Over the past few months I’ve had a nagging thought that has gradually taken shape and come to fruition at a time when I have desperately needed it.
It all started back when Helene blasted her way through our community and so many of us were just in this space of getting through to the next thing. And it made sense. There is certainly part of a natural disaster that really is nothing short of survival, hoping upon hope that things will indeed get better.
And yet I realized how often we are holding out and holding on for dear life. Take parenthood, for instance. We hold on in the newborn stage, hoping upon hope that one day we’ll sleep again. Then we get to toddlers and can’t imagine being able to grocery shop in peace, minus the adorable octopus of a child who makes mad grabs at anything within reach. Eventually we get to adolescence, that stage where we truly think that there is such a thing as Death by Parenthood and they tell us that we just have to make it until they are out the door. And then, per one local rector, we receive this little nugget of parenthood wisdom: “The first forty years are the hardest.”
Do we ever get there?
We are so often holding out for better days ahead, just white knuckling our way through. But those better days are not a guarantee. Sometimes one kind of hard replaces another. And sometimes it just lands on top of the already hard and we start dealing with layer upon layer of hard, an existential parfait of life’s little and big challenges.
So a while back I realized that maybe, just maybe, we would be better off accepting the hard as the normal and not some blip on the radar that will disappear when the life we want, the life we think we are owed, shows up.
Last month I listened to Kate Bowler’s interview with Rev. Sam Wells, vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London. He talks of his mother’s very hard life, as a refugee of the Holocaust, as a mother who lost two children shortly after birth, and then as a woman battled cancer for 14 years before her death at age 53.
As Kate spoke with him she said: “...I realized that so much of your tenderness in your personality comes from this place of knowing where I don’t have to explain to you that sometimes life is difficult and people go through personal tragedy because it’s a part, it’s life woven into who you are.”
His response was what got me: “..I think when people approach something like suffering… it’s all about what you think the normal story is…I’m firmly convinced we live our lives in stories and the story of suffering for somebody who thinks they are born with some sort of entitlement to a life of a certain security and well-being and health and modest success…If that’s their implied story, then suffering is made of up of why me? This is a terrible scar…So the default in our household was never, you know, why doesn’t it work out for us?”
The word ‘entitlement’ stuck with me.
One definition of entitlement from Oxford Languages is “the belief that one is inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment.”
Fast forward to the election, the inauguration, and the past two weeks of executive order upon executive order and news stories and developments coming so fast it’s like trying to drink out of a fire hose to keep up. And everywhere I see the dismantling of our national government and the very real possibility of the loss of our democracy, our freedom, and life as we know it.
And part of me, at times all of me, wants to panic or cry or flee the country altogether. But there’s another thought that comes to mind.
Who am I to believe that I am entitled to a life free of suffering and oppression?
Well, let me backtrack…I would be the first to say that there is certainly a lot of suffering that can and does happen within the bounds of a free society and I have had my share (and probably written about it ad nauseam). And I will also be the first to say we should do everything in our power to protect our free society and fight oppression in any and all forms.
But I also recognize that I have not experienced oppression the way so many have throughout the whole of human history. I have not personally encountered pogroms or massacres, slavery or feudalism. I have not had to watch my own husband or son go off to war or had my home burned by the enemy forces. I have not, as some of Matt’s ancestors did, buried nine of my twelve children before they reached adulthood. And I have not, as all four of my great grandmothers did, died prematurely due to lack of vaccines or basic antibiotics. I, and those I know and love, have not spent time in prison for my political or theological beliefs and I have not been attacked for the color of my skin.
I have not had to run. I have not had to hide. And while I certainly know what it is like to be dismissed and ignored, patronized and even scorned because of my gender; I am a white, Anglo-Saxon (with some German, Dutch, and a hair of some other things mixed in for variety’s sake), Protestant, middle-class, straight, educated person, I have never been discriminated against based on my color, ethnicity, education, orientation, or socioeconomic status.
Perhaps it has all been too easy. Perhaps we are about to learn what so many others throughout time have known, that there are no guarantees on freedom or safety. That at any time and in any place we could come face to face with oppression. Maybe it is time for us to learn the lessons that our Black brothers and sisters have learned, passed down, generation to generation, from their ancestors in shackles at the hands of mine, or at least those who looked like me. Maybe it is time to learn from my Jewish brothers and sisters, who learned from their parents and grandparent, great grandparents and aunts and uncles what it is like to be in hiding, to depend on the kindness of neighbors for a hope of safety and a life ahead. Maybe it is time to learn from my indigenous brothers and sisters what it is like to have what is rightfully theirs taken from them, and done so, as it often was, in the name of God.
Maybe it is time to stop hoping for better days to come and start embracing the days that are now. Maybe the good days made us lazy and entitled, leaving us with the expectation that life owed us something. Maybe the good times led to too much independence from each other and reliance on all the things that our driven, white, middle class, American culture values: money, stuff, success, and a house worthy of HGTV.
So this is what I’m thinking: We aren’t guaranteed anything. We shouldn’t be surprised when the hard times come.
Should we do what we can when we can to push back against oppression and seek to have a free and just society for all?
ABSOLUTELY!
But there may be times when all we see is the hard and in that hard we are called, per Micah 6:8, to do the most basic of things: Do justice. Love mercy. And walk humbly with our God.
