This post was delivered as a message in Spring Friends Meeting on Eighth Month (August 11, 2024).

 

Today after meeting, Wendy and I are going to a small family birthday party, for a great-granddaughter who has turned seven.

That quiet gathering will be a very modest landmark in what has been a  very intense and weird month.

For that matter, this last four weeks have been vivid pieces of a  weird patchwork quilt that  raggedly covers eight long years.

Or nine years actually. It began as I watched an almost surreal ride down a golden escalator. From there it set off an improbable clamor that reached its first peak in an earthquake on November 8, 2016.

Not a geologic earthquake, but a political and cultural shaking every bit as real.

The tremors shattered a lot that was important to me. It was not only what happened in the White House. As the debris was falling all around, among the rubble were the mangled reputations of many scribes and seemingly wise analysts, pundits & pollsters who had been confidently reassuring me and many others that—pshaw, no such earthquake was nigh. Ridiculous — it couldn’t happen, wouldn’t happen. Come on, it’s only a media-driven illusion, sound and fury signifying nothing.

They were proved not just fools but damn fools, and by believing them I shared their folly. (Some renegades weren’t fooled. Hat-tip & bow to Michael Moore.)

The experience deepened the personal trauma, and I learned that many others felt utterly traumatized too:

I turned to my Friends meeting for help regaining some balance, and preparing for the aftershocks. In response, Spring Meeting held two threshing sessions, in late November, and January 2017.

These weren’t business meetings— we didn’t haggle over the wording of an indignant protest to send to (and be ignored by) various public officials; nor did we brainstorm implausible new programs. It was a meeting for venting,  mourning, facing fears, and at least momentary consolation. They were good, or in Quaker-talk, serviceable.  Morale-building.

They encouraged us to do a bit more: in March of 2017, Spring convened what was called the CFEC, the Carolina Friends Emergency Consultation (I confess the grandiloquent title was my coinage): It was a day of workshops on various concerns, such as possible capture of the Supreme Court, vote suppression, and other looming perils, Friends from several other area meeting came, and we leavened the ponderous talk with music. We even pulled the rope and rang Spring’s bell.

Then in May ‘17, Spring joined several other meetings in an afternoon art show & mini-festival, “The Art of Fearlessness.” Stuff for kids, music, chalk on the sidewalk, and we rang the bell again.

Good ideas, good fellowship. I think we would have done more events like them, but — then more events: especially the pandemic.

One good thing happened for me in 2017– a great-granddaughter was born, in Robeson County, NC. But what would I & my generation leave behind for her?

Other good news was sparse. Our regional Quaker association, North Carolina Yearly Meeting, had been infected with a religious version of this wider polarization, and actually staged a micro-version of the earthquake, by abolishing itself in August 2017, after 320 years. (Spring Meeting kept toddling along on its own, though.)

In  October 2019, I had a stroke — not a terribly awful one as they go, but I had to stop driving (personally historic), and it slowed me down. That was soon followed by an even more, nation- and planet-wide “stroke,” in the form of Covid.

I’m working hard to forget all that pandemic trauma, its weirdness and horror, and it seems a lot of others are too. By 2019 and early 2020, I was chronically worried & anxious about a rerun of the political earthquake. In the meantime I lost at least ten friends and acquaintances to Covid.

In my numerous doctor visits: they always asked, brows furrowed in earnest concern, “How are you doing?”

Me: There were some aches & pains, but mostly I’m worried & depressed, about you-know-what.

Docs: “You want some pills? Anti-depressants? I got a suitcase full.” (I added that last bit, but it’s true.)

Me: No. Not yet anyway. (But at Big Pharma, my God how the money rolled in. Still does.)

The signature song for this time is by the late great Leonard Cohen, called The Darkness. In it he laments,

I’ve got no future,
I know my days are few
And the present’s not that pleasant,
Just a lot of things to do.
I thought the past would last me,
But the Darkness got that too.”

Still, I kept going. Trudging along: Masks, avoiding antidepressant pills, lockdowns, cadging rides, hoping to keep coping with the craziness.

Fast forward to less than a month ago, July 2024. After watching some frenzied party nights in Milwaukee, it looked like the earthquake was almost sure to be repeated this November. Words such as “landslide” were in the air like victory parade confetti. Along with talk of a big project for next year, 2025.

I haven’t told anyone this, but many mornings, reading newspapers online, tears leaked out. Not sobs. But stray tears, especially thinking about my great-granddaughter, and now her younger sister, the two of them, and the other kids and grandkids. What would be left for them?

Sometimes it got so bad I began to think about reconsidering the anti-depressant pills. But still didn’t.

And then you may have noticed, something amazing happened, not just to me, but to us: instead of an earthquake we had a hand-off.

After that, maybe more amazing, an unexpected turnaround.

And it felt kind of like this last Friday: we had had a week of  hurricane Debby lingering: wet & gray, flood warnings, power outages. Finally, on Friday there were breaks in the cloud cover, admitting glimpses of blue and sunshine beyond it. A fitting visual metaphor, only my period of dark inward clouds, thunder and storms, wildfires and droughts, had lasted eight years.

Well, today, the planet’s climate is still getting worse, but the sky is blue and the mood is still shifting: all of a sudden, upbeat & hopeful.

How long will it last?

I don’t know the future. I gave up predictions awhile back — before I copied Dana Milbank, thankfully. My crystal ball is in the shop, and the tech keeps  telling me  the spare parts for it are stuck on one of those big container ships the Houthis are trying to sink in the Middle East.

But I hope the new hope stays awhile. Not just for me; I’m old & tired. But my great granddaughters are young. So are other people’s kids. and even lots of happy cat ladies with new rescue kittens: they all have futures that need preserving.

When Dr. King talked to us about his own dream of a better world, at the 1963 March on Washington, he closed by riffing on the phrase, “Let freedom ring!”

And “Freedom” has been ringing this week on the campaign trail, and somewhere inside me. It’s like the Peter Paul Mary & Pete Seeger song, “If I had a Hammer,” the hammer of justice, which also sings about the bell of freedom.

Well, I don’t have a hammer this morning, or the bell of freedom. But Spring Friends Meeting has a bell, right back there. And I think we ought to give that bell a good weird ring this morning.

Like right now, and let its freedom ringing take us into open worship.

Who’s with me?