Last night, as I watched
the presidential primary results trickle in and realized that Donald Trump was
about to win everything except Ohio (including my own state), I wondered, “What
can one do against such reckless hate?”
My personal internal
Aragorn replied, “Ride out with me. Ride out and
meet them.”
“Beg
pardon?” I mean, Viggo Mortenson as Aragorn is gorgeous and there really isn’t
a whole lot I wouldn’t do if he asked me to, but still.
“For
death and glory.”
“No,
actually—you see, I don’t actually have a horse and these aren’t really orcs—“[i]
And
that’s the problem. The same people who support banning Muslims from entering
the country, or deporting all undocumented immigrants, who stand by and watch
as fellow rally-attendees assault protesters, are also our neighbors and
relatives. It’s easy on the internet to dismiss them as little better than
orcs, but that’s a lie we tell ourselves to make it easier to be righteously
angry about the very real evils that are being propagated through this
campaign.
They’re
not evil, or at least not remarkably more evil than any of us. They’re just scared. And
as we all know, “fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate.”
So how
do you ride out against fear? Especially fearfulness of wide-ranging cultural
shifts and nightmarish, unpredictable attacks across the world? Because
honestly, I’m scared too. I got my positive pregnancy test the evening after
the attacks in Paris back in November, and had spent most of the day agonizing
over the burning of a French refugee camp in apparent retaliation for the
attacks and the hateful rhetoric I was reading online against desperate,
innocent people whose only crime was being a similar shade of brown to the
attackers. When I got the positive result, my first thought was, “Oh God, what
have I done?” Realizing how many people are so openly full of
hatred for others and disdainful of their shared God-imaged humanity is
terrifying. And it makes me want to hide away and lob insults from the safety
of my computer keyboard and to Other those Trump supporters in the same way
that they’ve Othered those who look differently or think differently or worship
differently from them. I can only see violence and death down that path. We’ve
been there before, and there’s no reason to think we won’t do it again.
But as
Fred Clark (linked above) concluded, “I think there exists a more excellent
way.”
In one of my absolutely
favorite books of the Bible, the author says that
“God is love. When we
take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in
us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us,
so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is
identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love
banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of
judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love. We,
though, are going to love—love and be loved. First we were loved, now we love.
He loved us first. If anyone boasts, “I love God,” and
goes right on hating his brother or sister, thinking nothing of it, he is a
liar. If he won’t love the person he can see, how can he love the God he can’t
see? The command we have from Christ is blunt: Loving God includes loving
people. You’ve got to love both.”[ii]
My love is not
particularly well-formed. It’s a half-assed, when-I-think-of-it kind of love,
but God has loved me first. And I’m not so idealistic as to think that I, by
myself, can somehow fix everything, but perhaps I can bring a little more love
into my own community. If God’s love in me can drive
out my fear, maybe more love can help other people take a deep breath and step
back from their own fears, too. So ride out with me. Ride out and love them.
[i] Though
if this primary season really were the Battle of Helm’s Deep, Marco Rubio would
probably be that poor elf guy whose name I can’t remember because he was only
in the movie and not in the book and died tragically in dramatic slo-mo without
having been able to affect the plot in any meaningful way.
No comments:
Post a Comment