Like so many of you I am struggling--hard--trying to keep my perspective. lt isn't easy. Beset by porn stars and black-eyes on beauties and tumbling markets and lies and lies and lies. Workers come in and nail up a wall between the Democrats and Republicans on the Intelligence Committee. Intelligence? I am struggling hard with all those Dreamers that have gotten lost in the shuffle. What will they do? What will we do? At every turn it seems to get worse--the chaos and the hatred and the wrongness of so much. I am beginning to understand those black football players who fail to stand for the flag. It looks like we will tear that blood-stained symbol to pieces. How does one keep a healthy perspective in such time as this?
Looking for a sermon illustration I bumped into this quote by Mahatma Gandhi: On the eve of Lent I need badly to ponder his words:
"When I despair, I remember that all through history
the way of truth and love has always triumphed.
There have been tyrants and murderers,
and for a while they seem invincible,
but in the end they always fall."
One man asked his friend over coffee: "With all the wars and constantly looming threats, how do you keep going?" And she responded, "I have to really rejoice in the smallest of victories." Yes--that's it. Not Pollyanna stuff. The courage of the Dreamers--still. The immigrants that refuse to give up. The little boy that has worked hard to provide electricity in Puerto Rico. And he has made a difference. The woman who carries her heavy grief and still refuses to give up. The cancer survivor. The MeToo's--that just keep growing despite incredible odds. And the buds I saw coming up out of the hard winter ground just this morning. Spring will come. The flowers will bloom and one of these days things really will be better.
Read some poetry. Ponder the beauty of a painting. Listen to music. Smile at a stranger. Resist every effort to give in and throw in the towel. Wendell Berry helps me in these hard times. In one of his poems he says:
"What stood will stand, though all be fallen,
The good return that time has stolen.
Though creatures groan in misery,
Their flesh prefigures liberty
To end travail and bring to birth
Their new perfection in new earth.
At word of that enlivening
Let the trees of the woods all sing
Ands every field rejoice, let praise
Rise up out of the ground liker grass.
What stood, whole in every piecemeal
Thing that stood, will stand though all
Fall--field and woods and all in them
Rejoin the primal Sabbath's hymn."*
Yes! Yes! Yes!
*Poem found in Wendell Berry's This Day (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2013) p.15
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| Since this is Black History Month I remember that gorgeous stained glass window found in the 16th Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama. Even in the saddest occasions we are not alone. |
--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com
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