Dear all,
The Sunday morning after the U.S. election, I made my way to church, wondering how my liberal-leaning, relentlessly inclusive, LGBTQ-affirming congregation would be handling the news that the country had just elected a man whose campaign had explicitly promoted and celebrated bigotry, discrimination, and even violence against all marginalized people—a man, in other words, who in virtually every way is the antithesis of the God we gather on Sundays to worship.
The previous four days had been incredibly difficult. Like many of you, I was in shock. I was grieving. I was furious and terrified and insulted. Like many of you, I felt that who I am—as a woman, as an educator, as a young person, as an inhabitant of our quickly-warming Earth, as someone who cares deeply about justice for all people—was not merely ignored three weeks ago, but was directly assaulted and callously mocked.
In all of my courses, we took time to process the news. We shared stories of children we work with in Columbus who were verbally and physically harassed at school, told that Trump would force them to leave the country because they were African American or Latinx or disabled. We worried with our Muslim sisters who covered or even removed their hijabs on the way home from class because they’d heard about anti-Muslim harassment on the campus busses. We fumed as we learned that someone had spread white supremacy posters throughout the campus buildings. We were anxious as our LGBTQ friends and colleagues and professors expressed significant and legitimate concern that they could be stripped of their hard-won rights. We shared tears of frustration and fear as we teachers wondered whether all the efforts we have made to help promote open-mindedness and empathy among our students have been in vain. Mostly, we were sickened that a man who so blatantly capitalized on fears and prejudices was elected to represent our country to the world and to ourselves.
And yet, as upset as I was, I recognize that my own reaction, while valid, is steeped in privilege. For the most part, I can CHOOSE to be sad and mad and scared. Or not. My family and I are not facing the very real threat of deportation. I am not at an increased risk of being stopped and frisked because of my skin color. I do not have to fear that I will be bullied, injured, or even killed because of who I love, what god I pray to, or where I was born. Like it or not, I will continue to sail through this world with relative ease because of conditions beyond my choice or control. But since I have been given a choice over how to react, I continue to choose sadness and anger and fear. To ignore those emotions feels flippant and dismissive. It feels privileged. Frankly, it feels White. I do not want to simply post a meme with a lightbulb shining in the darkness or a Mr. Rogers quote and leave it at that. Not because those things aren't true and helpful, but because for me, doing only that would feel incomplete and willfully ignorant of the real danger many in this country are already facing.
This has been my biggest problem over the last three weeks: how do I continue to choose to listen to sadness and anger and fear while not being consumed by them? How do I acknowledge the deep, deep wrong in the world—which I believe I have an ethical responsibility to acknowledge—while not focusing on it so exclusively that I fail to see goodness too? How do I not choose ONLY sadness and anger and fear, since to do so would be the highest degree of hypocrisy, ignoring what I routinely tell my students, my friends, and myself (don’t lose hope, work for things and people beyond yourself, love is always biggest)? To lose hope would be counterproductive because sadness and anger and fear eat away at you, rendering you unfit to help. I recognize that people on all sides have been driven by fear and I don’t want that to be what I live by.
As I was watching the ever-reddening map of the U.S. on Tuesday night, I was also trying to grade a student assignment. My student had chosen to write about a picture book very clearly set in a Muslim country. He is not a native English speaker and while his writing is generally quite strong, he made a highly logical mistake while describing the setting of the book. The colors in the book evoke “the environment of the ancient Midwest,” he wrote, and the book as a whole invites the reader into “the magical and gorgeous Midwest world.” I’m going to be honest, on election night and in the weeks that have followed, the Midwest has not seemed very magical or gorgeous to me.
However, even in the best of times, I find great sustenance in beauty, so as I woke on Wednesday morning feeling dazed and nauseous, wondering how I was going to handle all of this with my 8:00 am class, I felt a desperate need for beauty, just to be able to make it through the day. And the week. And the next four years. What I wanted most of all was to drive to the Columbia Gorge or the Pacific Ocean and look out, out, out, away from people and institutions and the media for a while. I wanted to shut off my brain and sleep. But I’m about to start finals and I’m not anywhere near the Columbia Gorge or the Pacific Ocean. I needed to find now in the Midwest—and the nation—even a little magical and gorgeous.
So I did some pretty typical Sarah Jackson things. I wore my USPS t-shirt on Wednesday in recognition of my favorite thing about the United States (and on Thursday and Friday, I wore two of my Lion King t-shirts). I collected about 80 brightly colored fall leaves before class and throughout the day, handed them out to my students, my classmates, and some rather puzzled strangers. I thought about sunflowers and the importance of turning toward the light. I made my classes’ Question of the Day, “Who is someone you love, and what are one or two words you would use to describe them?” just so I could hear 60 college students (some of whom I’m sure voted for Trump) use the word “love” as reports of hateful speech and actions were beginning to pour in around the country. So in some ways, the beauty that has been sustaining me is what I normally think of when I think of beauty.
But I have also been learning that I need to look further and deeper for beauty than my usual sources because the leaves and the light weren’t enough; sometimes the ugliness is too great. So I have been learning about the breadth of beauty. For instance, I have discovered that there is a beauty in raw, authentic emotion. I heard it in the voices of my faculty who made space for us to talk and yell and cry in each of our classes. I saw it in their own tears. I heard it in their vulnerability when they would tell us, “I feel like I should tell you it’s all going to get better, but honestly, I can’t say that it will.”
I’ve learned that beauty can be found in fierceness, determination, even, at times, anger. I’ve seen it in the friends and peers who are redoubling their commitments to work toward justice and to speak out against bigotry and hatred. I’ve found beauty in the commitment some journalists and comedians are making to hold us accountable, to hold us to a higher standard.
But the beautiful moment that meant the most to me was in church that Sunday. We don’t normally “pass the peace,” a time when congregants greet each other with a handshake or a hug, saying “The Lord’s peace,” or “Peace be with you.” But that day, the minister asked us to. While this was happening, one of the older ladies I was sitting next to lost her earring, so a handful of us—me and about four other elderly folks—spent a few minutes looking for it. Eventually, the earring was found, and by this point, we had started the final hymn, “It Is Well With My Soul.” The man who had found the earring ended up standing next to me so I shared my hymnal with him. His voice was strong and even though he sang only about a third of the actual lyrics, I found myself believing that his soul was indeed well. He noticed halfway through that I’d started to tear up, and he grabbed my hand and held on tightly. As we approached the final verse, someone in the congregation yelled out, “Sing it loud!” And we did:
And Lord, haste the day when the faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.
My neighbor and I both giggled a bit when we sang the penultimate line and he leaned over to me. “Bit ironic, isn’t it?” he asked with a so-sweet half grin.
So maybe this is actually my question: how do I proclaim that it is well with my soul even as The Trump is resounding around the nation and the world? Do I dare believe in a day when “the trump” described in this song—the signal of a better time—will overshadow and outplay The Trump who seems to have saturated every part of our national psyche in the past year? I found myself taking some measure of comfort in the humility and longevity of the lower case “t”; long after the next four or eight years are over (please, Lord, make it four!), this hymn will continue to be sung, proclaiming the possibility of wellness, of wholeness, of holiness.
Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the season in the church calendar when Christians celebrate the coming of Jesus at Christmas. I don’t think there could be a more appropriate season for the U.S. right now. Advent is about waiting for and working toward justice in the midst of oppression. It is about believing in the existence of light when even the trace of light seems like a joke. It is about a steadiness and an assurance in the midst of chaos. Horatio Spafford wrote “It Is Well With My Soul” as he was traveling to meet his wife after she survived a shipwreck in which their four daughters died. “When sorrows like sea billows roll,” he wrote, as he sailed past the site of the wreck. Later, after the death of yet another child, the Spaffords moved to Jerusalem and set up a religious sect that addressed interfaith needs in the community, particularly during WWI. Sorrows the size of sea billows do roll into our lives, and Trumps do resound. To pretend otherwise is wrong intellectually and morally. But perhaps part of what we in the U.S. are being called to do right now is to grab a stranger’s hand and “Sing it loud!” through the tears and the pain. Richard Rhor tells us “Advent is, above all else, a call to full consciousness and a forewarning about the high price of consciousness.” I’m beginning to wonder if Advent is as much about protest as it is about prayer, as much about coalition as it is about contemplation.
What do you think? How are you approaching this season, however you define it?
Peace and beauty, y’all.
Sarah/Mouse
