A Clenched Month: January 2021
Rev. Janet Cooper Nelson, Chaplain of the University
Brown Spring term classes began on January 20th, sharing the date with the American Inauguration of a new President. Both are ordinary turns of the calendar, yet neither was like any of its predecessors. 

At Brown the Class of 2024 arrived on campus without late summer fun and warmth and quickly hunkered into single rooms, eating meals in bags, and living on-line to arrange regular COVID testing and to attend everything--TWTP, Orientation, meeting with hall mates and first classes. Successful, to be sure, with smiles and resilience
expressed broadly, but everyone felt and witnessed the strangeness.   

In Washington, DC, the US Capitol was polished, if muted, in readiness to host the Inauguration of the 46th President. Dominant, the mourning for the nation’s lost, COVID-19 precautions, and the barricades staffed by hosts of National Guard.  Burned
into the nation’s retinas were the devastating images from two weeks earlier of armed insurrectionists, Americans, largely White, exercising deadly force in a futile attempt to retain power for a defeated president, 

And January still has a few more days.  

I juxtapose these images not to create a vacuous equivalency. I mean to observe directly that this is a truly difficult season: nothing is quite right; and, much is very wrong. Our racing hearts can slow even when the worst is happening if someone can speak something plainly, truthfully--perhaps just an accurate recounting of how the sun seems
as it drops behind the horizon. The later Mary Oliver’s poem The Fist slowed my pulse:

There are days
When the sun goes down
Like a fist
Though of course

If you see anything
In the heavens
In this way
You had better get

Your eyes checked
Or, better still,
 Your diminished spirit.

The heavens
Have no fist,
Or wouldn’t they have been
Shaking it
For a thousand years now,

And even
Longer than that,
At the dull, brutish
Ways of (hu)mankind--

Heaven’s own
Creation?
Instead such patience!
Such willingness

To let us continue!
To hear,
little by little,
the voices---

only, so far, in
pockets of the world--
suggesting the possibilities
of peace?

Keep looking.
Behold, how the fist opens
With invitation.

As January 2021’s demands unfolded, The Providence Friends Meeting created an Interfaith Pre-Inauguration Vigil for Peace and Unity on January 19th on ZOOM and invited spiritual leaders in Providence to offer prayers. Mary Oliver’s poem The Fist seemed the perfect preamble to the prayer I wrote for that day. If it can encourage us as we finish stumbling through January 2021, then the work of February and beyond can begin. 

Can we unclench--our fists, our jaws, our death grip?  Whether on campus or in the community and nation, our work’s efficacy depends on our capacity to risk repairing broken trust; hearing the needs of the injured and excluded; assessing our role in the creation and perpetuation of harm; creating new good for others and ourselves.  May all that is sacred release our grip and sustain us in generosity and mercy.

Open our fists
Clenched in fear--ready to hit back
Shaking with grief, dreading news of the next loss
White knuckled in anger against greed and dishonesty.
Open our fists

Turn our eyes toward the softness
We hope dearly to receive,
To see our neighbors’ need
Beyond racist distortion,

May we see anew
Our common life
Our common risk,
Our common mortality
With open eyes and hearts
May we see all we have
Failed to be.

Hearts and fists
May we be open to truth and reconciliation
To racial healing and transformation.

May we find our neighbor’s fists
Unclenching, reaching--
Each of us to the other
Hoping dearly
For strength and a hand to hold
For the journey ahead.

Behold how the fist opens with invitation.
Amen.