At the time of my writing, election results aren’t clear. We’re in limbo--a hard posture to sustain with grace, but one worth practicing, because regardless of what news is delivered in the coming hours and days, there is no telling what will happen next. This vulnerable position of not knowing--magnified by the pandemic and by our political moment--is at the core of what it means to be human. The only real question is how we meet and move through it. Will we flee to an illusory place of greater certainty or will we roll up our sleeves and root ourselves firmly within what Parker Palmer calls the Tragic Gap.
Some years back, I was fortunate to be among the dozen clergy and educators to participate in a retreat with Parker Palmer, a Quaker philosopher and pedagogue, founder of the Center for Courage and Renewal. On the final afternoon of our time together, he shared with us his teachings on the “The Tragic Gap.”
On one side of the gap, teaches Palmer, stands all that is wrong in the world; on the other side, is all that we know to be possible in the way of goodness, equality and justice. This gap is tragic in that it will always exist between the world as it is and the world for which we yearn. The question is only one of endurance: do we have what it takes to continually stand in that tension-filled place between reality and possibility, or will be lured into the tempting alternatives of corrosive cynicism (a result of exclusively seeing what is) or irrelevant idealism (a product of excessively envisioning the realm of what might be).
While the two might seem like opposites, one can see how both the corrosive cynic and the irrelevant idealist might sit out voting or choose not to take Covid-19 precautions seriously. The cynic’s reasoning might be that the apocalypse is coming and/or that we’re all going to die anyway (or, less dramatically, that politics is broken and masks are bogus); the idealist might insist that everything is going to be okay and that rhetoric around the high stakes of this election or the threat of Covid-19 is exaggerated. Indeed, as Palmer writes in Healing the Heart of Democracy, “Cynicism and idealism…have the same result: both take us out of the action by pulling us out of the tragic gap….”
Parker Palmer names faithfulness and a capacity for heartbreak as the qualities that enable us to remain and act meaningfully from within The Gap. In unpacking what he means by these, however, I turn to a Jewish source from the 7th century. Avot d'Rabbi Natan teaches as follows: “A person should always be soft like a reed and not hard like a cedar. In the case of a reed, all the winds come and blow upon it and the reed bends with it. The wind ceases and the reed returns to its place. Therefore the reed merited to become a quill to write a Torah scroll.”
This text asserts that we need to be soft not because it’s nice, but because it’s strategic. The reed’s flexibility allows for resilience; its rootedness means it wins out over the long haul, even if it sways in the wind. The text goes on to say that the cedar gets used to build roofs, but that any remains are thrown into the furnace: it’s useful as a defensive mechanism, but ultimately, it burns out! The reed gets to write our sacred narrative--it inscribes our destiny.
With polls as painfully close as they are, the only thing we know for sure in this moment is that the work before us isn’t going to let up, regardless of which way the election goes. The future won’t be decided or defined by who wins it but by the work we do in its wake, by the grit and faithfulness with which we stand boldly in The Tragic Gap, the so often grueling and heartbreaking place of becoming. Writing a world we can’t yet see is what we’re here to do.
Octavia Butler (as excerpted in a fabulous summer 2014 TWTP booklet) says it best:
All social change is speculative fiction because we’ve never seen a world without poverty, never seen a world with total equality, never seen a world without prisons…therefore activism IS speculative fiction, it’s visionary fiction because we are writing a world we’ve never seen but a world we’d like to live in. It’s hard and unapologetic but it’s hopeful, because it can cause us to move; it wakes up and shows us that change is possible.
Here’s to our being as rooted, resilient and prolific as the reed. The Gap beckons.
