Tuesday, May 13, 2008
Even though I'm addicted to hating the president, I'm trying to forgive him -- as Jesus would. It's not easy.
Sep 26, 2003 | Thank God for the fall. Summer nearly does me in every year. It's too hot and the light is unforgiving and the days go on way too long. This year the war on Iraq was still raging, even though our leaders kept insisting that it was over, and that people like me were giving aid and comfort to the enemy. I'm often sick about Bush, the war, joblessness and the deficit, but I was also soul-sick this summer to discover the secret gladness in me, gladness that everything has gone to hell for Bush. It was sickening, to feel relief when things went badly in Iraq, when joblessness didn't improve, and I hated this in me even as it alone gave me hope that someone else might end up in power next November. I felt addicted to the energy of hating Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft. I thought that if we stopped hating them, it would mean that they had won.
Then summer turned to autumn, 2003.
I headed out for church on Sunday filled with the usual mix of joy and profound anxiety about all of life. But church is my favorite place on earth, after the couch in my living room. In church, we don't live from our minds -- we live in community, which is to say, shared loss and joy, singing and praying and eating together. We don't sit huddled together in church, thinking.
I talked to more than one person before the service began, about the snap in the air. Everyone seemed glad summer was over. Spring is sweet, the baby season; summer is the teenage season -- too much energy, too much growth and beauty and heat and late nights, none of them what they were cracked up to be. Fall is the older season, a more seasoned season. The weather surrounds you, instead of beating down on you. Clouds bobble across the sky and there are fresh winds, and salmon pink sunrises, and then cool egg-blue skies. The weather is lighter, marbled -- the wind, the fog, mild sunny days, and it makes you feel like striding again, makes you glad that so much still works at all.
There has been less light as the colors begin to change, but even though the world has grown more desperate, some of us have more hope. It's partly because we finally believe we can bring this administration down, but it's also the weather. Day 1 of this story was overcast, cold, and it looked like rain but the water in the air moistened my lungs. I started cleaning out drawers, for no particular reason, and in one, I found a horribly tangled gold chain. I sat on the step in the cool Sunday morning and tugged on it for a while. This is what you always try first with a tangled chain, with slinky filament. It always makes things worse, but it's what you do.
I used to love to untangle chains when I was a child. I had thin, busy fingers, and I never gave up. Perhaps there was a psychiatric component to my concentration but like much of my psychic damage, this worked to everyone's advantage.
My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India; to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.
Sometimes I could put the chain on a table, and work it gently, letting the slink work itself out of the knot, but other times I had to use a needle to loosen the worst of it, poking at it lightly with the needle so I wouldn't break any of the links.
Yesterday, though, I put the chain back in the drawer and went inside to read the paper. This was a big mistake. Our pastor has been trying lately to convince us to act more like Martin Luther King, but I have to say, some days go better than others. I not only hate what the White House does -- I hate almost everyone I've ever heard of in the White House; except for Laura, and the dogs. Or at any rate, I like the springer spaniel, Spot Bush.
I've known for years that resentments don't hurt the person we resent, but they do hurt us. In some cases, they kill us. You die of hatred for your ex, your parents, for people who have ripped you off, for your leaders. I've been asking myself, am I willing to try to give up a tiny bit of this hatred?
Yeah; finally; theoretically. And that's a start. I used to tell my writing students to start their work anywhere they could, and then to let themselves do it poorly. This is the secret to life, and good writing. I was surprised by how reasonable this sounded. I wondered if I could try to love Bush, like Jesus or Dr. King would, without having to want to sleep with him, or have him for lunch, or a second term. I am sure that Jesus would not make me have lunch with him. Jesus ate with sinners. (Of course, they ended up killing him; so there's that.) He'd eat with Bush, even if he knew that Bush would probably call the police or Ashcroft on him later for his radical positions. He'd do it, because He is available to everyone. His love and mercy fall equally upon the just and the unjust, upon the quick and the dead.
This is so deeply not me. How could I ever get anywhere near this, and with what? My mind? Yeah, right.
Singing in church, sitting in silent prayer and confession, I decided to experiment with turning to those things that keep us going on a daily basis, to the fuel, which is renewal, chocolate and change itself.
Unfortunately, change is not my strong suit. Neither is forgiveness, or letting go. Everything I've ever let go of has claw marks on it. But the willingness to let go comes from the pain: and pain makes us willing to change, and effort to change changes you, and jiggles the spirit, gets to it somehow, to our deepest, hardest, most beautiful, ruined parts. And then Spirit expands, because that is its nature, and it drags along the body, and finally, the mind.
So when seasons change, buckle up.
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