a new season is bringing life from the ashes of the old...

Everyday the dangerous and mean-spirited words, actions, and decisions of this current regime bring cruelty, fear, and death to countless beings throughout God's creation. The magnitude of slaughter and desecration is mind-numbing. Our violation of the water, land, and air has ravaged the life-giving properties and beauty of nature and condemned our partners in creation - reptiles, water and land animals, and plant-life - to disease and ruin. The political abandonment of our European allies has advanced the resurgence of nativism and race-hatred on the continent and strengthened the international influence of Russia and China throughout the developing world. The current regime has consistently betrayed our historic friends; ignored the wise counsel of time-tested political, ethical, and economic elders; and used the power of the federal government to line their own pockets. They routinely advance economic havoc, nourish the 
unholy marriage of White Protestant Evangelicalism with the State to enhance an American theocracy, and manipulate the checks and balances of our system to deepen grassroots cynicism.  

Yes, there has been resistance. Of course, there have been challenges in the street, courts, and ballot boxes. And without a doubt, the movements to contain and reverse the violence will mature - and, in time, bring some long needed correctives to our culture of greed. Like Dr. King and others have noted, the arc of the moral universe does tilt ever so slightly towards justice and truth. I know this to be true in history and nature. In the meantime, however, the callous and cold-blooded destruction intensifies.

These days it is no longer my regular practice to write like this: since leaving my public role two years ago, I have not sent letters to the editor, taken part in local demonstrations of opposition to the regime, posted political/ethical analysis on my blog, or even tried to impact public opinion. I needed a season of silence for my own soul; and I sensed that this era was one where we had to come face-to-face with our own shadow. We needed to live into the consequences of our lies, fears, greed, and brokenness. Other nations, like Germany after WWII and South Africa after apartheid, have done this becoming wiser and more compassionate by confessing their wounds and atoning for their sins. There has been some of this in Canada, too. But the USA - like most of the former Soviet bloc nations - have chosen to hide from our social sins and deny the suffering we have inflicted on creation over the generations. Consequently, those wounds still haunt much of what we do - and will continue to do so until we face them with courage, honesty, and humility.

Perhaps that is why I have been trying to learn from the experience of the late Jean Vanier who advocated what he called the "Ten Foot Rule." Give your attention, energy, and resources to those in need whom you can physically touch. Some suffering cannot be ended nor can every person be engaged in every moral cause that cries out for attention. In an interview with Public Radio's Krista Tippett, Vanier observed that while the internet aids some forms of human communication, it also trains us to accept helplessness as the norm by bombarding us with agonies and atrocities we can do nothing to stop. His counsel was to own this truth. Act where you live was his message. Do so with courage and vigor and not only will your action be more satisfying, it will turn our words of love and hope into flesh and blood compassion. I believe that the wise old preacher Quoleth of ancient Israel said much the same thing three thousand years ago - and not much has changed. 

All things are wearisome; more than one can express; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, or the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun.... (Indeed) to everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:

a time to be born, and a time to die;

a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;

a time to kill, and a time to heal;

a time to break down, and a time to build up;

a time to weep, and a time to laugh;

a time to mourn, and a time to dance;

a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;

a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;

a time to seek, and a time to lose;

a time to keep, and a time to throw away;

a time to tear, and a time to sew;

a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;

a time to love, and a time to hate;

a time for war, and a time for peace.

It is not for me to prophesy whether we in the US have faced the consequences of our fears, anger, and greed sufficiently to start making reparations. The jury is clearly out and we won't know for certain until Election Day 2020. But it is not just the weather that appears to be shifting in the fall of 2019. There is what appears to be a growing interest in what sounds to me like confession taking place in the public realm. Rather than just the wringing of tired hands, divisive carping, or silent despair - instead of only reacting to the vulgar attacks of this administration - there are new ideas being shared that are built upon hope and compassion. There are new scientific resources rising to the surface to help us contain the consequences of climate crisis. There are new players in our politics calling us to accountability. And an emerging new coalition of interfaith congregations reclaiming the vision of the Beloved Community arising from within the ashes of our shared grief. (NOTE: Join us on Friday, November 22 @ 7 pm at First Church of Christ on Park Square as BIO - Berkshire Interfaith Organizing - partners with local musicians and poets to raise funds as we offer safety, shelter, solidarity and "sanctuary" to an immigrant family seeking a new start in our region.)

One of the wise elders of our land, Parker Palmer, who partners with Carrie Newcomer to reclaim hope and action throughout the US, put it like this in his prescient reflection on the spirituality of the season of autumn. "Autumn is a season of great beauty, but it is also a season of decline: the days grow shorter, the light is suffused, and summer’s abundance decays toward winter’s death. Faced with this inevitable winter, what does nature do in autumn? She scatters the seeds that will bring new growth in the spring—and she scatters them with amazing abandon." 

As I explore autumn’s paradox of dying and seeding, I feel the power of metaphor. In the autumnal events of my own experience, I am easily fixated on surface appearances—on the decline of meaning, the decay of relationships, the death of a work. And yet, if I look more deeply, I may see the myriad possibilities being planted to bear fruit in some season yet to come. In retrospect, I can see in my own life what I could not see at the time—how the job I lost helped me find work I needed to do, how the “road closed” sign turned me toward terrain I needed to travel, how losses that felt irredeemable forced me to discern meanings I needed to know. On the surface it seemed that life was lessening, but silently and lavishly the seeds of new life were always being sown.

This hopeful notion that living is hidden within dying is surely enhanced by the visual glories of autumn. What artist would ever have painted a season of dying with such a vivid palette if nature had not done it first? Does death possess a beauty that we—who fear death, who find it ugly and obscene—cannot see? How shall we understand autumn’s testimony that death and elegance go hand in hand? In the visible world of nature, a great truth is concealed in plain sight: diminishment and beauty, darkness and light, death and life are not opposites. They are held together in the paradox of the “hidden wholeness.”

Like Palmer, my hunch is that this country is moving into a new season that simultaneously honors the grief that has dominated the past three years as we look for the new seeds of life taking root, too. Ours has been a culture "that prefers the ease of either-or thinking to the complexities of paradox, we have a hard time holding opposites together. We want light without darkness, the glories of spring and summer without the demands of autumn and winter, and the Faustian bargains we make fail to sustain our lives." Could it be that after a mere 243 years, our nation is maturing beyond limitations of sentimentality and cynicism?

credits:
+ https://www.artmajeur.com/en/argjce/artworks/11228875/dark-clouds