With all that’s been going on, I felt a little more worried than usual when Kathy left Friday for a couple of days on grandma duty in San Diego. What if something happened during her drive? It’s called catastrophizing, imagining the worst in every situation. The catastrophizer will say that bad things happen all the time. People have car accidents. County fire warnings reach a neighborhood hours too late, and someone’s grandmother perishes. Your home, church building, school, or place of business burns down. All that happened one Tuesday and Wednesday in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. On the prior Sunday, only the catastrophizers (and perhaps the meteorologists) imagined such things for the week ahead.The rationalist replies unhelpfully that these things usually don’t happen, which is true. The reply is “but it might,” and the circle goes round. Catastrophizing can be debilitating. Chronic sufferers can get treatment. But worrying about something unlikely happening to our beloveds can also be a spiritual practice. Imagining life without them can make our lives together better. On Ash Wednesday, when ashes are imposed, we hear a minister say “remember that you are dust, and to dust you will return.” I always hear it as an invitation to store up the treasurers of the heart. Make every moment with someone count.
For those in the body of Christ, this goes for the someones we know, and the someones we don’t. The someones who are like us, and the someones who are different. It sounds simple, but sadly, it is not. This week some people hated on Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde just for speaking up on behalf of our frightened neighbors, especially trans people who want to live authentic lives and immigrant workers who do their jobs, care for their families, and pay their taxes.
All she deserved was the thanks of an exhausted, anxious nation. She invited her hearers, every one of us, on the spiritual adventure of construing ourselves as members of one American community, one nation under God in our magnificent diversity, doing our best each day, with leaders who have our backs. Everyone of us a someone who would be missed by our beloveds if we were gone, whether taken by sickness, fire, or ICE.
Faithful or not, the leaders of a divided country, whatever their political beliefs, could put this way of thinking into practical action by pledging each day to do their best for the largest number of their constituents. Through the bishop’s teaching, our Lord Jesus Christ offers them a beautiful gift — a call to the vocation of enabling liberty and justice for all. National unity sounds so foreign these days that some may reckon Jesus’s invitation as a curse instead of a blessing. Yet they can still open the gift whenever they want. Let us pray that they do, and begin to heal our land and help us come home to one another again.