Went this evening to an interfaith "Vigil for the Healing of the World" at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It was a program put together before the election, in anticipation of a fractured electorate, an uncertain or contested outcome, and rumblings or realities of violence, but there is no violence, as our side doesn't do that. Given where we are instead, the prayers and readings and musical performances for healing and reconciliation, listening and uniting resonated less than the repeated reassurances, from one tradition after another, that darkness doesn't overcome light, that a single light, a candle, "this little light of mine" offers comfort and reminds us that darkness will not prevail, that there will be light in the morning. We ended with tapers, the light quickly spreading through the cavernous nave of the Cathedral. (What to do with the lit tapers is always a question.)
Moving through sections on Dignity, Justice and Peace, the vigil was beautifully and earnestly put together, a demonstration of the sweet promise of interreligious harmony and solidarity. But it didn't move me as I'd been hoping to be moved. I realize now I had been hoping to weep, to be among many people also feeling bereft and betrayed and at risk as we enter what will unquestionably be a dark age for many. I've felt numb all day and the numbness is still there. But religious traditions at their best don't give false comfort: this moment is dark. Despite the inevitable dilutions of interfaith performances, these representatives of organized religion know that being together for each other is what we can do, and will even more urgently need to do going forward. I don't doubt I'll tap back into what we did do, incomplete as it was, in the seasons of hardship ahead.
I also went to a prayer gathering eight years ago, after the first calamity, under the sky in Washington Square Park. That wasn't as artfully curated an event as this, as top-down, as decorous. Huddling together in the cold rather than seated in rows in a heated fortress of a church, our feelings were more exposed. We'll need all these ways of being there for those whom the new regime will target, and when we too become targets.
But actually there was something in tonight's service, a poem read right at the start, that is nourishing me already. It connects to an important thing we learned the first time. It is not incidentally that they caused you worry and fear: your worry and fear is their object. And they are led by a shambling master of casual cruelty and monopolizing attention. If you let him, he will drive you to despair through a kind of slow torture of daily cuts, each act of cruelty or disdain primed and spread out for maximal pain. This time last time, the sadism was just beginning with the drip-feed announcement of one after another outrageous choice for positions in the cabinet: a climate denier for interior, an enemy of public schools for education... I can hear rumblings of a repeat already. His bloodthirsty cronies are looking forward to hearing our howls of impotent horror.
Pain and grief we must and can't but feel, but not at his bidding. This awareness might have been one reason Pádraig Ó Tuama =, the gay Irish poet and theologian who started the vigil, began with a reading of his poem "Rite of Baptism." It includes these lines:
Some
of our people will hate you as they hate themselves.
You must create a life
without giving them all your life’s attention.
