I have been living as if floating in an isolation tank. The pain of the Wednesday morning after was incredible. It was more than losing an election. It was losing a way of life.
A week now I have been on media blackout for the most part. Not as chatty in political sections of social media. Isolating and healing from feeling like I had been mule kicked in the groin. Regrouping because I know that fighting is what will be necessary. A man with a long, documented history of racism, misogyny, and narcissism has been elected and has indicated that he will implement policies that will devastate the poor and the least of these.
I am a Christian. Most of the listeners to my podcast on trauma and addiction don’t know that. Most of my patients don’t know that. Most of my readers here and many of my colleagues don’t know that. They don’t because I respect all paths to the divine. Mine simply goes through a man who talked about compassion, love, caring for the least of these and ultimately proved that even death was not to be feared.
I am not the kind of Christian who screams and yells and hates. Those Christians voted for this man because their fear and hatred was stronger than their faith and they forgot the fundamental truth of history. God always wins.
I almost forgot that truth myself for a week. I was injured. I was in disbelief that evil could win. That racism and misogyny could triumph. But I was caught up in my own hurt and fear. I was frightened for the futures of people here without proper documentation who had become really good friends to my family....teaching my daughter Spanish even. I was frightened for the transgender woman who worked at a local grocery but always had a smile and a pleasant word even when I knew living in a small, midwest town had to be hard. I was frightened for the friends I have who are compassionate, loving muslims that are now very much at risk.
All of that fear got the better of me and I forgot the truth......Good always wins.
In 1984 I was in my first year at Southwest Missouri State University (GO BEARS!) and I met a man by the name of Gerrit tenZythoff. He was a professor of religious studies and he became a mentor to me for a time. I think he sensed how lost I was, how hard I was searching for a God to make sense of a universe around me that seemed so full of hurt. I used to take lunches with him and he would eat his sandwich with arthritic broken hands as we talked about world religions and the meaning and difficulty of faith.
Gerrit introduced me to Dietrich Bonhoeffer whose work, The Cost of Discipleship became foundational in my own Christian faith. One day, as we were eating lunch, he told me the story of how his hands and knees became crippled and arthritic. He was a teenager in Holland when Hitler came to power. His family decided to take part in the resistance and smuggle Jews through Holland to free Europe. They all knew the risks but did not feel they had any choice if they were to follow the calling they had felt so strongly all their lives.
“The God of our understanding,” he told me, “did not promise following His call would always be easy. Only that He would be with us.”
Gerrit was captured by the Gestapo. He had no information to give them because the system was set up in such a way that after you dropped a family off you had no idea who they were with or where they were going. None the less, they tortured him to be sure. They broke his fingers and knees and left him disabled for life. You can read more about him here. He was a great and humble man.
I have been rereading Bonhoeffer lately and thinking a lot about Dr. tenZythoff. In the aftermath of the recent election I have come to realize I will need their strength, wisdom and faith now more than ever.
I will need to be strong because I will resist any attempt to deport the least of these back to lands where death is almost certain, because I am called to do so. I will stand with my sisters who are told to be quiet after being sexually assaulted because a powerful man did it, because I am called to do so. I will stand with my LGBT brothers and sisters when the God police come for them and I will hide them and resist with them, because I am called to do so.
But I will also need the strength of forgiveness. You see there is more to Gerrit’s story. When he managed to escape the Nazi’s he returned home to find two youth who had been taken in by his parents. They were Nazi youth. He was furious. He stormed out of the house declaring that the would not share the same roof with them. His mother stopped him and reminded him that they were all, even the youth, Christians first. They would give them refuge the same as they had the Jews. They would show them acceptance and love because that is what they were called to do.
In the heat of political battle I have been guilty of forgetting that last lesson from Gerrit. I have been angry at people who were disenfranchised and frightened and willing to follow even a wolf in sheep’s garb. I have overlooked their brokenness while asking how they could be so out of tune with the brokenness of others. I have done so because, as I have written before, I am broken too.
What is coming in the next two years is too important to ignore. My resistance is too important to get wrong. To allow it to degrade into an argument rooted in being right would strip it of all value. It must be rooted in compassion. Move forward with humanity and love.
In the end I am assured of this....God always wins. In the history of humanity darkness has always come. It has always had periods of rising up and oppressing one people or another, but it has never prevailed. The story of humanity is a progression. A long movement forward towards compassion and love with occasional slips into darkness. Always there is a return to the forward march. We are growing towards compassion, towards love and connection, towards a world where there are no longer divisions. We are doing so painfully slowly it seems because we live only a short time on this rock hurtling through space. But in the 14 billion years of the universe we have only been here the span of one breath and God’s plan is bigger yet.
We must become resolved to resist because there is a battle coming. But we must do so as the truly great humans before us (Martin Luther King, Gandhi and others) have done. With compassion and love leading the way and with this knowledge always in the back of our minds....
Good always wins.