The Morning After

My post content

“It’s not looking great for Harris. At this point, she has to win Pennsylvania and every other State, with the possible exception of Alaska.”

That’s what Joe said, the last words about the election returns I heard before going to bed Tuesday night. I can’t remember getting up during the night. I know that I didn’t check the returns at all. I’d be either relieved and delighted or—.

I ambled through the dim living room, came into the study where my phone had been charging, picked it up, and read a note from the elder of my two daughters.

I would say good morning, but I am sad. I will be sad and then I will pick myself back up and move to hope and the repeated phrases, ‘I will with God’s help’ and ‘to do the work you have given us to do.’ Thank you, Mom and Papa, for instilling compassion and kindness in us that we have now instilled in our children; all is not lost. Wiping my tears and sending love and big hugs this morning.

That’s the way I heard the news.

In a strange way, I am somewhat glad that I had experienced the morning after the 2016 election. Then I was dumbstruck. I could not believe what seemed to me to be an unthinkable apocalyptic event. This time it felt worse, but I was more enervated than shocked or grief-stricken or nauseated. The only thing I can liken it to is getting the news that somebody close to me has suddenly been delivered a grim diagnosis. It’s something to let sink in, to deal with later, not yet the time to plot and plan caregiving or funeral or another of the dozens of things that might be called for in the next few weeks and months.

I began reading a few commentaries, beginning with Jay Kuo’s first post-election message on Substack. He has seemed to me to be both clear-eyed and cautiously optimistic throughout the last 100 or so days. He made sense while confessing shock and dismay.

“I’m going for my walk,” I said to Joe. “Maybe I can find—” I don’t really remember what I said, or even what I was thinking.

At this time of year when the desert air cools and temperatures drop in early mornings, I begin to walk in lieu of my summertime outdoor practice of yoga and qigong. Instead of launching my intercessions and thanksgivings from the yoga mat, I send them into the ether while I’m walking. I talk. Out loud. I am not imagining that I’m radioing to a distant God. I’m carrying on a conversation with my soul, where I conceive God lives as truly as God lives anywhere and everywhere, in every wave and particle in the universe. God: nearer to me than the air I breathe. I must get the words out of my mouth, or they will stick in my throat where I’ll gag on them. So out of me they come. Sometimes they are words of familiar texts—psalms, hymn texts, prayers that I’ve internalized, and sometimes just unvarnished language that tumbles off my tongue.

That’s what came out of me yesterday on my walk. Words from the Baptismal Covenant in which I promise to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being slid out along with the almost defiant rhetoric of Romans 8:

What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but delivered him up for us all: how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? What shall separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

I wept. Not for sorrow nor out of dismay. Tears fell because I was stirred, moved, determined to spend every ounce of energy I can muster doing exactly what I have been doing and am doing: throwing myself wholeheartedly into the fray. It’s nothing heroic, nothing special, nothing to crow about or feel proud of. It’s just paying attention to whomever I pass, meet, greet. It’s simply praying and nosing around for people to support, for causes that need a few extra bucks to spend on the work they do for the benefit of the vulnerable, like the folks at the Woodhull Foundation. It’s writing a note here, inviting to a Zoom call someone there, sending a text message. It’s talking to my Muslim doctor about his folks in Lebanon, or checking in with Jewish friends whose bodies and psyches bear the scars of traumas past. It’s planning to go to the Transgender Day of Remembrance at City Hall in a few weeks.

Or writing a blog.

You are a part of my world and my life if you’re reading this. And before you laid eyes on a word of it, I’ve already asked a blessing for you to strengthen you, inspire you, prod you, challenge and affirm you. No labor that we do in and for the sake of the Lord of Life and Lover of Justice is in vain.

Take up your—tools. Roll up your sleeves. Come labor on. Take up your cross, which is terribly heavy until you realize that you’re picking up something the weight of a single sheet of paper when you lift it in and with the power of Resurrection in your bones and sinews.

The courts may be corrupt. Congress may be in the hands of the few hoarding and controlling power to keep the many powerless. The Presidency may be debased by crudeness, vitriol, hatred and revenge. Truth may be on the scaffold, wrong on the throne, blood in the streets. But (I promise you) the fields are white with harvest. Can we lock arms together and wade into the fields—reaping and feeding and healing and helping especially those in the crosshairs of hatred and violence?

Could it be that we have been preserved for just such an hour as this?