Since Tuesday night all I’ve had to eat is a few slices of white toast and a granola bar. I can’t tell if I’m sick, or it’s just grief and depression. Coffee still tastes good though.
Well, here we are.
Donald Trump has been reelected and the future we thought was coming is gone. That is a truth that we need to make peace with. The American government will be more conservative, brutal and dysfunctional for the next 20-40 years as a result of this election.
But we don’t have to be. You and me. We get to chose how we live.
Hannah Brooks Olsen, a wonderful writer whom I very much enjoy, wrote yesterday about the fruitlessness of despair. It’s absolutely a natural emotion to feel right now given what we know about the past and can guess about the future. But she makes the point that it is also disconnected from reality in that the terrible things we fear haven’t happened yet, and some of them might not even ever happen. We don’t know!
If we collapse into ourselves in despair though, the only thing that is certain is we will not have the resilience to push back against all the evil in the world. Olsen invites us to “an insurrection of joy”. To find small things each day that bring us joy is resistance. To do one small thing a day to help someone else is resistance. To take care of yourself is resistance. To be alive is resistance.
These are the every day things we do that make us ready for the extraordinarily bad things when they come. I have no doubt there will be extraordinarily bad days in the next four years. But you know what else I know? There will be good days too. And if we cannot accept the grace of those good days, if we cannot be present for those good days, we won’t make it.
During the first trump presidency I got the job I have now with Renewal Ministries, had our first kid, got pregnant with our second, watched my wife get her current job and flourish, got to build and sustain resilient communities that survived Covid, learned how to advocate for progressive values in the church and in my community, and then got to celebrate him losing the 2020 election.
My own faith deconstruction and reconstruction is still very present in my life and faith, but I’m glad it’s not beginning now with this election. If your faith sustained you through the first trump administration, and has been bruised or shattered by this election, I’d love to talk to you. You are not alone, and having your faith shaken, jumbled, and recombobulated into something different doesn’t mean that you can’t still draw hope from it.
In just a couple weeks we celebrate one of my favorite days in the liturgical calendar: Christ the King Sunday. It’s the last Sunday in the Christian calendar, before the start of Advent and the “new year”. It is a reminder that the baby who comes in the manger on Christmas is the same Jesus Christ who will rule over all time and people at the end of Revelation. Love triumphs over suffering.
“Look, God’s home is now among his people! He will live with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them. He will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or sorrow or crying or pain. All these things are gone forever.” - Revelation 21:3-4
So today, be alive. Feel your feelings. If you need to talk or need a hug, I can do that. Then make a plan for tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. Let’s not let fear and hate rob our lives of joy and compassion. Even though the horizon is dark, let us go toward it side by side, with our heads held high and our hands together.
What are some things you can do to help feel more alive? That’s going to look different for everyone. Yesterday I asked Simon for a hug. Today I smiled at someone on the street. Tomorrow I plan to go golfing or do some yard work. It’s going to be different for everyone, but here are some suggestions:
Join a crafting group
Come golfing with me
Go on a hike.
Lots of these suggestions are about finding community if you don’t have it, but being in solitude can be an extremely important part of self-care. Without distractions, learn to listen to your body, to the earth around you, to the sounds you make moving over it. Remember and feel that you are alive.
Change your media diet. You don’t have to follow every bad story every second of the day. There are people and ways to be “informed” without stewing in negativity. I’m stepping away from twitter. Maybe I’ll go back, maybe I won’t, but it’s mostly people screaming at each other and circling in despair. No thanks.
You don’t need to endlessly scroll through post-election takes, but I will tell you this: despite Donald Trump winning, progressives, democrats and progressive causes won all over the place last night, frequently by large margins, even in red states. The voters that voted for those people and causes are real. There are voters and organizers and leaders all over the country who are doing the work. There’s almost certainly someone in your community looking for help organizing now or in the coming years, and local organizing is the backbone of resistance.
Volunteer at a food bank. Mutual aid and non-governmental resources are going to be extremely important in the coming decades!
Find a faith community. I say this hesitantly knowing that lots of people have been hurt by churches (specifically evangelical churches) so I want to be very, intentionally broad in this suggestion. Maybe a traditional pipe organ and vestments church is your jam, maybe a unitarian community, Buddhist temple, mosque or synagogue are what you actually need. Maybe it’s a humanist reading group. The point is, find people who believe in something beyond the self, a place where you can find meaning beyond bad news, a place where you are seen when you’re there and missed when you’re gone. If deconstruction is part of your journey and you want faith community but not church, I can help you find those places. They exist.
Find a DnD group to join. Escaping from reality for hours at a time is healthy!
Find an organization like NWIRP or Aurora Commons or the Legal Defense Fund where you can set up recurring donations. You can even unsubscribe from their newsletters if they’re too much, but you’ll still be supporting people pushing back against trump.
Fall in love with something or someone.