A love letter in hard times

I, perhaps like you, have found myself many times this year curling into a ball under the covers as I awaken to the creeping existential angst that comes with each new disaster, each new political headline. I’ve grown numb to headlines about nuclear war, lies from politicians, national trauma, even death. How can each new story affect me, when the ones before it haven’t even had time to settle?

Overload leads to paralysis, paralysis to lots of Netflix. (Everything in moderation, my dad always said- but this consumption has lately not been very moderate).

Today, in an effort to break the malaise, I turned to those individuals who had been on my mind more and more lately- the authors and theologians who lived and wrote through WWII. This seed of thought began while reading Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain earlier this year- while there were many interesting and profound aspects to it, the thing I was most struck by reading it in this particular year was that even in the midst of global calamity and violence, coffee was still served in cafes and discernment to monasteries still happened and people still fell in and out of love.

Life for many went on, at a very basic level, just as it had before the war, and just as it would after the war. It is naïve to admit, but in all the history I have studied this came to me lately as a surprise. That underneath big historical moments, people still made plans to meet up for lunch.

That in the midst of this time, of great upheaval and change and discord, I still have a job that needs doing and bills that need paying and an internal life that needs tending.

As I stared at my bookshelf, I grabbed two books- Markings by Dag Hammarskjöld, and The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.

I started with Markings, which is more a series of short quotes or reflections from a truly accomplished and great man (more here). I share a few of the excerpts that struck me, like a punch in the gut, today.

“Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.”

 “You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn’t reserve a plot for weeds.”

Whoa.

What our fear, hatred, and misunderstanding cause us to pray does not become God’s because we ask it of God. What we propose in the name of God does not become of God because we say it is so- this is, in part, what the Bible so often calls idol worship. Mistaking our own idols of self and prejudice for God. And we cannot fight cruelty with cruelty, without losing our own compassion. Hate does not grow justice, in our world or in our own hearts. My own fear, even spoken in the name of God, is still not of God.

I then turned to C.S. Lewis’s famous text, The Screwtape Letters. If you haven’t read it, I recommend you do- in it, Lewis imagines that an “"Uncle" demon is writing to his "nephew" demon on how best to accomplish the devil’s work of distracting humans from God. It is humorous, uncomfortably true, and illuminating. The passage I opened to this time felt divinely appointed for me today.

“The great thing is to prevent [the human from] doing anything. As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. Let the little brute wallow in it… Let him do anything but act. No amount of piety in his imagination and affections will harm us if we can keep it out of his will. As one of the humans has said, active habits are strengthened by repetition but passive ones are weakened. The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.”

So why do I call this a love letter in hard times? Because I write to you all, my internet peoples and IRL peoples, to say that shit’s really rough right now. And that the bad news is, it’s been terrible before. And the good news is, it’s been terrible before.

If we allow this to keep us from acting, or allow it to excuse us acting in hate, we risk losing the very heart of what makes us human. This is a love letter because love is about resiliency, about showing up when it’s inconvenient or tough. Because love is of God.

And I see love from so many of you in ways big and small; from those I see daily or weekly, and even from those who message me online to let me know I mean something to them even though we haven’t spoken in years. I see the resiliency in this love, woven over many years and in so many places, and I feel bound together and held in that knowledge during these hard times.

Difficulty can be a gift when we allow it to unveil that which we should have seen before, and transform who we are now into the fullness of who we can be. Because quite frankly, if it is happening anyway, we may as well take control of its effects and bend them towards love and real justice. First within ourselves, and then within the world around us. Lest we run the risk of, as Lewis writes, allowing imagination to pass for action, inner anger to pass for outward justice.

“The overtones are lost, and what is left are conversations which, in their poverty, cannot hide the lack of real contact. But why? Why—?

We reach out towards the other. In vain- because we have never dared to give ourselves.” Dag Hammarskjöld

The story around us may be new, but the work before us is much the same. Life somehow goes on, and the bills must be paid and the inner life must be tended. We must remain awake, and hold on to love. And as always, in each day to day moment, we are asked: “Will we dare to truly give ourselves?”