Peace It Together
From seventh grade through 12th, I proudly donned a polyester robe as a member of the Trinity United Methodist Church Spirit Wind youth choir. I carried more conversations than tunes but remember the people, places and performances with great fondness.
We sang a song known as the Prayer of Saint Francis with lyrics that seem apropos as we settle in to what we hope will be a peaceful, joyful 2021.
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, let there be joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life. Amen
In the weird wake of the most divisive election of my time, I felt compelled to try my hand at peacemaking starting with the uncomfortable, unpopular act of talking politics.
I took a cue from St. Francis and sought to understand how and why fellow white women, especially moms, supported Donald Trump. I started my quest via a post-election Facebook post asking as much and referencing a piece I’d written on the topic weeks prior.
The dialogue was honest and respectful amongst women from both sides of the aisle and a few good-intentioned men. But when a progressive, Atlantan entrepreneur made her peace thus offending a conservative, North Louisianan nurse who then shared her own, the forthcoming women sharing on my wall quickly put up their own. The entrepreneur built a successful beauty business by designing synthetic brushes to spare the squirrels. The nurse, by simple nature of growing up in Ruston, LA as I had, is likely to have either hunted, cooked or eaten the bushy-tailed rodents.
Both are hard-working women I admire with strong heads and big hearts, and despite my desire to share as much, I continued my research with private messages, phone calls and texts where some of my closest friends turned out to be the most tight lipped. I took the reading and watching recommendations of women with whom I agreed and disagreed. I binged Mrs. America, watched Sean Hanity and multiple well-produced conspiracy theory videos, learned about Parler and even went to church twice, virtually of course.
My high-level takeaways:
In the words of Michael Stipe, everybody hurts sometimes, and hurt if not healed can easily and unknowingly, turn into hate.
Like Poison front man Brett Michaels, people are looking for something to believe in - a fact welcomed by opportunistic, power-seeking people and organizations effectively pedaling divisive hate from pulpits and social media platforms.
It’s a heck of a lot easier to see the shortcomings of others than it is to see those of our own by looking at the man (or woman) in the mirror just like the King of Pop.
Everyone with whom I connected felt scared and misunderstood on some level. Trump supporters who fear the loss of personal liberties and believe they will be harmed if others are unfairly helped resented being labeled as ignorant, greedy racists. Progressives or liberals who also fear the loss of rights and racial injustice were bitter about being dubbed evil, baby-killing socialists.
At best, folks weren’t quite ready to smoke the peace pipe with the other side, and at worst, they weren’t sure they ever would be. And somewhere in between was a privileged, peacekeeping contingent, to which I’d recently belonged, whose fear of the aforementioned hurt kept them from political discussion altogether.
While I don’t believe a penchant for Panera, Jesus and The Container Store does a mom-olithic group make, it turns out the broad-sweeping assertions I’d made about the minds of conservative white women seemed to hold up. Where I’d missed the mark was my assumption that they’d be willing to speak or change them based on my modest, maybe even condescending attempts.
I’d placed Donald Trump at the center of my research, and my efforts to understand differing ideals shone a light on a shared truth echoed in the pages of Pulitzer Prize winning author Isabel Wilkerson’s best seller Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in which she writes,
“'It's much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unquiet minds needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place. It's harder to focus on the danger of common will, the weaknesses of the human immune system, the ease with which the toxins can infect succeeding generations because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man. It is us, all of us lurking in humanity itself.”
We are all scared, power-seeking, social animals who find solace in feeling bigger, smarter, stronger, thinner, prettier, more pious or in any way better than someone else.
These primal traits have been on full display in our country since its inception 243 years ago and at my house as we celebrated Hanukkah, birthdays and Christmas with our three young kids. The joy from each gift opening or dessert served quickly robbed by comparison leading to a fear of scarcity, power struggles and injury (emotional and/or physical) only pardoned when the shared desire for more presents and sweets is recognized and weapons are dropped.
I wish I could blame the tantrums on their ages, but we see it from others who should know and do better every day, and if we look with honest, open eyes, we see it in ourselves.
It’s not childish behavior...it’s human behavior.
Follow Good News! on IG to see everyday acts of goodness like this one. If you’ve lost your faith in humanity, I promise this will help restore it.
While there’s no denying the prevalence of toxins hiding in humanity, thankfully right alongside are the healing antidotes of love, joy, faith and selflessness. Homo Sapiens have survived for more than 200,000 years largely in part to our ability and willingness to cooperate and work together towards a common goal.
It’s a skill that seems to have atrophied in Washington but can be seen at work every day in hospitals, grocery stores, streets and homes here in the US and around the world. It’s a skill we can build back by opting for connectedness over correctness, disagreeing without disrespecting and flipping the script from debating smaller or bigger government to working towards a better one.
St. Francis prayed “let me sow love” which I’d naively assumed was “so love.” But the change of that little word carries big meaning. 2020 brought so much darkness, and while we may not be willing or able to light it up overnight, we can plant the seeds of love, forgiveness, faith and hope which will grow in due time.
As the ball dropped this year, I prayed our defenses and walls would drop along with it; that the possibilities of 2021 along with hearts, minds and lines of communication would open wide to and by all; for courage to face the wars raging within each of us because only then can we make peace with one another; for enough love for ourselves so we are able to receive and give it to others - especially those who look, think or act differently than we do.
Whether you believe in the fruits of the Holy Spirit or the human spirit, I hope you’ll join me in sowing the seeds that will put the kind back in humankind and help us move from a people in pieces to a people at peace - working in our own ways with differing ideas but towards the shared goal of healing the social and biological diseases plaguing us. Because if we want to survive and thrive another 200,000 years, we’ll have to do it, together.
