Our Recent Elections: The Status Quo as Ebb and Flow

I write this a day after the U.S. midterm elections.

As much as I have tried to keep away from the political fray these past ten years, I cannot but be acutely aware of the anger and the fear that divides our nation. I feel great relief that the results were actually status quo, with no great shake-up, and all pretty predictable — even with all the media hype and sensationalism that is actually, and tragically, also status quo. It’s predictable because people will have different world views and different understandings of facts and storylines. It is healthy and wise to allow and accept these differences. 

I am aware that there is a much greater perspective than the one we each may hold so dearly. I also know that the more ardent and rigid a person’s opinion and stance, the greater it is that fear is holding tightly to that position. That applies across the board–no matter how loud, vociferous, or indignant the claim. Behind the “certainty”  lurks the great shadow of fear.  There is a brutality to this fear that expresses itself by labeling of others as rotten, corrupt, morally inferior, etc. 

Real personal power is rooted in the faith, trust, and courage to remember over and over, we are all in this together, through love. There are great differences and still we are always in the process of deliberately working out the points of tension and stress. We see Love in Action, in our country,  so much more than is acknowledged. Perhaps hope and optimism don’t sell as much as anger and violence. 

For me, a great example, of courage and spiritual action, in our country, was the response, in 2015, of the survivor’s and victims’ families in the Emanual African Methodist Episcopal mass murders. A young man of 21 years of age, joined the parishioners in bible study. They welcomed the white man into their circle of trust. And, as they were all holding hands in prayer, he opened fire on them, killing nine in the circle. At his bond hearing, one by one of the Church members who attended, stood up and spoke messages of forgiveness and purposefully countered the hate and rage of the aggressor standing before them. 

A year later, I attended services at the church, and felt the warm embrace of compassion for me, as a white woman going to pay my respects and to show my deep-felt admiration for the way of being that they model for all of us– a love that just IS. I do not deny the great rage and agony the families and parishioners suffered. But their choice was to intentionally break the cycle of violence with a response of forgiveness and faith in a greater, divine perspective. 

So with the recent elections, I felt hope with the cycle of elections and the calm that followed. There was a return to faith in the process, and the inevitable human messiness,  that holds our beautiful country together by the promise ”to form a more perfect union,” a never ending process.

Let’s pray that forgiveness, compassion and faith guide and support us as we continue on our collective journey, with the awareness of our differences, as part of the ebb and flow, the inevitable changes and adaptation, along our momentum of evolution.