Spiritual Lifelines: Finding Your Way When Life Seems Adrift

Once upon a time, when Rev. Lone Jensen Broussard was less than 65, she had imagined aging as an adventure, a slow process where she would gradually and gracefully grow wise and content. She would say “saging” not aging, and loved to recite the popular poem on aging by Jenny Joseph—replete with red hats and purple outfits. Like Lone, I was also proud of stating my age, even proud of my wrinkles; I felt I’d earned every single one of them. My images of old age were those of freedom, of being outrageous, and of getting away with it.Since then, I discovered reality. Jenny Jones actually authored the quoted poem when she was only 29 years old. Now that I am much older, I have discovered that aging is not so easy. Yes, I still hope to become a sage and I do wear a lot of purple, but my body, like Lone's, seems to be betraying me.Aches remind me daily of what I can’t do, and I find that to age even a little gracefully takes reflection, building a strong spirit and plain, hard work. It takes acceptance and resilience and most of all gratitude for what we still can do and what we still have available to work with.Lone reminds us as we lose to death our friends and family and people of our own age, we are reminded of our own mortality. Those beloveds we still have become more precious and time becomes very precious indeed.Isolation and loneliness are the mortal enemies so many of us fight now during the unprecedented quarantine of 2020. It is all too easy to sink into our easy chairs until we almost become a part of them, invisible and indistinct. It is all too easy to let our sour moods and our seeming aches and pains dictate our activity. To get through this time takes courage and resilience.As Lone was writing Spiritual Lifelines, the COVID-19 virus has changed our world and limited all of us in ways we could have never anticipated. To support each other we have to stay six feet apart. We must stay at home and can enjoy no visitors. Shopping has become a potentially dangerous activity. Streets are empty. If we ever needed hope, it is now.Lone Jensen Broussard reminds us that when we feel real despair about our situation, we should recall the people who lived through more than five years of Nazi occupation during WWII. Gratitude is essential to surviving this pandemic—as it also was during that forlorn segment of history. We have no choice but to live through this and pray that we do indeed survive—as many of the holocaust survivors managed.We should all be grateful for having a pleasant home to stay in; grateful for our families, friends, and pets; grateful that we live in a time when we can contact each other in ways earlier generations could not have imagined. Yes, a virtual hug will never be as comforting as a physical one, but we can still see each other’s faces and hear our voices even when we’re literally worlds apart. In some ways it seems a bit like a miracle.The reflections and stories in Rev. Broussard’s book are meant to help you on your unique journey through this time and peril. She calls them “spiritual lifelines.” It was her hope, as an author and a Unitarian Universalist minister, that you will find something in these pages that will resonate with your spirit to help you when your life seems adrift.When you need help to get back to your personal shore of safety, I invite you to consider Lone’s insights as a guide from a loving woman of wisdom and experience.--Sunny Baker, PublisherManor Publishing Collective