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by Ken Sehested

Anxiety is loose in the land here in the US; and abroad as well, since our nation’s cravings reach around the globe.

Today’s polling deadline—whose results will likely not be determined before the bewitching hour of midnight—may very well lead to the donning of sackcloth and ashes for many.

The predictions on the outcome run the gamut from a landslide for Biden to a narrow electoral college win, despite another loss in the popular vote, for Donald Trump.

I urge you to consider that more is at work than what is obvious.

Which is not to say I am sanguine about the outcome. I well remember, four years ago, making morning coffee as I heard from NPR the unexpected outcome of Trump’s win. I put my hands on the kitchen counter as tears welled in my eyes, my mind reeling with a speedy accounting of all who would suffer this monumental blunder.

All things considered, we as a nation are lucky that more damage has not been done, given the catastrophic potential of four years of this amoral, maniacal, self-obsessed man who has turned the White House into a political brothel. But the damage is real, and will likely take a generation or more to repair, even if he is evicted from office. There will still be much grief to attend.

And if he is not?

I say, even still, that is no counsel to despair. History has suffered more. People of faith and conscience are a sturdy bunch; and, in fact, have shone most brightly while on the run from authorities.

The very fact that the electoral turnout will likely be historic is reason enough to be thankful, even should Trump prevail. The history of nonviolent resistance to tyranny is rich and textured. Truth has often been on the scaffold while wrong is on the throne. “Yet the scaffold sways the future, behind the dim unknown” (James Lowell Russell, channeled by Martin Luther King Jr.).

Whatever the case may be in the aftermath of this present tumult—whoever stands before the crowds in January’s inauguration ceremony—there is still much grief to attend.

We as a people are poorly trained to handle grief. We have been suckled on the “power of positive thinking” gospel; of “accentuate the positive” counsel; of “look on the bright side” prescription.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s book, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America, provides a careful biopsy of our cheery habits of mind which leave us ill equipped to face moments when love does not win, when an-apple-a-day does not keep the doctor away.

Let me say this as resolutely, and carefully, as possible: Grief is the place where we generate the prospect of joy. It is the introit to the only reliable threshold of hope. Joy is more enduring than happiness, and hope is more sustainable than optimism.

As the Prophet Isaiah wrote about the Suffering Servant—which the Christian community links with the narrative of Jesus—“He was . . . acquainted with grief.”

I confess I do not understand why life typically begins with a newborn’s bloody scream, or why voluntary suffering may inaugurate redemptive effect. But I have seen it enough to lean the small weight of my conviction into its promise. As the blind man healed was grilled by the religious authorities (John 9)—demanding “how did this happen?”—the man said “I don’t know; all I know is that I was blind and now I can see.”

People of The Way do not make calculated decisions to stare into suffering’s countenance because we are masochists responding to the prescriptions of a sadistic deity. We do so because we sense the vision of a very different future unfolds exactly in those places that are cracked and broken and deformed. We do so not because we are heroic or stoic or full of romantic gushing. We do so to listen intently to that Voice effectively suppressed in a world where wealth and power and prestige hold sway.

“There’s a crack in everything,” sings Leonard Cohen. “That’s how the light gets in.”

We do of course cry out and echo the ancient psalmists and prophets at the intersection of suffering and despair, “How long, O Lord, how long?” We return again and again to the cliff’s apparent edge of destruction, and we do so without money-back guarantees.

We do so because we have fallen, head-over-heels, in love with the vision of the Beloved Community, of the promised day when all tears will be dried and death itself will come undone. Of the time when, as Isaiah proclaims, “. . . all the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of God” (52:10).

On that day, the barren ones will burst into song, “for the children of the desolate woman” will multiply. And all shall hear the voice from beyond all human management, “Do not fear, for you will not be ashamed . . . for you will not be disgraced. . . . In righteousness you shall be established, far from oppression . . . far from terror. . . . This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord” (Isaiah 54).

Beloveds, let this be your rejoinder to election day blues; let these assurances buoy you amid this present tempest.

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©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

Hallowed Eve and All Saints Day meditation

by Ken Sehested

Like most, my early memories of holiday festivities are varied and (mostly) pleasant. But Halloween stands out, with the most distinct memories, since it involved an evening of roaming (without adult supervision) in homemade costumes throughout the small town where I lived, collecting sweet treats in decorated paper bags.

Then came the much-anticipated sorting of the evening’s haul: the keepers (the really good stuff), the give-aways (won’t eat even though it’s free), then everything else for trading with friends, which could go on for a week or more.

In Southern-flavored baptist territory, All Saints Day—following “All Hallows Eve” (part of the origins of Halloween)—was never mentioned, much less observed. We didn’t believe in saints. Though we did have Annie Armstrong and Lottie Moon, namesakes of bi-annual mission offerings—a surprisingly feminine pantheon for a body with severely circumscribed leadership roles for women.

I now believe there is no observance in the liturgical year in greater need of recovery than All Saints Day. In turbulent times and turgid circumstances, we need the sustenance of resilient memory.

Remembrance of those gone before us provides the buoyancy to continue the struggle despite bleak prospects. Such stories perform vivid reminders that (a) we are not the first to encounter hard times and (b) the assurance that sustenance (beyond our own ingenuity) will be provided.

Even more: Telling stories of faithful witness—with faces and names and details—is far and away the most effective means of catching courage and transmitting hope. We need a horizon beyond market reports, electoral predictions, and the cacophony of broken-hearted headlines.

The work of imperial powers over a conquered people always begins with the suppression of indigenous language and, thereby, the people’s ancestral stories.

Jesus’ primary mode of communication was stories—not because he was pre-modern or philosophically illiterate, but because he knew stories have an animating power that propositions and apologetics lack. It’s still true.

Resilient communities are storied communities who do the work of hallowing, of naming and memorializing its redemptive moments and characters—filled with faces and names and details—and connecting such memory with that of the Beloved’s Name and presence.

The preamble to the Ten Commandments required the injunction to memory: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of slavery” (Exodus 20:2). Jesus’ model prayer began with the hallowing of God’s name, thereby unleashing the consecrating power to invoke the Blessed One’s reign over creation: “your will be done on earth” (Matthew 6:10).

Hallowing is declaring allegiance to what we revere and honor and stake our lives and fortunes on. Its practice is the harbinger of death’s demise amid joy’s full embrace. Hallowing is the asset that sustains us, wounded but poised and resolute, in the face of history’s brutal affront.

“Precious memories,” as the old gospel tune says, are “unseen angels / Sent from somewhere to my soul / How they linger, ever near me / And the sacred scenes unfold.”

May the poise of the saints—however famous or inconspicuous—be yours.

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Below are several resources for observing All Saints Day.

• “All Saints Day,” a litany for worship

• “All Saints: Call to worship and pastoral prayer,” Nancy Hastings Sehested

• “Hallowed Week: A call to worship for All Hallows’ Eve and All Saints Day,” Abigail Hastings

• “Quotes about saints: A collection”

• “Saint Óscar Arnulfo Romero: Canonizing El Salvador’s beloved archbishop,” an essay

• “For All the Saints: New lyrics for an old hymn”

ALSO:

• For a well-written account of the ancient history of Halloween and All Saints Day, see “Halloween 2019” from history.com

• Want to expand your personal All Saints Day imagination? Visit Dan Buttry’s “Global Peace Warriors” blog for brief profiles of peace-wagers and justice-seekers from every age, every part of the world, and of every religious tradition.

©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org

by Ken Sehested

As has been said,
if you think you're too small to be effective,
you've never been in bed with a mosquito.

From all appearances, we in the United States are at one of the most dangerous moments in our nation’s political history. We have a president who thinks that “when someone is president of the United States the authority is total.”  Someone who winks at white supremacist terror plots to assassinate public officials. Who repeatedly suggests that he won’t leave office voluntarily—and by so saying may in fact unleash a hail of street violence after the election.

So, yes, I believe voting is an urgent duty. As the poet adrienne maree brown writes, “today we show up for those furthest from power” (“election day spell”).

But we need to bring added context to this urgency. Here are a baker’s dozen suggestions to keep in mind before, during, and after you cast your ballot.

1. Voting is such a small part of our commonwealth duty. You will likely spend more time in grocery store lines every month than in polling stations every year. Elections are but the end result of an advocacy for the common good that starts in each watershed. Imagine a different future, find collaborators, and spend yourself extravagantly.

2. Renewed public policy requires new public consensus. Even our best, most humane public officials face immense pressure from powerful, moneyed interests, particularly at election time. They need the backing of public opinion to withstand corruption. Do what you can to organize and focus such backing.

3. Ballots have proved a welcomed alternative to bullets. It is no small feat that the U.S. has survived for over two centuries with only one attempted coup d’état. But elections do not a democracy make. They can be bought in a thousand different ways.

4. As Frederick Douglass knew all too well, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” Be demanding. Justice often requires the painful work of delegitimizing existing power arrangements before reconstruction can occur.

5. The roots that nurture my support for democratic polity include conclusions from philosophical reflection and political theory. But the deepest are theological: democratic governance is an important public means by which we practice nonviolence.

6. Vote—with a chastened realization that what we get does not coincide with what we want. Most of the time, it doesn’t. Increments matter. Better-than-worse is a relevant calculation.

Long before polities are decided in D.C.—or your state capital or county commission or city council—the struggles to build a movement powerful enough to make substantive change is underway. Lend yourself to one or more.

7. No movement has ever been generated or crushed by an election, but they can be encouraged or restrained. As Einstein said, no problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. Work at constructing a new level.

8. Convictions that don't raise blisters or calluses are good only for talk shows and fashion runways. We live our way into new kinds of thinking far more often than we think our way into new kinds of living.

9. Think large in small ways; act small in large ways. Be like the trim tab on a large ocean-going vessel, altering inertia just enough to allow the rudder to shift course without fracturing.

According to the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy (aka Six Nations), “In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.” Pay it forward.

10. People of equal vision, passion, courage and intelligence will (and do!) disagree on how to get to where we need to be. The body politic needs vigorous, even heated debate, but not demolition derbies and cockfights.

11. Lasting change takes patience and endurance, characteristics in short supply in our fickle, attention-deficit culture. It requires disciplined persistence—a truly countercultural asset—of fostering, precinct by precinct, the willingness to demand more than seems feasible at present.

In his novel, The Overstory, Richard Power wrote: “Trees fall with spectacular crashes. But planting is silent and growth is invisible.”

12. Stephen Jay Gould, renowned paleontologist, coined the phrase “punctuated equilibrium” in revising Darwin’s theory of evolution. Most evolution comes at glacial, nearly imperceptible speed. And then . . . shazam . . . as if from nowhere emerges dramatically altered biological conditions giving rise to new species. So also with social change, which sometimes appears as a miracle. Think bus boycott in a sleepy Alabama town—carried out by marginalized people, taking frightful risks, against seemingly impossible political odds—which ends up launching a global civil rights movement.

13. Finally, ponder the parable of the coalmouse.

“Tell me the weight of a snowflake,” a coalmouse asked a wild dove.

“Nothing more than nothing,” was the answer.

“In that case I must tell you a marvelous story,” the coalmouse said.  “I sat on the branch of a fir, close to its trunk, when it began to snow, not heavily, not in a raging blizzard, no, just like in a dream, without any violence. Since I didn't have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952.  When the next snowflake dropped onto the branch—nothing more than nothing, as you say—the branch broke off.”

Having said that the coalmouse ran away.

The dove, since Noah's time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for awhile and finally said to herself: “Perhaps there is only one person's voice lacking for peace to come about in the world.” (“A Tale For All Seasons,” adapted, from The Caribou by Kurt Kauter)

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©ken sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org