Grace & Gratitude. Sanity & Singing. Repentance & Resistance. A Hopeful Manifesto for These Times.

1. Grace & gratitude are as real as gravity, & we need these to guide us & ground us. Grace is unlimited because if the grace of God can be shared with the idolatrous sinners of scripture, if grace can be given to a reformed drunk & delusionist now crazy poet mystic like me, it can be shared with everyone & anyone. That means everyone. Even our political adversaries are recipients of a gratuitous grace. Every single one of them. Don’t plan a revolution without grace. Return to its wellspring often.

2. Talk to each other. Talk to everyone. Strangers, friends, leftwing or rightwing or no-wing, all of the above, it doesn’t matter. Talk to people about everything except politics. Music, TV shows, movies, weather, even God, try to have a meaningful conversation where you are right now about what is actually going on in your lives. Let’s try to avoid shaming & blaming our neighbors for making choices we don’t approve of because plain & simple, we are not in charge. You are not in control, & neither am I. The political binary is blinding us in ways we cannot even comprehend because we are so caught up in the either-or narratives to which we don’t belong. We belong to each other. Extremist ultimatums & temper tantrum tyranny are the way of an evil warrior. We share the earth, just another someone standing on common ground, breathing common air, blood running through our veins. Fundamental human unity remains an incontrovertible fact of existence. Cosmic reality requires admission & acceptance of the ways in which we really do have so much in common. Don’t dehumanize, even the dehumanizers. Try hope. Try it.

3. Sing Kumbaya. Sing This Land Is Your Land. Sing Sit At The Welcome Table. Sing We Shall Overcome. Hold hands & say the Lord’s Prayer & the Serenity Prayer. Sing the Doxology. Sing all the old songs that your parents & grandparents sang when they marched with Dr. King. Stop saying “I wonder if I would have marched if I lived back then.” This is our “back then.” March. But don’t forget to sing. To Hold Hands. To pray with your heart & pray with your words, even while you are praying with your feet. Stop saying love doesn’t work when you have anger & fear in your heart. Try giving love the first try or one more try. Try it & see if love doesn’t make fighting seem like less of a struggle. Try love. Sing Kumbaya.

4. Repent. Repent. Yes repent. Don’t forget to repent -- repent because the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand. But if you are white, middle-class cis-het Christian person of privilege like me, repent for the part of our collective lineage that was there & is responsible for the collective sins of our past. Don’t do it out of guilty, because you might not be guilty but we bear the cross for our foreparents in the deepest cellular river of psychic debt. Repent of white supremacy, slavery, racism, native american genocide, sexism, bigotry against the LGBTQI family, repent of overconsumption & exploitation of earth. Reparations as prerequisitive for collective reconciliation. Remember Jesus accepted his share of the responsibility for the guilt of humankind, & he wasn’t even guilty of anything except blasphemy. Participate in the holy blasphemy of sacred disobedience to the immoral executive orders of these early days of a new kind of evil empire. Moral dissent is our calling, repent for the past that made this possible, & join the loving revolt for the future of humanity.

5. Don’t give away the sweetness of joy & sanctity of sanity & the loving love. Take time for self-care. Take a day off the news, a day off social media, a day to yourself. So much sanity & so much love, these are subversive to the core. This is a time where the couple behind the barricades in a passionate embrace provides the crucible of true defiance. We will compromise when it doesn’t destroy our values, we will admit when me might be wrong, we will work to make it better for everyone & not just a few, we will share the abundance of mercy with as many as we can, but we will not compromise our center, our beating hearts, our breathing lungs of loving joy, a holy precious reality underlying all the other unrealities constructed to distract us. We rejoice in our differences even with the ones who hate difference, please don’t flatten us into bland & blind illusion of whatever you’ve been told is true by the manufacturers of lies. Please don’t say love doesn’t matter. Don’t let the seriousness of righteous anger suffocate the tender laughter & the sweet relief of human beings as fellow human beings. Hold on to love. Believe in love. Love is resistance. Resistance without love is defeat. We are love. We are resistance.

6. Read Will D. Campbell:
“I believe God made the St. Lawrence River, and the Rio Grande River, and the China Sea and the English Channel, but I don’t believe God made America, or Canada, or Mexico, or England, or China. Man did that. It is doubtful that there has ever been a nation established for bad reasons. Nations are always established to escape tyranny, to combat evil, to find freedom, to reach heaven. Man has always been able to desire to build a heaven. But it seems he has never been able to admit that he didn’t pull it off. So he keeps insisting that he did pull it off. And that is really what patriotism is all about. It is the insistence that what we have done is sacred. It is that transference of allegiance from what God did in creating the whole wide world to what we have done with (or to) a little sliver of it. Patriotism is immoral. Flying a national flag—any national flag—in a church house is a symbol of idolatry. Singing ‘God Bless America’ in a Christian service is blasphemy. Patriotism is immoral because it is a violation of the First Commandment.”   ~ Will D. Campbell ~