We are in a time of risk and fear and grief for ourselves and those we love. We gather together to be present to one another and to create sanctuary for one another. We can feel all these feelings. As “Black Liturgies” author Cole Arthur Riley has written:
“INHALE
This is too much to hold.
EXHALE
So we hold it together”

 

We Hold It, Together

Rev. Joe Cleveland

November 10, 2024

 

Sitting in a cold, hard metal folding chair at the polling site where I was working, looking out at the gymnasium at all the voting booths set up in the center of the floor, the tables making a ring around the whole space, poll workers making a ring around those tables, many checking some voters in and getting them their ballots, many just waiting, I just had a bad feeling.  I think what was happening to me was a growing numbness.  I was just withdrawing from the situation.  It didn’t feel right.  I didn’t want to hear any news or anything at all forecasting any outcome.  I got home from the polls I just went to bed. I did not look at anything.  I got up the next morning and my wife had looked at something.  It didn’t look at any news.

I hosted several opportunities for people to gather the day after the Election, and everyone who came seemed to have this glazed-over look in their eyes.  I think part of it is exhaustion.  So many people worked so hard during this election cycle.  People wrote postcards and letters, phone banks and text banks, knocked on doors, contributed financially, wrote more letters, dutifully watched the debates, wrote some more postcards, and on and on — exhausting.

And that work did not have the result that they wanted. So another part of what’s going on is that lots of people are experiencing real loss and grief.  

We are feeling lots of things.  Rage, frustration, shock, chagrin.  We feel tired and stressed, confused and vulnerable.  Despair, anger, guilt, shame.  We feel overwhelmed.  

I wasn’t tuned in to the news, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t tuned into anything at all.  There were a few things that I allowed myself to look at.  And the image that was most often repeated in the blogs and newsletters that I pay attention to—that image was of the Feelings Wheel.  Maybe this says more about my social networks than it does about the present political moment. But.

We need to pay attention to what we are feeling.

I don’t know what your upbringing was like, but spending a lot of time developing a vocabulary of emotion wasn’t really part of my upbringing.  Granted, I was raised with a healthy dose of stoic Minnesota Norwegian bachelor farmer. Not a whole lot of expressiveness in that genre.  I think different towns emphasize different sets of emotions.  I think things are a bit better now—there is a feelings wheel and animated movies like Inside Out.  But developing an emotional literacy—our culture isn’t great at it.  And we’ve just elected, again, as President someone who seems to have a pretty limited emotional range. Good at rage and vengefulness, good at disdain. I’m trying to think of another emotion I’ve felt coming from the guy.  Good at hate.  I do tend to eliminate his face or voice from whatever video or sound that comes my way, so maybe I don’t have a good data set.  

Why am I spending so much time talking about emotional literacy?  Why am I urging you to look inward?  There are certainly lots of other things to do: organizing, educating, advocating, disrupting, imagining, visioning and more. 

Part of why I’m talking about this is because I care about how you all are feeling and that’s probably why I’m a minister. I care about how things happen for you all.  

But another reason to focus on emotion is something a climate and democracy activist and author named Daniel Hunter published: 

“… for us to be of any use in a Trump world, we have to pay grave attention to our inner states, so we don’t perpetuate the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion or constant disorientation.” 

Some of the tools that the autocrat uses to establish and maintain their power are those inner states and generating these feelings and crises of spirit in us—getting us to feel fearful, isolated, exhausted, chaotic.  

I think this strategy has been pretty successful. I believe many of us have felt one or more of all of those ways if not today then recently.  The way hate and vitriol and have been expressed and acted out in our lives — how can it not cause fear, exhaustion, isolation, disorientation?  For just one small example, one of the young people I know who identifies as gender non-binary stayed home from school Wednesday so that they could at least get a one-day pass on facing the jeering and demeaning of their classmates now combined with a winner-takes-all, you-don’t-belong-here triumphalism, not just at school, but on the bus ride to school.   

We need to take care of ourselves.  I need you to take care of yourselves.  And we need to help one another feel safe, connected, rested, and undisoriented—which I guess means oriented—which makes me think of orienteering which I did for summer school as a kid—which makes me think we want to help make sure each of us feels like they have a reliable compass. 

I trust your compass.  I trust your compass.

This is so much to hold.  It’s really too much to hold.  Taking some cues from the writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley who wrote the book Black Liturgies, we need to just breathe for a moment.

INHALE This is too much to hold

EXHALE So we hold it together

Here is some of what I believe our work is: We need to lean into trust. Distrust is a crowbar that divides and rends.  Leaning into trust can begin simply with your own self and that compass of yours.  I trust your compass.  You are taking in a breath and letting it go, and you keep on doing that.  And there is love with you.  There is love with us all.  The pain you feel is because you care, it’s evidence that you know there is a love and loving.  I trust your compass.

We need to lean into community.  We need to check in with the people we care about as much as we can.  And when we don’t hear from someone, forgive them: it’s not a slight against you: they are feeling all the feelings and might need to hear from you.  We’re not all going to be ready as quickly as some others of us to reach out. But we do need to reach out.  I trust your compass.

And we all need to do the basic stuff:  I need you to get enough sleep.  Resistance requires rest, and in a chaotic world that wants you to Do Everything Fix Everything Now, as Tricia Hersey of the Nap Ministry says: Rest is Resistance.  

Do the basic stuff.  Drink more water.  Step outside and just pause and look at the sky, or a bird, or a tree. Or listen to a birdsong or just hear the breeze or maybe some water flowing. Or maybe it’s just the drip from the tap of your kitchen sink.  That’s ok. What a regular and beautiful thing. I need you to celebrate the beauty that is right now offering itself to you.

And may we establish this basic stuff as practices: practice it, and then practice it again.  It’s not about getting right.  It’s just about doing and doing it again.  Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat.  That’s life.

We will organize.  We will act to protect those who are especially being targeted: the transgender and gender non-binary, the immigrant and more.  And we will finish none of this today.  Today, we take a breath in and let it out.  And we begin to practice.  We begin to practice holding it together.  We practice holding it, together. We begin to practice remembering we are not alone. 

 

Hear this poem by Alberto Ríos:

We plant seeds in the ground

And dreams in the sky,

 

Hoping that, someday, the roots of one

Will meet the upstretched limbs of the other.

 

It has not happened yet.

We share the sky, all of us, the whole world:

 

Together, we are a tribe of eyes that look upward,

Even as we stand on uncertain ground.

 

The earth beneath us moves, quiet and wild,

Its boundaries shifting, its muscles wavering.

 

The dream of sky is indifferent to all this,

Impervious to borders, fences, reservations.

 

The sky is our common home, the place we all live.

There we are in the world together.

 

The dream of sky requires no passport.

Blue will not be fenced. Blue will not be a crime.

 

Look up. Stay awhile. Let your breathing slow.

Know that you always have a home here.

 

And, via our own Effy Redman, hear these words from ADAPT, a grassroots disability rights organization centered in nonviolent action: 

“There is a place we go to every time we go to a National Action. It is not a physical place, but rather a place within ourselves where the candle of human dignity burns at its brightest and the pursuit of choice drives us to remarkable outcomes. We access this place all across the country where justice has been denied, and it is within this place where we the people demonstrate our power…” 

And where is that place? That’s a place within ourselves.

As the writer Octavia Butler would say:

So be it.  See to it.

Let us see to it together.

Topics: Atonement, Interdependence, Repair