All the grace

It is just another Wednesday morning among thousands of other Wednesday mornings. I drink two cups of coffee as I wake and get ready for the day. I wake my children up for school, ask one of them to get out of the shower a few times before they do. I think about making oatmeal but don’t. I comb my hair, start my car, feed the dog and decide to grab a sweater on my way out the door, just in case the classroom is cold today. From one day to another I never know how the room will be.

I mark the twenty-two miles from here to there by the number of swooshes I hear when the road curves this way and then that. This is the sound, or something like it, that the case of water in the back of my car makes, nearly empty now, when I turn the car enough to send it this way and that. Swoosh on this right turn, swoosh back on that left turn. 

It is just another Spring morning in Eastern New Mexico and the sun is already high and is shining like a lightbulb above low flying clouds that are like strips of white cotton hanging over miles of grass and cows. To the west the clouds are gray and lower and the light is just so that one can make out details that a less filtered sunlight would allow.

This morning you can see all the little houses that dot the prairie. Wood pillars holding up a porch. A white chair next to a front door. Blue shutters on those windows or red trim on that roof. Those fat green trees that are just as fat and as green as can be. My brain catches bits and pieces of what is out there, forming impressions as my car carries me Northeast at 70 miles per hour on this stretch of Highway.

It is almost pretty, this god-forsaken place. I think. Surprising myself with such a thought. I wonder, what makes a place god-forsaken? Poverty? Disparity? Injustice? Racism? All of those things certainly exist here. But I don’t think that this place is god-forsaken. There is immeasurable beauty and strength in this little community. My mood has been informed by the news this morning, consumed between sips of coffee and these low hanging gray clouds. 

Truth is, this is a great little community that sits at the edge of Eastern New Mexico. It is so near Texas that if you happened to be driving on a thin road East or West you could miss that you’d left one state and entered another in less than half an hour, if not for the time change. Since moving here over a decade ago we have seen the folks who live and work in this little town rally around one another when times got tough.

When Covid happened it cut right down the middle of the community. It was like the earth’s shifting left a crack that went though neighborhoods, houses, churches, and all the buildings that people lived and worked in. People, friends and family alike, were left on different sides of the fissure. Like a new border suddenly raised fences leaving everyone in a new and opposing nation and some people (many people) seemed to settle into the role of enemy or if not that then adversary. It was shocking and disappointing. 

The crisis passed and a new normal settled. Then someone wanted to be president again and the vitriol and purposeful disparaging and dehumanizing language that became the norm his first time around (much worse the second time) sent the tectonic plates to shift and the cracks came up and widened – again leaving people on opposing sides. To be clear, the shift only worked to reveal where people actually chose to stand. I struggled not to despair.

I desperately want to believe that all humans are good. Father Gregory Boyle says this – all the time – that all humans are good. And despite my theological training and decades worth of personal religious practice, I still struggle with this notion when I see the ways in which we harm one another. I believe it, I do, and I pray that God will help me with my unbelief.

These days I find that I am leery of other humans. I fear that you can’t really tell who is who anymore, and maybe you never could. That man sitting on that bench waiting for a ride. The couple sitting on the pew in front of you. The lady coming up to that counter you man, or giving you the latte that you ordered. 

You just can’t tell who is pleased that ICE is in the community. You can’t tell who would defend the men who killed Alex Pretti or Rene Good. You can’t tell who is happy that DEI has been removed or who is alright with Medicaid and Medicare cuts or that WIC or school lunches (and so much more) are in danger of disappearing for thousands and thousands of families.

You can’t tell if the lady or man in front of you, smiling and holding the door, is happy about any one of these issues and hundreds more just as long as abortion gets banned or immigrants are removed from this nation’s soil or both. You just can’t tell, and that is unnerving. 

A few weeks ago I stood on the sidewalk holding a sign that read, “Human rights for all humans”. Underneath was a red circle with a red line diagonal over the letters I.C.E. and next to that another red circle with another red line diagonal over the word kings. Young men with mullets (no shade to mullets) boys really, in a dirty pickup truck drove by us over and over again giving us their middle fingers, the exhaust from their muffler and their best sneers. Older ladies in mini vans gave us both fingers and lots of F’ yous. Old men in big shiny trucks pulling trailers yelling F’you, you mother F’ers.

Other folks drove by and honked, the way that I used to do, and threw fists in the air. You might even get a, “hell yeah!” or “Whoooo!” but I was puzzled most by the many more people who looked straight ahead not seeing us at all. How can you not look? I wondered. Then again, how can any of us get up and drink our coffee and get dressed and drive our kids to school or clock in to our jobs and out again or eat and wash dishes or brush our teeth or plant gardens or do any normal thing when bombs are falling and children are in cages all over our “great” nation?

But I suppose that I don’t know what is on the news you watch and you do not know what I am seeing. I believe this is a huge part of the problem. News feeds and algorithms are pitting us against each other, tricking our brains and dulling our senses. And maybe not knowing who is who keeps us afraid and unwilling to talk to one another. What if we talked to one another?

There is a spectrum. On the one end stand those who are straight maga, they wear red hats and flip protestors birds. In the middle are all the people in all the situations – as diverse as all of humanity and to the other end live those who get up in the morning and grieve and simmer and go on doing the normal things of life (and whatever they can to stand and fight) in spite of oppressors oppressing everywhere. Some of us are angry too and throwing birds at passing cars at protests.

This morning, when I got to the next town, the clouds were lower and grayer. They sat in the trees and blurred all the edges of industry. They seeped under the bridges and laid down flat on the train tracks. Is this what god-forsaken might look like? I wondered again. And again, I wondered who decides that a place or that a people is “god-forsaken?”

I don’t know. But I cannot for the life of me understand how people can defend this administration, or remain silent or look away from suffering or see it and not be moved. Especially if those people say they follow any sort of religious practice. I suppose one could wonder if we, as a society, are not in danger of becoming god-forsaken in our apathy.

How do we look away from the many thousands of pages of evidence of children being harmed and exploited? The files that our DOJ won’t fully release despite court orders. How is it acceptable that the leader of our country and many of the people in his circle (some in leadership today) are also in the files yet no charges are being filed? In his first term the videos and court cases and then convictions were enough (more than enough) for me to not understand how church folk could support him. It baffles me that many religious leaders are calling him “sent by God” and comparing him to Jesus. And please tell me, since when is it acceptable to ignore court orders? 

What about DOGE and the havoc they wreaked? The scope of which we do not yet fully understand. Or of the attack on National Parks and the Kennedy Center or the destruction of the Rose Garden, the unnecessary and costly White House renovations NOT by-the-way paid for by a private donor but by tax-payers. There is the blatant white-washing of history and the repealing of environmental standards, health standards, education standards. It seems this administration and the people behind it are in a hurry to take us all back to the 1950s, but with AI and robots.

I wonder if we could take a moment to ask ourselves, who benefits from us being divided? What do corporations, PACs, billionaires and politicians gain when the ordinary people living in ordinary communities are busy fighting or hating or hiding or barely surviving, unwilling or unable to even think about much less read the fine print of bills being passed in congress or on school boards or city councils and court orders being ignored? Everyday the newsfeeds overwhelm and distract us from the fact that many in power are making decisions that enrich themselves at the cost of the rest of the world.

At the end of this normal Wednesday I mark the twenty-two miles from there to here by the number of swooshes I hear when the road curves this way and then that. That case of water in the back of my car, still nearly empty and still making the swoosh sound when I turn the car just enough to send it this way and that and I think about the other side of my homemade protest sign that reads: “No one is well unless we are all well.” It agrees with something else that Father Gregory Boyle says often and that is, “We belong to each other.”

I can hear someone’s answer to these statements. Something negative about hand outs and demanding people pull themselves up by bootstraps and why should we pay for them… but those kinds of words fall short. I’ve given meals to strangers and have been on the receiving end of meals from strangers in nearly every community that I have lived in, and there have been many. People are capable of such beautiful decency.

If you are religious you might recall someone holy’s words about loving one’s neighbor. And I would ask you, who is your neighbor? If you are not religious maybe you’ve heard what the late Mr. Rogers said of his mother, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me. ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” Her words are often shared after terrible disasters to remind us that there have always been helpers. I leave you with this – we do not have to agree on everything but I do believe we have a responsibility to one another to work together towards shared human dignity and speaking very broadly – what we are doing now is not it.