Be each other's hope right now

I suspect I’m not alone in not sleeping well last night and waking up with a sinking feeling in my chest. The results of the election are heartbreaking. I opened up Facebook to see so many messages from people I grew up with and family members, people from rural Indiana, who saw Trump’s victory (and likely the Republican sweep of Congress) as a religious victory: Jesus taking the wheel.

But other things happened this morning which gave me hope.

A phone call with my 70 year old mother who is grieving the results, as well, and doing her part to change hearts and minds in her corner of the Midwest.

A text exchange with Blake Chastain, Lenny Duncan, and Redeem Robinson, who I’m talking to live this evening, about the work ahead of us.

A beautiful post by CML Bishop and Reina Ortiz that reminded me that change starts from the ground up.

Here’s Ortiz:

But I have come to learn, begrudgingly, that hope is not something one finds, but rather that it is a gift. There is an Arab idiom, which has been reiterated and expounded upon by bell hooks in All About Love, which says that “resistance is the deepest form of love,” and what is resistance, if not, the courageous decision to hope?

Today, we need to be hope for each other, which means we need to be love for each other, which means, we need to resist for each other.

I’m not trying to sugarcoat anything. Things will get darker in this country for many of us as we see more rights taken away and as hatred and bigotry are nurtured from the top.

But there will also be love and joy to the extent that we can offer it to each other. I echo Baldwin who, in The Fire, Next Time uses “the word ‘love’ … not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

Baldwin had hope that growth was possible for the country. That repentance and redemption were possible. And he believed that this growth was possible through love and collaboration.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the world.

James Baldwin

Our journeys are not over, and they are not separate. Let’s fight, and hope, and love together.

Join me this evening at youtube.com/@radicalsoul at 5pm PT/8pm ET with Blake, Lenny, and Redeem as we discuss a gameplan for combating Christian nationalism—one of the most powerful movements and perspectives that guides the country’s political power.

Featured image: Hope by Serafino Rudari