There’s a lot of tough stuff going on in the world right now. There is too much bad/catastrophic/scary news for any one of us to take in. One of the challenges of this time, I think, is to be able to keep our hearts open and empathetic, without becoming overwhelmed by all the scary information we could have at our fingertips.
For me (and I’m not necessarily recommending this approach!), it’s meant that most pieces of bad news I cordon off into a category in my brain labeled something like “Wow, that’s terrible! Is there something I can do about it? If so, do that thing and then move on.” This mostly allows me to function, to do the work that I believe is meaningful and that is making a difference, without getting overwhelmed.
But every so often, that barrier comes down, and I just need to see and bear witness to one of these things. And the LA fires have been that thing for me this week.
I’m sure part of my reaction is the familiarity: my first job after college was at a school in the Pacific Palisades. One of our favorite hiking trails in LA was Eaton Canyon in Altadena. I remembered the names of the streets, the contours of the hills, enough to spend a couple hours poring over the maps, watching the news helicopter footage, looking up whether places I knew had been burned. This served no useful purpose, except just that I felt like I needed to watch, at least this time.
These moments remind me that I am a person, not a machine. We are living in hard times, scary times. It’s okay to be afraid, to have some time to not be okay when things are really not okay. It’s okay, sometimes, to just need to watch, without being effective, without having an answer.
But these moments also remind me that, as a person, I am resilient and powerful too. Right now, I am safe from wildfire, even though I remember what it felt like to be in danger from one. I, and we, are creative, adaptable, capable of change, capable of living through hard things, of learning from them. Humans, for all we mess things up, also have a track record of building a better world because of what we learn in challenging or even catastrophic times. Two things are just true of being human: we are vulnerable, and also we are able to act to keep ourselves and our communities as safe and healthy and vibrant as we can.
This balance is part of what it means to act for justice, I think. We keep our hearts and minds open, as much as we can, to perceive what is unjust. Then we hold onto the hope and the insistence that things can be better, we ask God for guidance and strength, and then we act. We can do all of that together, supporting each other when we are vulnerable, and trusting in our collective strength, and God working among us, to bring justice and goodness.
I hope you’ll come this week and have an experience of what it means to be in a community doing the best it can to be humans acting for justice. We need to see each other and sing together and act together in these days, especially.
With care,
Rev. Anne