As this new year begins...

Here are some thoughts that are useful for me. Maybe they will help you too.

As 2023 drew to a close, I began seeing this meme a lot:

I certainly relate to these sentiments. I want them to be true. I think we need to be clear-eyed, though, that we’re not in for an uneventful or uninteresting year. (The precedented part…well, some very evil potentialities are unfortunately precedented.) I don’t call this being cynical or pessimistic. I see it as being as wise as a serpent even as I strive to be gentle as a dove.

It is, after all, a presidential election year in the U.S. I have lost count of how many criminal and civil cases our former president - and Republican Party frontrunner - is currently embroiled in. He has a host of extremist henchmen doing his bidding in Congress and beyond. He has convinced a significant percentage of the population of an alternate “reality” in which everyone is out to get him and his followers. He is using language and tactics previously employed by dictators and masterminds of genocide.

I have moments of genuine despair thinking about where we are as a country and as Church, because some segments of the Church are complicit in the white “Christian” nationalism the former president deals in while some others are not raising enough of a ruckus about the injustices of our world. (I give thanks for the parts of the Church that are active in making change.) I was at one of those low points recently when I read a blog post that was assigned for my upcoming Doctor of Ministry class on Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk who became a well-known voice of protest against the Vietnam War.

Jim Forest, the blogger, was a young activist in the mid-20th century who was deeply frustrated that his work on behalf of peace seemed to be going nowhere. He wrote a letter to Merton expressing his anguish. Here you can find both his letter and Merton’s response. Merton urges Forest, “Do not depend on the hope of results.” The metric we must use is our faithfulness to God’s call to love like Jesus, which is mostly in our control, as opposed to what our actual impact is, which is beyond our control. We will never truly know how a word or action moves the needle, and if we have to see tangible results, we will quickly become discouraged or burn out. Instead, we must trust that God is at work in, around, and through us in ways we cannot perceive.

I don’t know what results we’ll see this year. I hope to be nicely surprised! But Merton’s urging to stay focused on the effort rather than the outcome is a helpful one, as his reminder that “In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.” All life, all faith is about connection - to God, to each other, to our own bodies, and to the created world. If we can build and strengthen relationships, this will both move love forward and fuel us for the work that is ours to do.

So in this new year, may you be wise as a serpent and gentle as a dove. May you persist in love, changing everything and everyone through it. And may you know that God is here, close at hand and yet everywhere, tearing down what is evil and building up all that is good, even if the timeline stretches out far beyond what we will know.

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