The Morning After the Morning After

Dear Friend,

I’m struggling. It’s the morning after the morning after. You are smart enough to recognize that my last post was likely definitely an attempt to self-immunize. A letter to myself trying to convince myself that the results don’t matter, and that my job to love God and my neighbor transcends any circumstance or even who we choose for our president. I won’t pretend it didn’t help. It did, and I still believe most of what I wrote. 

But here is where I am struggling. I woke this morning wondering if it really is enough to love God and love my neighbor. Was that just magical thinking? Most of the people I know seem to think it is exactly that - Metaphysical woo-woo, they might call it. And yet I want to believe it is enough with all my heart. That loving God and loving my neighbor is, in and of itself, meaningful.

Today, I don’t quite know how to love my neighbor while standing firm against the idea that some lives matter more than others - in a world where love for one seems to be viewed as condemnation of another in a twisted “the friend of my enemy is my enemy” sort of logic. An idea that seems to be in the very air we breathe and to question it risks being shunned as a heretic - by everybody, really. 

Both sides seem to have accepted this atrocious lie as self-evident. From where I sit, both left and the right have judged which lives matter more, and which lives matter less. Each side seems to have divided the world into us and them, and them-ness is a moral failing. Each side seems to have convinced itself that it is not only morally justified, but morally obligated to choose who should be held in and who should be cast out.

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.   

I am losing heart today. I still long to live in a world where we absolutely refuse to push anybody, and I mean anybody, outside God’s circle of compassion. Where we refuse to deny the belovedness of anyone, no matter what they say, or do, or believe. In a world where God’s love is plenty big enough for friends and enemies alike, and where God doesn’t withhold love and compassion from anyone if they choose the wrong team to play for. In a world where God does not withhold love even from those who reject His love, a love is big enough to swallow any terrible bogeyman we can conjure up, and overcome the fear we seem to worship (myself very definitely included.)

I’m beginning to wonder if this hope is denial or some other delusion to which I am clinging to survive whatever time I have left, and I’m beginning to wonder if there are enough of us who share this longing for this hope to have any chance of survival. 

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 This weekend, my pastor quoted a prominent theologian quoting a prominent poet.

my pastor said, and attributed it to Timothy Keller.

I’m certain you recognize the original source. It’s from The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

I’m struggling this morning, and mightily. Not because this side won and this side lost. I think we can get past that. No, I’m struggling because I’m beginning to wonder if the center is, in fact crumbling. The center feels like a very lonely place right now, as if passionate intensity is indeed, drowning the ceremony of innocence. God forbid.

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I would really love to wrap this up with some hopeful little blue pill. But I won’t. Maybe just a prayer:

God,

I find myself, yet again, at the end of myself. Where are you? Will you show yourself and restore my hope?

Because I cannot generate it on my own. I just can’t.

Help. Please.

Oremus,

Ć