Repair

I watched the live feed of the inauguration on Wednesday on my laptop and the nighttime inaugural festivities on TV. Calm crept over me, an unfamiliar feeling. There was nothing to be incensed over, no horrifying selfish incompetence. But a last quick scroll through Facebook at the end of the evening showed a post from a distant acquaintance expressing concern over what the change in administrations in Washington would mean. The comments below echoed and amplified the fear.

Deeply crazy, I thought -- a phrase which was not so much about degrees of crazy but about degrees of deep. How could anyone fear the election of 78-year-old Joe Biden, a flawed (as we all are) but decent man, a man of humility and faith? Someone focused on returning competence to our federal government. 

But there it was. 

I've tried to imagine my way into that fear. Was it fear of "crazy socialists" and the associated atheism? Fear of a world with too many choices? Fear that the sure foundations of your faith might shift and slip sideways in a pluralistic culture? 

We label others as racist, phobic, selfish, godless, but very few of us think of ourselves as deeply crazy or  prejudiced or amoral. Things are what they are and naming them privately and publicly is the first step to fixing them. But you can't just dismiss what a person's emotions, actions and judgments mean to them. 

So I'm back to imagining the inside of someone else's head. What I see is fear of a terrifically complicated uncertain world. One where logic says giving something to one group of people means taking it away from another group. Where gender, morality, Christian doctrine are immutable. Where seeing things as relative or shifting undermines everything. Where truth has to be -- what? a certainty through the ages.

My very insistence on the existence of multiple worldviews is a belief in itself. My acceptance of different views of morality, even the possibility of different views on the faith and ethics of Jesus, identifies me as one sort of Christian (or hardly a Christian to some people). 

I believe that the kingdom of God — the coming kingdom, the kingdom coming into being, the kingdom potentially present in each moment of our lives infused with God's breath and Spirit — is bigger than any one of us can know. That it is all the things in Amanda Gorman's inaugural poem. And that this vision is very much a gift of the Black church.

We've had three Wednesdays in January: insurrection, impeachment, inauguration in succession. We're working toward a new world, at least I hope so. The repair work begins. It will be slow and hard. 

And I pray it brings us together.