The day after the election, I was grateful for a gruelling twelve hours comprising an out-of-town work trip, with no time or energy to think about anything but the task at hand.

The day after that, my calendar was clear. What to do? How to begin to process what had happened?

I wrote.

I tried to uphold the importance, in the face of indifference, of allowing the Saints to show us that sanctity is possible, and is God’s hope and call to us; and the importance of thus being called to examine our own lives in the light of Christ, reflected in the lives of the Saints, and of looking at the world as well with clear eyes, with ‘the spirit of wisdom and revelation [Greek apocalypse]’, with the ‘eyes of [our] heart enlightened’. And I wrote because it is important that we keep creating, thinking, studying, meditating, in a world that wishes to destroy, to bypass our brains, to play upon our passions.

I walked.

I had the luxury not to have to use my car today. I know many others do not have the luxury not to use a car, and still others do not have the luxury to own one in the first place, and that my privilege in this regard is ultimately based in some very questionable past and present realities.

At any rate, as I had business downtown, I walked through the city. This walk hardly begins to offset the damage done to creation all the times I drive this same three-mile round trip, being too lazy, or too undisciplined, or too averse to sweat – nor yesterday’s four-hundred-mile drive. But every step is a step away from the pollution, sprawl, social disconnection and societal breakdown, war, profiteering, suffering, and death – indeed, all the crazed and violent behavior attending the world of junkies and dealers – that our mass oil addiction brings about, and a step toward peace and the flourishing of all creation. I will keep trying to take such steps.

To walk in the park would have been good, but even in this city walk I found abundant life. Despite our best efforts to destroy everything, cities, we are told, are becoming habitats for wildlife as nature recolonizes urban forest, domestic gardens, and all the edge places from unmown property lines to overlooked drainways to the cracks in the sidewalk. St Paul had something to say about finding our way – about finding The Way – along boundaries, in the places where we come into contact with the other. I take the toadstools in the pavement gaps as signs of hope, for the walled world and the divided Church, and for those searching for a place and a path somewhere in the interstices of both.

I read.

Here in pre-Advent, in the time after All Saints’ Day, the light of God, reflected in the Saints, shines in the darkness suddenly made all the more palpable in nature by Sunday’s time change.

[God] has made us worthy to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.

[God] is speaking peace to his faithful people *
     and to those who turn their hearts to him.
Truly, his salvation is very near to those who fear him, *
     that his glory may dwell in our land.
Mercy and truth have met together; *
     righteousness and peace have kissed each other.
Truth shall spring up from the earth, *
     and righteousness shall look down from heaven.
The Lord will indeed grant prosperity, *
     and our land will yield its increase.
Righteousness shall go before him, *
     and peace shall be a pathway for his feet.

Do not fear.
Be glad.
Whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy.

  God will impart wisdom to those who truly seek it.

Outlandish claims, commands, and promises: but they are made because they will be fulfilled, they have already been fulfilled. Just as St Paul said of God, and Our Lord and His Forerunner proclaimed of the Kingdom, the Psalmist sings that salvation is very near. Wisdom may be had for the asking. The path will be made plain.

I prayed.

Thank God I was on duty for Evening Prayer: the destination of the aforementioned walk and the locus of the foregoing readings. The Office is perhaps not meant to be medicine, but it surely has a sanatory effect.

Show us your mercy, O Lord;
and grant us your salvation.
Clothe your ministers with righteousness;
let your people sing with joy.
Give peace, O Lord, in all the world;
for only in you can we live in safety.
Lord, keep this nation under your care;
and guide us in the way of justice and truth.
Let your way be known upon earth;
your saving health among all nations.
Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten;
nor the hope of the poor be taken away.
Create in us clean hearts, O God;
and sustain us with your Holy Spirit.

O God, whose blessed Son came into the world that he might destroy the works of the devil and make us children of God and heirs of eternal life: Grant that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves as he is pure; that, when he comes again with power and great glory, we may be made like him in his eternal and glorious kingdom; where he lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart, and especially the hearts of the people of this land, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Almighty God, whose will it is to be glorified in your saints, and who raised up your servant Leo to be a light in the world: Shine, we pray, in our hearts, that we also in our generation may show forth your praise, who called us out of darkness into your marvelous light; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Nearly every word – those well-known Suffrages and Collect, and prayers less familar for the occasion – resonated afresh: vibrantly so. It is not that they had no meaning before, nor, I hope, that they were suddenly applicable to or newly directed at only one person or one party or even one nation. Rather, this day and every day, we pray for the Church and her leaders, for peace, for the nation and all nations, the poor and needy, for our own selves and our own repentance and renewal. And here are the saints again, and a call to follow them in sanctity and praise of God.

These are indeed dark times. The United States will soon have an unstable and megalomaniacal leader with a rubber-stamp legislature and supine judiciary, and this will only further encourage the rise of the right-wing populism already gaining ground across Europe. Even if the election had turned out differently, this colonial-imperial power would have been drawn ever deeper into war; into complicity in horrendous, mechanical, systemic and systematic violence at home and abroad; into the perfection of a surveillance state; into the sellout of government to corporate interests. As it is, even if there are no mass exterminations or even mass deportations, we can look for a contraction of civil society and a retreat of truth through sustained attacks upon writers, thinkers, activists, journalism, science, the arts, anyone and anything that dares criticize the new order.

  Yet in the darkness we wait, watch, weep, and work to discover, to uncover, to reveal (there is that word apocalypse again) the coming Kingdom, the Kingdom that is already here, and the King who suffered brutally at the hands of a foreign imperial power with whom local political and religious leaders colluded, and so doing wrought the salvation of the world.
writing
