Dear Great Heart:
My human heart is heavy. Our next president trusts a white supremacist for guidance and offers our foreign policy to Big Oil. He invites a climate change denier to head the agency protecting the environment. He exposes capitalism – without values beyond the bottom line of corporations and market gamblers. Around me, people feel powerless, anxious, afraid, angry, in grief for democracy, asking,“What can I do? How do I keep faith in life, in my fellow citizens, in myself?” Even as I write to you, I feel your response: We have to take good care of ourselves, because for democracy to survive, it needs us to hold capitalism accountable to an ethos of respect for individual rights, respect for cultural rights, and respect for the rights of the planet. This requires clear-minded, open-hearted, collaborative women and men, willing to move beyond individualism, remembering who we really are and always have been: Expressions of the Great Heart, the sea of loving kindness, God’s mercy. It needs us to dream together, plan together, resist together, organize together, stand together. This is why we form congregations, why religion exists: to remember that we are inextricably part of one another; as MLK said, “part of one seamless garment of destiny,” within the arc of the human story, bending ever so slowly toward justice, compassion, and peace. May we listen, care for ourselves and one another, and act from the heart, from You.
Thank you. I love you.
