Resources for Resistance
In this part of the world it’s back to school season, a time to take inventory of supplies, arrange schedules, and restart routines. Although I’m not a teacher nor student right now, my work in vocation ministry has also put me in planning mode and I feel the crunch of time ticking away, eating up my sense of summer ease.
I need to reset some things in my life, to establish some steady rhythms that hold my sometimes-fragile heart and health, that provide the container for my spirit to thrive so I can still authentically show up to love and serve others no matter how heavy the state of the world.
Here’s the messiness of Christian living nowadays: we must respond to reality by staying in solidarity and acting in response to many needs, plus remain rooted in what’s good, right, and just. Yes, we intimately know the horrors of injustice and crumbling systems yet remain hopeful, loving healers and activists.
I wondered: what are the foundations that can feed my faith in action right now? I dove into the Messy Jesus Business archives for some inspiration. Some of what I found might serve you too.
“When I am striving to get back to the basics, I find it helpful to return to the Word of God, to pray with the Scriptures that say it straight.”
“King cautions against maintaining a tough mind at the expense of our tender hearts, lamenting that a hard-hearted person “is too cold to have affection for another and too self-centered to have joy in another’s joy and sorrow in another’s sorrow.”’
“Creating new things that I aim to keep going demands a fierce hope from me — a hope that trusts in the graces of growth, progress and transformation along with an abundance of time, health and energy. A hope that trusts in God’s timing and mysterious ways, and tends to the possibilities found in each small ‘yes’ to love.”
“With all the news of heartache, fear and pain rapidly increasing in our world today, it seems we are stuck upon the cross, we are stuck in Good Friday.
We need not stay stuck. We believe in Easter Sunday and we know it is always coming in three days. We know that Christ’s wounds upon his body have been transformed, glorified.”
“I have also come to see the inevitable anxiousness as not only necessary but also sacramental. While I must be aware of my limits and the reality of unhealthy anxiety, especially in the form of mental illness, I see some level of anxiousness as a gift; a signpost on my journey toward Christian discipleship. An indication that—with God’s help—I can to learn to embrace fear and then to let it go.”
“The trouble is that neither our very best intentions nor our deepest guilt and shame will fix racism. Yet many of us who were raised Catholic have quite a bit of both, so it will require a lot of patience and strength to recognize that neither will serve the deep transformation that we are being called to engage as white people.”
(a poem and a playlist!)
As we navigate these messy, beautiful and horrible times together, my prayer is that each of us is strengthened by a community of faith, by spirited people who encourage us and help us each know the graces of mercy and might. A might that resists oppression, serves the suffering and remains fierce in hope, thanks be to God.