Hold to the Difficult

• 

Friends, even as 2021 dawns, we are in a struggle to bend that moral arc towards justice.
Those who see clearly are collectively bending it together.

On the front lines of the pandemic, caring for the sick and dying.

Teaching children in homes and classrooms. Singing on zoom calls. Comforting the fearful. Sending beautiful words, thoughts and images into the airwaves.

• 

In the halls of power, speaking truth with Love, not hate and violence. At the Sacred Ancestral Sites in ceremony and prayer as the land is threatened to be destroyed for profit. Standing in the way of pipelines being readied to toxify our water.

On the streets, with hope for a new day of justice for all— not just a few. Facing down fires and tsunamis with soul force. Satyagraha.

• 

• 

Even as we begin our first steps into 2021, I’m in the wilderness listening to that still small voice inside, whispering my next direction. I think we all are wondering, what is ours to do? It’s not going to be something you hate, or something that is hateful or violent. Actually, according to Frederick Buechner, it’s when your deep gladness meets the world’s greatest need, something amazing can happen.

• 

We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. It has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if we could only arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloud shadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you.”

― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

May we all find the courage to go out and do what our souls are collectively calling us to in this New Year. Just make sure it’s connected to your deepest gladness…