When people say,“we have made it through worse before”
all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones
of those who did not make it, those who did not
survive to see the confetti fall from the sky, those who
did not live to watch the parade roll down the street.
I have grown accustomed to a lifetime of aphorisms
meant to assuage my fears, pithy sayings meant to
convey that everything ends up fine in the end. There is no
solace in rearranging language to make a different word
tell the same lie. Sometimes the moral arc of the universe
does not bend in a direction that will comfort us.
Sometimes it bends in ways we don’t expect & there are
people who fall off in the process. Please, dear reader,
do not say I am hopeless, I believe there is a better future
to fight for, I simply accept the possibility that I may not
live to see it. I have grown weary of telling myself lies
that I might one day begin to believe. We are not all left
standing after the war has ended. Some of us have
become ghosts by the time the dust has settled.
--Clint Smith
As a chaplain serving in Washington, D.C. after the 2016 election, I listened to many stories of fear. On November 4, 2016, I walked into school and the first person that greeted me was my Muslim colleague who burst into tears.
“I’m afraid to be Musim,” she lamented.
All day long, Black students, female students, Latinx students all expressed worry for families, friends, and their own lives. Sadly, their fears were warranted. In a recent FBI report, hate crimes in the last four years have increased by 20 percent, with murders committed by white supremacists rising to their highest numbers in 28 years.
I’ll never forget the one student who refused to come to school that day, but rallied by mid-morning, after creating stickers that read: “Love trumps hate,” and passed them out all day long. As our country moves forward, we must remember these words and the words of countless others who have dedicated their lives to fighting for justice by practicing love and non-violence, including of course, Dr. Martin Luther King.
This morning Sarah McCann, St. Mark’s English teacher and recipient of the Tyler Chair for Creative Writing, sent the above poem by Clint Smith to the faculty. The message that resonated for me was the need to remember the depth of loss we face as a nation—400,000 dead from COVID-19, Black lives lost to police violence, families separated, police officers killed at the attack on the Capital, the loss of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, John Lewis, C.T. Vivian, and many other civil rights activists, frontline workers, and countless others.
Let us unify around this loss; by remembering the individual persons behind the statistics, we honor their lives and hold up the very real pain and suffering of those loved ones left behind. Whether Black, white or Latinx, Democrat or Republican, may we all be united by our common suffering. Let us move forward in love.
Gracious God, help us to realize that humanity was created to shine like the stars and live on through all eternity. Keep us, we pray, in perfect peace. Help us to walk together, pray together, sing together, and live together until that day when all God’s children—Black, White, Red, Brown and Yellow—will rejoice in one common band of humanity in the reign of our Lord and of our God, we pray. Amen (From The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King)
--The Rev. Katie Solter
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