Photo by Danie Franco on Unsplash

As I travel the country, meeting with people and speaking with community leaders, I am confronted more and more by an immense, pervasive sense of grief. Everywhere, people seem to be grieving what we are losing—or in many cases, have already lost—in society. Some of it stems from COVID. We collectively lost a sense of normality, not to mention hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans who were inevitably our friends, neighbors, and family members.

But the losses we are grieving are about much more than COVID.

Our increasingly nasty and divisive politics, a rise in mass shootings, and an epidemic of loneliness now envelop our lives. We are in the grips of losses that at times seem imperceptible. Yet as they keep growing, they diminish our spirit and wear us down. We feel these losses deeply. We have a lot to grieve, there’s no doubt. Productively navigating the grieving process is essential to being human.

What concerns me most in this moment is that, when it comes to public life, we do not talk about grief and sorrow. We do not know how to meaningfully process these emotions in the public square. There’s an emphasis on forging ahead and refusing to dwell on the losses we have experienced and what they mean for us.

When loss occurs, grief inevitably follows. Yet in public life, grief from our collective losses seems to routinely get short-circuited. We seem incapable of allowing it into our lives. But that stymies our shared project of creating communities that thrive, because it causes so many of us to pretend or wish our losses never happened. For others, it means a retreat from public life entirely.

It was not so long ago that the front page of The New York Times published their “Wall of Grief,” which depicted each of the 500,000 COVID-related deaths up to that point with individual dots. Such a public invitation to process our grief feels distant, even foreign as the rogue wave of the upcoming election season threatens to drown the public square in acrimony and division. The election seems dangerously disconnected from reality. Indeed, the upcoming election runs the risk of pushing us even farther away from engaging with our grief.

It takes courage to name and address grief in our personal lives. It should come as no surprise that we find it difficult to do the same in public life. In fact, I think this is why so many of us are turning away from public life, from our communities, from our public schools, or even from our close circles. Working through collective grief means we not only engage with our own pain, we engage with the pain of others too.

Psalm 23 is one of the most important passages in Scripture regarding grief for many people of faith. David, the Psalm’s author, explores the way through grief—in his case through spiritual connection—in the line, “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” But this common English translation obscures something profound in the original Hebrew. Where most modern translations use “paths,” the word David wrote in Hebrew actually means “circles.” He is saying that his path out of grief is circular, closer to a spiral than a straight line.

This spiral, or passage, maps perfectly onto the way most of us process grief. It is not a straight line. It is roundabout. This means we have to visit places that we might rather avoid. The hard work of grieving together means going to places we’d rather not go.

Right now, people are looking up and seeing where we are, recognizing that this is not where we want to be. We’re like an ocean swimmer who pops their head above the water only to realize they have drifted much farther from shore than they imagined. Part of finding the way out of this mess requires coming together and restoring our collective spirit to overcome grief and chart a productive path forward. It is about joining hands with those treading water near us and moving back to shore, together. It means each of us must recognize our own grief.

Oftentimes, people struck down by grief will note a need to “rebuild their lives.” As if grief were an earthquake that destroyed their foundation. The same is often true in our civic lives. Yet while our foundations may be shaken, they remain nonetheless, even if we sometimes need to rediscover them.

The can-do spirit we exemplify as Americans may be diminished by current headwinds, but it is not defeated. Certainly, our civic lives have been pummeled over the past few years, but like all forms of grief, it’s time to work through it by standing back up and stepping forward. That’s why I’m leading an alternative national campaign whose core message is, “Enough. Time to build.”

This campaign I’m on is a call for communities to break out of our silos and our isolation. Enough hunkering down. Enough turning inward. Enough hate and division and fear.

Enough grieving in silence.

Let’s engage in working through our grief together. And using it as a catalyst to make things anew by building together.

In calling for this, I am reminded of a passage in Isaiah where, amid despair and devastation, God calls the Israelites to engage, to shake off the heavy blanket of grief that weighs them down. “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland” (Isaiah 43:19 NIV).

This is the opportunity before us. Whatever your faith background, we each have a responsibility to our communities. Now is the time to collectively step forward to make a way out of this wilderness. We are not stuck. Our work is just beginning again.