12th of June 2020

This is a time of great polarity, in both our bodies and in our communities. In it, we are experiencing great scarcities and also great abundances of various kinds. We hear and live stories with pain, suffering and protest. And we also hear and live stories with rest, sacrifice, and love. Often these stories are woven together. If we want to live in reality, then it seems that we have to hold the truth of these stories at the same time. As such, we can't diminish the ugly in favour of the beauty, or vice versa. We can’t diminish peace achieved, in favour of strife, or vice versa. 

This is the hard work of this time, and it is both deeply unprecedented and completely precedented.  Soren Kierkegaard reminds us that: “Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing...Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.”

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The work of love is hard and long and has seasons of immeasurable darkness and despair. Loving the world makes us vulnerable in this way—mourning when it mourns, celebrating when it celebrates. Love is responsive to reality. And reality doesn’t always look like what we want it to look like. But that’s why love isn’t the same as fantasy—it takes us back down to the ground, out of our ivory towers, out from behind locked doors, and out from our previous ways of relating—it takes us closer and expects more from us than we think we have to give. But it also promises us more than we are willing to hope for. And in this work, every generation has a task of its own. 

I’m finding this reflection mirrored and paired with hopeful expectation by the Jesuit Poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem “God’s Grandeur.” You can listen or read here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur.