When I travel to give talks on scripture or faith, the people in my audience are filled with doom and confusion, with repressed rage and a desire for revenge. Or at least I am.
Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend: “But today I am very bad and very stupid and I hate everyone and everything.” This may be my favorite quote of all time. And nothing makes me feel this more than the current state of air travel. However, when I get somewhere and have a sad and scared audience, I do a deep dive to share what I'm sure will work to restore hope, no matter what, and it helps me.
What could those things be? Love, compassion, laughter and No Kings manifestations are the most important elements to me. They briefly rebooted me, breaking through the mists of defeat and pessimism.
When I mention these words before an audience, I also internally slap my forehead, because I had forgotten them again.
Let's start with love. Oh please, really? Love like Winnie the Pooh? No, no, no, love like your best friend who picks you up for a run at Target when you call her channeling Darwin's quote. Loves like “We Are the World” and the Berrigan Brothers, Dolly Parton, Wavy Gravy.
I recently spoke at a theater in North Carolina, where all day I heard snippets of DC news that convinced me that the Confederacy was rising. That night I was on stage with the exuberant theologian Kate Bowler, who can be very irritable. One of her books is called “Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I Love to Tell Myself,” and yet everything we talked about—the political scene, the terrifying childhoods, the inevitable catastrophes of life—was finally answered by a tattered old love.
Compassion. My husband defines it as the love that arises from suffering, and many times one feels it naturally, certainly more frequently, for a person who votes like you. But 75 million didn't in November, and now people like me, who were born more uptight than the average bear, fear for the young people in our families, for the Constitution, our Earth, the world's poor, and, of course, ourselves. And my heart goes out.
I look at people's sometimes desperate faces and hear hopelessness in the questions they ask. I wish I knew something that would work like a magic wand. Sometime around 2018, my pastor shared a line from Martin Luther King Jr.: He said that in times of evil and violence, we must not let them make us hate them. Then we are truly doomed: hate means we lose ourselves and our greatest strength, our goodness.
This line broke through my wall of indignation. I began to notice that I have seeds of everything scary that certain politicians display, but theirs seem to be on steroids, while mine are comparatively mild, a teenage Cindy Lou Who with PMS. I too am capable of being petty, stupid and (God knows) judgmental. Furthermore, he knew that some of them had been raised in bitterly cold circumstances, by alcoholics, abusers, and rabid fundamentalists, so he would feel fleeting mists of compassion for them.
Thinking along these lines used to soften my cold stone heart for a long moment, and that is a precursor to hope. I haven't felt like this very often lately.
Many mornings I look through the fog, due to the Bay Area's marine layer. I could drive along a strip of brownish meadow and, beyond that, the narrow strip of a lagoon, with a bit of ridge rising behind it and then, above it, a total misty gray like a lowered wet curtain. I am isolated from the sun.
This is how things feel these days, my thoughts clearly distinguish the lies and malice, but are unable to see the way out. The fear and pain I feel daily about what is to come in this country, and what is actually already here, makes me feel isolated and separated. On bad days, I can't even remember the great spiritual truth that we are connected to each other. We are in this together.
And that brings me to the No Kings rallies, another of which is next Saturday, everywhere in America. People who didn't vote like me last November say it's a hate march of aging hippies and radical anarchists, but in truth it will be friendly and joyful, diverse and full of everyday people from the nation's core believers, even if it has lost its way.
I would very well suggest that one million of those 75 million voters will be with us this time.
Because of all that fog, they have no more idea than the rest of us about our role in righting recent wrongs. But those who attend will see peace in these demonstrations, solidarity, attention and raucous laughter at the signs and inflatable costumes.
Love, compassion, peaceful gatherings. I spoke at Gettysburg a few weeks ago during a truly terrible day in America. Walking and driving through the battlefield beforehand, feeling the most enduring American tragedy of all, the ownership of human beings, I wondered what the hell I could say later that might bring hope to the people. And then we drove to the statue of Jenny Wade, the only civilian killed at Gettysburg. A stray bullet hit her while she was baking bread for her sister, who had just had a baby. And I realized I could preach that: the arbitrary harshness of loss, the sweetness of small human moments: a baby, a sister, a loaf of bread.
In dark times, what we have most left is each other. One of us could remind the others to look around for intermittent flashes of light, as a radical act. These change us. In my front garden, even with the autumn fog settling, I see the vigor of the trees still without leaves and, in one of them, many lemons, like sunny scores, and I can breathe freely again.
Anne Lamott, author of fiction and nonfiction, lives in Marin County.. His latest book is “Somehow: Thoughts on Love.” UNKNOWN: @annelamott
