Holding Two Truths, Seeing the Path

"If America hasn't broken your heart, you have not loved her enough." -Cory Booker

In past posts, I’ve written about the need to personally affirm your values, and the place of intentionality prior to deciding to take action.

Today, I’m attempting to cover a more difficult action: holding two seemingly opposite truths at once.

Let’s begin with a simple truth about the media: no medium is “independent.” As we seek to navigate the current chaos and moral darkness, the media are of little help. Independent, Corporate, or Individual, they all want clicks, and they gauge their headlines and openers accordingly, depending upon the audience they have decided to reach.

Here are two examples from Substack, the medium you and I are using right now: May we have occasion to hope today? Ariella Elm has three daily good things that Democrats did. Occasion to despair? Ben Meiselas will begin by telling you the latest dastardly thing that the Regime has done, and remind you to get a paid subscription in the close. Evening gratitude lists are a Good Thing, and being wise as serpents about the wiles of this world only makes common sense these days. However:

The resulting seesaw of emotional states we experience as part of this chaos will at best slow us down, and at worst cripple our resolve to get through it intact. How, then, shall we live?

illustration courtesy of nano bananna

I asked my resident Human Authority to name the opposite of hope. “Resignation,” was her answer. Hope, she explained, provides energy for a different future. Resignation decides that no change is possible: the present IS the future. Resignation is the result of learned pessimism.

In the last few decades mainstream media news producers recognized that we are looking for adrenalin at the opening and a hopeful end. That final TV news story about a touching family reunion or an unlikely pairing of seemingly mortally opposed animals, or a successful volunteer effort in a natural disaster are all carefully selected for a soft finish to the hard news. But the hard times we are in now do not get “balanced” by this lighter stuff.

The hope I’m referring to does not have an evanescent source in a story of one detained person being released by ICE, or a schadenfreude video of a President whose physical faculties are visibly decompensating, or a victory for justice wrought in a difficult legal case against the Regime. Or even, for this independent, a few Democrat “wins”.

The hope I am putting forward here comes from a deep understanding that one’s values will prevail. It comes from the conviction that it is possible to have a government that administers both justice and mercy with even handedness. It comes from a conviction that it is possible to have a vigorous and truthful dialogue between fiscal conservatives and social liberals, a dialogue that culminates in the fashioning of laws and policies that enable us to live with ourselves and each other.

This hope is exemplified by a familiar quotation often attributed to Martin Luther King, Jr., who was condensing an affirmation from a sermon by Unitarian minister Theodore Parker published in 1853:

the arc of the moral universe is long, and it bends towards justice.

The conviction that justice prevails eventually has already had a long history in this country. It has provided many with a basic foundation for existential hope that can face the most difficult of conditions, and counter the temptation of cynicism, the doorway to resignation.

What do we do when it is clear that the obstacles to that “bending arc” are seemingly insurmountable? The US Supreme Court’s ruling on absolute legal immunity for presidential decisions, for example, struck a huge blow against just decision-making by the Executive Branch of the US Government. Our country has repeatedly provided incentives for these obstacles to both exist and grow in both size and number.

When we are faced with these obstacles, we need to hold a second truth, through what I would call our lamentation. Lamentation is transformed anger.

In his book The Tears of Things: Prophetic Wisdom for an Age of Outrage, Richard Rohr takes up the subject of lamentation as a transformative process, noting from his examination of the Bible’s Book of Lamentations:

Lamentations ends with a final warning against “an anger that knows no limit” (5:22, jb), which too often we have confused for God’s anger. But this surely must refer to our own anger and our own spirit and expectation of rejection. If we believe that God is angry in the way that humans are, then it is too easy for all of us to end up being angry “without limit.” (p105)

Angry “without limit” is exactly how the media thrive: it creates a limbic condition in which your body’s vigilance compels you to click on the latest outrageous headline, which leads to a paragraph that only confirms what you had feared already, which in turn propels further anger as a response to the fear, guaranteeing that you’ll click again on the next outrageous follow-up headline.

Lamenting breaks that limbic cycle of fear and anger.

The media have their informative place: I am grateful that enterprising individuals are willing to put themselves in harm’s way to bring us verifiable stories of murder and injustice, perpetrated in my name by the the current Regime. My response to these stories, however, is to lament these atrocities, and decry what my government is saying in my name. Shedding tears is not a sign of hopeless frustration: It is my recognition of the current gap between justice and practice, between skillful means and mean behavior.

Lamentation is never self-pity. It is an agreement to live in and respond to that awful gap between what we know is just and right, and what we see is our (often incentivized) corporate inability to practice what we know.

As Rohr goes on to point out, it is a place of transformation. These are his observations about Jeremiah, the prophet of Israel’s exile to and return from Babylon:

In the prophecies of Jeremiah, all hopes for the future of the Jewish people lie in those who endured a three-stage process of transformation: first, those who entered into exile; second, those who retained hope and did not turn bitter in and during that exile; and, third, those who returned from exile with generativity [sic] and praise in their hearts instead of self-pity.

These people are the change agents for culture, paralleling the classic three stages of purgation, illumination, and union. (p106)

I want to become an agent of change, and this is my path: holding hope and lamentation together. I refuse to surrender my hope in the face of my lamentation, and refuse to stop lamenting because I have hope. The two need to be accepted and exercised together. Here’s why:

The path forward for our country (and, I believe, a renewed form of democracy that informs and guides our governance) lies somewhere between these two conditions of lamentation and hope. In that space, our lament focuses on the truth of what is, and our hope on what has yet to become.

If enough of us begin holding those conditions simultaneously, and intentionally living our values, our hearts will inevitably recognize the way forward. Not because we finally have a hero to follow, not because it’s good for our investment portfolio, not because the Bible tells us so....

But because we see that for which we have been waiting, and we have the means to embrace it.