― Toni Morrison
"As Lutheran Christians, our focus on Jesus Christ affects how this church understands justice. Because we are freed in Christ for others, we are able to respond to God’s call to love our neighbor as ourselves. In society, neighbor love takes the form of neighbor justice."
--From the proposed social statement "Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action" (adopted with 97% of the vote at the ELCA Churchwide Assembly, August 2019)
This is a familiar scene for me: sitting down to write after a long day of travel, after a week away from home, after returning from a summer trip and feeling like I should be writing about its moments. The lake in Minnesota, and the way the evening light settled across the sky, lighting the water as I swam after dinner until dark. The way my son dove in as soon as we arrived last Saturday evening and for the next four days could only be coaxed from the water for meals. I should be writing about the completely wonderful and utterly necessary getaway with my best friend, who picked me up and spirited me away to Fargo/Moorhead, where we spent a couple of nearly perfect days visiting our college town for the first time in years. It was deeply good for my soul.
And yet, last summer, the night we returned from our first trip of the summer, this is what I wrote:
Underneath it all I have felt a relentless churning dread, a sickening shame over what our country is revealing itself to be. I sat upstairs while the kids played downstairs, listening to the sound of their laughter. I sat right down on the carpet and leaned against the bed and clutched my head and exchanged a few texts with friends who were also sitting somewhere clutching their heads, literally or figuratively. This has been a very, very bad news week. I'm just sick. I don't know where to start. We traumatize thousands of children. Children. Without apology or shame...I could write exactly that and more tonight.
We had extra time at the airport yesterday after dropping off our rental car, and I finally had a few desperately needed moments to myself. I sat at a wine bar and ordered a turkey sandwich and a flight of white wine and wrote six pages in my journal. I was hardly even writing real sentences; I just poured the messy contents of my mind all over those pages. Migrant workers detained while their children were at school, children who waited in vain to be picked up, or children who went home to empty houses. Children who slept on a gymnasium floor. More shootings. Terrorism at the hands of toxic white men. Why don't we call it that? Why don't we say our country is under terrorist attack? Can we pause to imagine how differently this would play out -- the policy changes on the table -- if the dozens of people murdered in three different states had been murdered by someone other than a white man? How is it a fathomable thing that mass shooters invoke words used by the president literally hundreds of times?
So I slept terribly all week. But I slept terribly in safe, comfortable beds, simply because I happened to win the cosmic lottery of senseless privilege.
And then we have these absurd, obscene discussions. Thoughts and prayers. Mental health. I was stupid enough to read the comments on Steve Bullock's Facebook page. I like the governor of my home state quite a bit, but the trolling comments under literally every post on his page never fail to depress me: Tyranny of the government and "We have the right to access firearms with absolutely no restrictions!" And, of course, "But you don't care about the slaughter of innocent babies." That's about every third comment, including posts that show, for instance, a photograph of the governor eating corn on the cob at the state fair. At that point, I'm utterly reduced to for fuck's sake until I can rally enough to donate to immigration aid and gun control. Again.
The same story of America, in any season.
And then Toni Morrison died. And I just cannot. Cannot.
I've been trying to counter every horror I read about with a tribute to Toni Morrison. There is no shortage of either. All the great writers understand who was the greatest of the greats, the absolute brilliant best: Jesmyn Ward, Marlon James, Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie, John Irving, Angie Thomas, Margaret Atwood, Mohsin Hamid, Salman Rushdie, Carmen Maria Machado, Chigozie Obioma. And so very many others. I would bet all the money I have that if Pat Conroy were still alive he'd have written something gorgeous about her, too.
This is where I find hope this week. Or maybe not hope, because truth be told, most days I don't have a lot of hope that things will be much better than what they are in my lifetime. But something else, some unnameable feeling fueled by a fierce and consuming combination of rage and love. Who was it that said we are not obliged to finish the task, but neither may we abandon it? That's where I'm at. That's why I keep reading and writing and teaching. That simple human need to connect, only connect. To see something beautiful and true in the artistry of our daily lives, the beauty and truth captured by writers and artists, the thing I have to believe in to keep breathing in and out. The connectedness and not-aloneness, I suppose.
And then other things happened, while I tried to grapple with the juxtaposition of soul-nurturing vacation and the horror happening in my country. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of America voted to become the first "sanctuary church body" in the country during the churchwide assembly. I'm not entirely clear on what exactly this means yet, but it could look like providing shelter for undocumented immigrants, equipping folks to serve as first responders during raids, advocating for immigrants in deportation cases, fighting for the end of mass detentions and family separations, and "extended radical hospitality." My own understanding of Christianity means I sort of feel like WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING, THEN towards churches that don't already do this, and certainly there are many churches outside the ELCA that engage in this work, service, and love of our neighbors, and who are expansive and inclusive in what it means to call someone a neighbor. Not all churches are silent or complacent in the face of the status quo. All the same, I'm grateful for the vote.
(It's not easy to believe in much, these days.)
Anyway, as I said, we arrived at the airport yesterday with time to spare. After the turkey sandwich, after the wine, after the journalling, the kids and I found seats near our gate while Matt walked around and enjoyed his last pint of Surly's before returning to the Pacific Northwest. I opened up Facebook and saw the posting from the ELCA: the churchwide assembly also voted to adopt the social statement "Faith, Sexism, and Justice: A Call to Action." They included a video of the assembly singing "Canticle of the Turning." It is one of my absolute favorite hymns, and in that moment, listening to all those voices, it gave me chills -- and then it brought me to tears. Right there in the Humphrey Terminal in Minneapolis. I let my kids play on the iPad and I wept openly at the gate. Then I downloaded the statement itself -- all 48 pages -- and read it on the plane. This week I'm going to print out a hard copy. It gives me something close to hope.
I wasn't going to go to church this morning. We were exhausted last night, and the kids really needed some down time because after a week of the lake and grandparents and cousins and wild feral joyful freedom and about ten desserts a day, they weren't really ready to be normal humans in public. But then I remembered that it was my Sunday to help count the week's offering. I even considered just showing up after the service, but I woke up early -- still on Minnesota time -- and I really wanted to go. So I did. But I also felt all kinds of something, so I sat by myself, towards the back. I almost put on a skirt, but then I remembered that we had signed up to run concessions at the Blast Off Soccer Tournament this afternoon, and I didn't really feel like changing, either. So I dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, and I drove my weepy, tired self to church this morning, and I slipped in near the back. And the thing was that I knew it was okay. I knew I could show up in shorts and a t-shirt and be a little weird and people there would still love me, and I really did feel perfectly comfortable slipping into the back by myself. And I felt okay crying a little at times when it didn't really make a lot of sense for me to be crying.
Sometimes I have to laugh a bit when people talk about faith as a crutch, because it would be so much easier not to go to church. It would be easier not to believe in this totally crazy stuff I actually do believe. The church has caused so, so much harm, and it continues to cause harm, and on top of that, it asks us to believe in the impossible. So like, I get it. I get why people leave, and I understand why people don't walk through the door. But somehow, here I am. Maybe this is, again, a consequence of my birth -- I was born into a family who brought me into this messy church, and even though that family has drifted into different faith communities, communities into which I cannot follow and in which I don't really belong, I'm grateful for my roots.
I wasn't much older than my daughter when I read Madeleine L'Engle's Crosswicks Journals; I think that was where she wrote about someone asking her whether she believed in God without any doubt, and she replied -- and I'm paraphrasing -- that she believed in God with all of her doubts.
Roots and doubts. That's what I have.
What I have might not be hope. But it's not nothing.
My heart shall sing
Of the day you bring.
Let the fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all tears, for the dawn draws near,
And the world is about to turn!
--Canticle of the Turning
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