person you kept telling, 鈥渨e should get lunch sometime,鈥� But never did
because you were too busy 鈥� or too terrified they would rather not.
Let yourself feel the weight of the world in your hands.
Run your fingers across the ocean. Hear the trees breathe
in renewed air.

Clasp your loved one鈥檚 hand from far away. Grieve with them that
they couldn鈥檛 walk at graduation. Or that she labored alone for two
hours while waiting for a room.

Hold the earth just long enough to recognize it is far too heavy to
place on your back. Set it down. Watch the sunset and hold onto
gratitude for this single day.

Sacred Space is curating a virtual gallery to offer space to communally share how we are processing in this season. We would love to be witnesses to the ways you have been showing up with yourself to grieve and lament. to submit a photo of your art, a written piece, a recording of you playing music, or any other form of processing. In the coming weeks, you can visit the Intersections blog to see artists highlighted.

The post Pandemic Way of Life appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

鈥淗ow are you grieving? In what creative and available ways have you found for your body to express its pain?鈥� Melissa Deeken, MATC and MACP student

Sacred Space is curating a virtual gallery to offer space to communally share how we are processing in this season. They would love to be witnesses to the ways our students have been showing up with themselves to grieve and lament. to submit artwork, a written piece, a musical recording, or any other form of processing.

鈥� reflects what this time has allowed/required me to do鈥攕low down. Amidst that slowness, I’ve been surprised to receive guidance, support and blessings from the plant allies that are providing food, medicine, and keeping our ecosystems in balance at all times and especially now amidst pandemic.鈥�

Kate Fontana’s patronus is a peregrine falcon. She thrives on ambiguity, karaoke, and the worlds of youth fantasy fiction. She struggles with single-use plastics, small-talk, and to get anywhere on time. She is a Sagittarius, an auntie, and a third-year MDiv student. You can visit her blog at .

鈥淎fter an initial five weeks of enjoying the slowing down that the quarantine provided, during the fifth week I began to feel a building anxiety and a feeling of overwhelm. My process of grounding myself started with yoga, tapping exercises, and meditation. Yet while it aided in reconnecting to myself, it wasn’t until I started mixing colors on my palette and putting some force into my brush strokes that I began to feel the transfer of my emotions onto the canvas, and an eventual emotional release. There is something cathartic about mapping a color to an emotion and assembling them together into a mosaic. The process helped me identify areas where my body was holding emotional tension and where I needed to tend to myself the most.鈥�

Yuliya is a Seattle-based photographer, writer and grad student of Counseling Psychology, playing in the intersecting spaces of trauma and creativity. You can see Yuliya鈥檚 photography at .

鈥淔rida was a woman who bore her discomfort and worked through adversity. These are times of adversity and she inspires me.鈥�

Danielle is a mother of four (ages 14, 12, 10 and 8), wife of one awesome guy, and graduating with a Masters in Counseling Psychology from 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology. She is honored to be a regular contributor to and her and . She plans to open a private practice. Her loves are my four children and husband. You can find the #supersixcastillejos reading Mo Willems and other various books, hiking, creating spaces for art, and adventuring together. Her heart is to bear witness to the stories untold by the marginalized, silenced, and bodies seeking healing. As a survivor herself, she fights together with clients for love, justice, truth, and honor. Learn more about Danielle by following .

鈥淥ne of the ideas I’m trying on in solitude is: soft is good. Soft words, soft thoughts, soft body. This does not come naturally to me.

I like rough edges and abrasive things like critiques and analyses and freezing cold water and hard, unsquashable objects like river rocks and steel, like concrete buildings that cut the light into clean lines. Soft makes me suspicious.

A long time ago in school critiques, one of my art professors would always take my hands. Cracked, stained, maybe bleeding, they bore the brunt of whatever work had just been finished. These? He would say, ignoring whatever sculpture I had hurled my body at for the past two weeks. These hands are the piece.

And this need for steel and concrete, this need to hurl myself against unyielding impenetrable boundedness is not because tough calls out to tough like deep to deep. The craving to feel cool unyielding solidity outside comes from somewhere deep within where, in a really terrifying sense, I’m soft too.

As my own boundedness grows new and fragile in some places, calloused in others, I feel the gentle but reliable edges of my own skin from the inside out. There is soft and steel in here, too. As smooth and cool as a river stone and as easily squashed as a freshly baked roll all at once.

And still: how scary to be soft. How terrifying to let the concrete be out there and grow a skeleton inside, to touch surfaces that might collapse. How strange but strong to feel the texture of my internal world softening and hardening at once, like new skin growing under a scab.鈥�

Ellen Cline is a MACP student interested in body as an instrument of research, art, and healing. She is committed to growing out her hair during this time of isolation. She will not buzz her head. You are all witnesses. To view more of Ellen鈥檚 work, visit .

The post Processing Amidst a Pandemic: A Collection of Student Artwork appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.

These words of the prophet Jeremiah situate themselves in a devastating part of Judah鈥檚 history鈥攖he destruction of Jerusalem. As it lay in ruins, Jeremiah speaks of what the community is collectively grieving in the death of their beloved city and the thrust into exile for the third time.聽 They are a people desperate for hope. For restoration. For shalom. says that, 鈥淪halom requires lament鈥� because its very nature is to 鈥渆mbrace the suffering other.鈥�¹ In a time when we as God’s people yearn for a collective shalom, we are reminded that we must first enter into a collective lament.

On April 8, 天美视频鈥檚 Sacred Space group hosted a virtual lament service to create a space for individual and collective mourning over the losses of what we knew as life. Faculty, staff and students gathered to see the faces of the suffering other and to collectively lament鈥攊n song, word, and prayer. We ended our time by praying through a poem by Christine Valters Painter, pausing at each stanza to write the names of those heavy on our hearts, to write our laments, our pain, our grave sense of scattered losses. It was a raw and beautiful time to pour our hearts out like water in the presence of the Lord.

During the service, artist and alumnus Kate Creech ² acted as a witness to our community lament and created this piece of art to hold our feelings of confusion, anger, and grief. As she scrolled through the suffering faces and words of those in attendance, her brushstrokes acted as 鈥渆xpressions of what was both spoken and unspoken.鈥� We are grateful for her witness and illustration of this sacred evening.聽

Artwork by Kate Creech

While the service is over, our lament is not. Grief will continue to come in waves as we endure the changes we have been forced to adapt to and as we long for the presence of the ones we live life with the most.聽聽

How are you grieving? In what creative and available ways have you found for your bodies to express its pain?聽 Kate reminds us that artistic expressions can act as a mouthpiece for our souls鈥� greatest afflictions, containers for our unspeakable laments. We stand suspended in a time that knows not its return to life as we knew it. As you hold these tensions and uncertainties, know that our is necessary to see our shalom.聽聽聽

Sacred Space is curating a virtual gallery to offer space to communally share how we are processing in this season. We would love to be witnesses to the ways you have been showing up with yourself to grieve and lament.聽 to submit a photo of your art, a written piece, a recording of you playing music, or any other form of processing. In the coming weeks you can visit the Intersections blog to see artists highlighted.

The post A Lament: Processing Amidst a Pandemic appeared first on 天美视频 of Theology & Psychology.