Grief Should Have It’s Day

This for many of us is a gut blow of a day. It’s hard to catch a breath. The very air we move in seems heavy. We’re frightened and full of grief. Perhaps too full of grief to be angry, though that may come.

Or numbness, that may come too, even more numbness than we’ve already seen. Numbness, masquerading as emotion or patriotism. Numbness to the soul of us.

Cindy S. Lee in her book, Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation understands soul as a space, a space in which body, mind and spirit move together.

It’s a space we too often board up. We don’t want to expend the time and energy it takes for wisdom to grow, for weighing the opinions of experts, for listening to the quieter voices, doing the slow work. We too often choose a momentary ease for wholeness.

Much as I am sickened by the result of this election, I’m using the word ‘we’ because I don’t want the duality of us and them to take root in me, whatever us, whatever them.

I also don’t want to urge you to hope, not yet, because I believe deep grief should have its day.

But when we’re ready perhaps we can dig deep, look for the places in and around us where we too are looking for “strongmen”[1]. Someone who says they can take away our fears by also taking away our agency or own particular story.  I’m urging this work because in it I believe is our hope. It is something vital that we can do.

I grieve today for the place at which we have arrived. I am wading the sludgy places of despair.

But soon I will go back, I hope, to searching my own life for the dictator’s I’ve given my power too. I’ll search them out in myself and in the institutional habits I’ve internalized, in the colonizers of thought I’ve been occupied by and that I can become.  I’ll do this rigorous work to be opened and reconnected with myself and with others.

A few weeks ago, I preached on Bartimaeus. It always seems to me the greatest miracle is that Jesus asked him the question and he knew the truest answer, “I want to see”. This meant physical sight, but it also meant, I want to see what You see, I want to see myself as You see me. Jesus didn’t tell, he asked and Bartimaeus knew that he wanted to see. May we want to see, ourselves, one another, and all creation. May we want to see, whatever it costs us, and may we honour the soul of us and follow One who animates us in Love.

[1] “There’s so many Americans who actually want to have strongman rule. I find that disturbing.” Tim Snyder, quoted in Marsha Lederman’s opinion piece on November 4, 2024, Globe and Mail, Historian Timothy Snyder has an important warning on Trump’s threat to global democracy.