If you’ve had enough of fear and uncertainty ruling your life, I ask you to join me in a Novena for healing and sanity. A novena is nine days of focused intention to connect our spiritual self with the Great Spirit that created us through, for, and in love.
Why now? Because we’ve collectively become addicted to fear.
COVID-19 has shut down the United States and most of the rest of the world too. The responses by governments reminds me of a joke I once heard about a gal who was afraid of spiders. Not wanting to get near the spider crawling up the wall in her house, she set the house ablaze. Spider gone. House too.
I get it. We don’t want to overwhelm the healthcare system and have people die unnecessarily. Yet the consequences of burning the whole house down because we’re so fearful that we can’t think rationally will have long-lasting and very destructive outcomes beyond dying from a virus.
Mainstream media is complicit. Yet so are we as we hang on breathlessly to every statistic laid out by reporters and government officials alike. My daughter called it fear porn; which is exactly what it is. And we’re hooked.
The big question is why? Why are we so vulnerable to our fears and why are the powers that be so hellbent on stoking them?
The United States has been in the grip of fear, anger, and division for twenty years. After 9/11 we were so anxious to run away from our grief that we started a war that has yet to end. In 2007-2008 we blew up the financial system. We’ve steadily trod deeper down a path of spiritual destruction because we couldn’t own up to our fear-induced retaliatory actions or our fear-induced greed.
Now with COVID-19, since we still can’t rationally confront our inability to control everything (especially death), we’ve allowed almost all of our civil liberties to be abridged in the name of safety.
We have literally shut down. We’ve given up our rational decision-making power and succumbed to a “power greater than ourselves.” Every addict in every 12-step program must do that, but we’ve surrendered to the wrong power.
Yet I know that we collectively possess the ability to change this discomforting and destructive reality. We live in a sacred universe created by the greatest power there is: Love (otherwise known as God, the Creator, Abba, Alla, and a whole host of other names). If we place our trust in our Oneness with God and with each other (otherwise known as Love), we can begin to tamp down our fears, begin to think rationally again, and live life in reasoned unity of purpose resulting in the least amount of harm for the greatest number of people: our brothers and sisters, and ourselves.
An Invitation: All Words Matter
My small contribution to this process is this invitation to nine days of focused thought and prayer, a novena for healing and sanity.
What we say to ourselves and what we think about matters. Garbage in; garbage out. Fear porn will stoke fear, anxiety, and mistrust. Prayer or good intention will stoke understanding, compassion, and gratitude.
Thoughts Matter
Since thoughts precede action, becoming aware of how our thoughts amplify either fear or trust is a useful endeavor. This novena will challenge you to become more aware of your daily thoughts and choices.
Whatever your tradition or spiritual practice, I ask you to join me in prayer (or intention if the word “prayer” doesn’t’ suit you) for the 2020 novena for sanity and healing.
It is an opportunity to gather as a virtual community with the focused intention of creating the return to sanity and healing we seek through a spiritual discipline.
Communal Prayer as a Pathway to Fearlessness
It’s Holy Week and we can’t go to church but we can still pray together. When we engage as a community in prayer, we are reminded that we are not the separate individual souls we appear to be. We are simply different bits of the Oneness of all creation.
In this novena, we connect our individual souls to the Oneness of all beings—and to Oneness of our Divine Source. This unity simultaneously feeds all our spirits as it magnifies spiritual gifts like trust.
Many of us ask God to provide for us. But I personally think God expects us to co-create what we desire.
Isn’t Sanity & Healing Worth Ten Minutes a Day for Nine Days?
Praying the novena will take about ten minutes a day. And depending on when you choose to engage in it, it will prepare you for more sanity in the day ahead or for a good night’s sleep.
The ritual basics and the questions for reflection will challenge you to notice how your thoughts or actions create or amplify your fears. Feel free to adjust the prayers and questions to suit your religious tradition, need, or comfort.
Each morning I will post a short quote, reading, or personal reflection to go with the ritual.
So that’s it. Take what works for you, let go of the rest. Invite others.
My hope is these few moments of focused intention, quiet reflection, reading, or prayer will enable each of us to plant within us seeds of trust that will germinate and grow as we move through this crisis. As we feed that seed the light of compassion and the water of love then fearlessness will bloom in us and bless the world with its fragrance.