Hello, 2021
Like so many, I had hoped that 2021 would be a bit, I don’t know, easier. Gentler. A word that comes frequently to my mind is gentle – one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit according to St. Paul, and the opposite of how our world feels right now. Perhaps, in the chaos of the news cycle and the instability COVID has exacerbated or created in so many lives, God is still whispering, gently, for us to pay attention – not only to creation, but to each other.
How do we do this? There’s a wonderful commentary on the Spiritual Exercises by Dean Brackley where he insightfully notes that very few of us can really look at reality; it’s simply too hard. The number of 400,000 COVID deaths is almost too much to take in. The riot on the Capitol and violence in the hearts of so many invites us to look away, to want to make the situation we are in less dire—less manifestly ugly. God does not invite us to look away from a world that is hurting, but to sit with God sitting with that world, looking for how to grow peace and love.
How do we do this? I would say that January 6th was not so much an invitation but an imperative – a call to root out racism, misinformation, and violence. And I do not want to say this from a place of self-righteousness or virtue-signaling, but as a difficult task in which we are all asked to take part. After the election in 2016, I made a conscious decision to leave social media. My conclusion was that it was making me a more angry, less connected human being. Since the advent of COVID, like so many, much of my connection now comes on-line, but I have not returned to Facebook, Twitter, or the like. This has helped me take each human that I meet as they are when I meet them. It has helped me see my own self-righteousness and dismissiveness more clearly. My own spiritual director reminded me, yesterday, that this how Jesus meets people – even when their demons are manifest, he sits with them, talks to them, and for those who want it, heals them.
As anyone who has come back from surgery knows, healing sometimes hurts. Healing can leave scar tissue or even change the shape of and substance of the person or thing healed. We also rarely heal ourselves – healing often calls for listening to experts and letting go of power and control. Healing involves trust and humility. This country needs healing, and racism, which still exists even in so many churches, needs to recognized as the malignancy it is and excised. The fact that the same mob that chants Jesus can erect a gallows is something with which I am sitting, something that breaks my heart. Our churches and faith clearly need to change. What emerges will look different, and that’s good. We have to trust that God still has a dream for us and for this world, but that it’s time for some old forms to pass away.
Take a minute, today, and try to dream a better world with God. God speaking, even now. Maybe, especially now. Can you make space to listen? To change?
Alison Umminger Mattison