Grieving what we have lost in America

The great pine tree on the south side of our house, with its intricate weave of branches and fulsome long green needles, has long been a favorite landing place for osprey whose nest is a little bit down river.  Quite often we fail to see an osprey cocooned in the tree limbs until it suddenly swoops down to the water below to seize some prey it has been observing awhile.  If it is lucky, it carries the fish back to its nest; if we are lucky, it returns to the tree for further communing, knowing that the fish that got away will be back.  And so we get to feel the closeness of the osprey a little longer.

One night this past February, during a heavy storm, the pine tree fell. We woke to find it horizontal, partially in the water, its branches as intact and majestic as they had been the day before, but lying helpless and inert. Its base had left a massive chasm, revealing rocks we had never seen before, now displaced in the uprooting. Today the tree rests like a still-warm corpse outside our south-facing window.  When my eye lands on it, I feel the deadness with a jolt. Its life is still living within me. I haven’t yet absorbed this blow. 

The downed tree draws me further into the sorrows surrounding me in our downed country.  I never felt this land was as perfect as a tree.  It has always had the capacity to jar us with its inconsistencies, and failures of empathy, and cruelty.  But we used to take some solace in the hope it was a work in progress.  We could live with the thought that human endeavors will inevitably fall short of the reassuring welcome and embrace of a full-gown tree.

I woke up the morning after our president called for the destruction of Iranian civilization, and the thud of the fallen tree was recapitulated. What had happened was not a sudden death. It was the confirmation of an incremental death we have been observing for some time, of America’s dignity and its commitment to respect for others, to the global community’s agreed norms, to minimizing of human suffering, to the preservation of a basis for future relationships of cooperation.

I grieve many things these days. The blatant self-dealing of our government, capped in the past week by an attempt to purloin $1.8 billion of taxpayer money to support those who, they claim, “suffered weaponization and lawfare.” This is a further foray in the project to rewrite the history of January 6, 2021 as a history of heroes protecting Trump’s supposed election victory. It conveniently overlooks the fact that a number of those doing time for their attack on the Capitol, whom our president has released from prison, have committed serious subsequent felonies.  It once again makes the Justice Department into Donald Trump’s personal instrument of revenge.

 Europeans are concluding that they no longer can trust in America as an ally.  “An absolute majority [of Europeans] view Trump as an “enemy” of Europe and U.S. foreign policy as “recolonization” reports Amanda Stoat in The Washington Post of April 8th, citing a recent article in Le Monde.  She continues, “Polls also reflect a growing belief that China is a more dependable partner.”

I grieve the disappearance of important institutions: the Department of Education, which went some distance to supplement locally-funded public schools’ efforts to provide education in places of social disadvantage; the US Agency for International Development, which has shared a very small percentage of American bounty with the needy of the world, undergirding development programs that are the bedrock of self-reliance. 

Of course there was already much to grieve before those currently in power took charge.  America has always been a place of idealistic words that attempted to hide its cruelty and mean-spiritedness and greed and selfishness. We have proclaimed that the land of the free would give everyone a chance to step into the fullness of life, and then persecuted a good many of our people so they would never be able to make good on this promise.

I grieve the disappearance of species, the drought, the sunburned trees, the choking air, the signals of centuries of exploitation of the earth, our most intrinsic treasure and the source of health and spiritual wellbeing. I grieve abandoned projects that were addressing these losses, and the profligate, disparaging attitudes of those who have mocked their importance.

I grieve the crass rejection of compassion, the grotesque support given to the ugliest of authoritarians by my government, the offhanded forms of international aggression that belie decades, yea, over a century of work to develop an international arena where disagreements are addressed, violence is delegitimated, and the well-being of humans is placed front and center as a goal of the human condition. 

I grieve the blatant lies and pervasive tampering with truth, the surreal capturing of media outlets and law firms that have been the American people’s guarantee that honesty and justice are benchmarks. 

I grieve the cruel treatment of immigrants and the crass dismissal of their essential value and place in the meaning of our country. I grieve the very concept of detention centers and shudder when I read about the conditions within them.

I grieve mechanisms that make it more difficult for people to vote.  I grieve the fact that our Supreme Court has, in past weeks, made decisions that reverse the Voting Rights act of 1965, and effectively will close down opportunities for black people to be fairly represented in our political life.  This is the first Supreme Court since the 1950s to reject civil rights claims in a majority of cases involving women and minorities.

I grieve the corporatizing of America – the monetizing of human relations, the diminishing of the true personal encounter, the suppression of graciousness and helpfulness. 

When my eye catches the broken tree outside my window, I grieve all over again the assault on my sensibilities that I experience in America right now. I imagine there are thousands, nay millions, of Americans who feel as I do.  We are incensed, enraged, shattered seeing the inert corpse in the water that used to be the promise of America. We bear it with all the more sorrow this year when we are commemorating 250 years since our declaration of government by the people that we liked to hold up as a beacon to the world.

I grieve the underhanded ways certain people and institutions have profited by our divisions and increased the national rift. I would like to be a person who builds bridges of understanding across our national divisions. I grieve that I am placed in a dilemma about whether, in speaking my mind, I am making those divisions worse. I did not vote for Donald Trump, but I have some understanding of why some people chose to vote for him – I know the left has played a role in letting this country down. But I hope fervently that those who voted for Mr. Trump out of a sincere belief that he would do some good will have the courage to admit he betrayed them. 

We are Americans, and that means we know that a democracy only survives and thrives when we are all involved.  So much of the time these days we suppress our sadness as we attend to the business of standing up for norms of goodness we thought were unassailable. We fall back on anger, and yes, self-righteousness. We attend to the flurry of appeals and suggestions that assault our inboxes. We apply our minds to master intricacies of the law we never thought we’d need to fully understand. We feel compelled to follow the news, including our president’s offhand, vulgar tweets, putting up with that sour taste in our mouths. We applaud our humorists. We train to be effective observers of ICE raids. We contribute to candidates. 

Our heads spin with the strain of too much time on screens, of too much scrolling. And if that weren’t bad enough, if the encroach of technology weren’t biting our sensibilities even as we address our other problems, we now have the additional, overwhelming threat of AI’s forward march, diminishing our originality, threatening to squeeze out the pumping blood of human reflection with a mechanized substitute that ignores the value of actual participation in centuries of human discussion and learning.

For those of us who have devoted lifetimes to trying to make a difference in the wounded wider world, we feel right now the urge to raise our game, work harder. And we also feel tired. But I want to be sure, first, that I linger with this wilderness moment.  It is a time of grief for lost loves, lost hopes, and lost dreams. We grieve so that we find the freedom of spirit to open ourselves to new places of light, new opportunities.  

Francis Weller, who writes and teaches about grief, tells us that being willing simply to be in its presence is where the “apprenticeship with sorrow” begins. Then we can develop practices that keep us steady.  Meditation that arises out of a place of grief anchors us.  “The gift of grief is the affirmation of life and of our intimacy with the world,” says Weller. “Without it,” he says, “we would not know the heartening quality of compassion, could not experience the full breath of love, the surprise of joy, we could not celebrate the sheer beauty of the world. Grief fosters each of these capabilities, deepening them by bringing gravity to the moment.” (The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief)

I want to be the kind of person who meets our moment at the deepest level.  I am still trying to figure out how to do that. But, to start with, please join me in looking this time of sorrow fully in the eye so that our spirits can be more grounded. To grow as people, to deepen, to have access to more inner resources, the ground of our being is most available to us through grief.  

Father Richard Rohr recognizes that grief and suffering have the power to transform people because our usual defenses do not work when we are grieving. “We are pulled out of our heads and into our hearts and sobs; we are finally thrown into the belly of the whale, where all transformation and enlightenment happens." It is only the tragic experience of life, he says, that is able to change people at any depth. (A Lever and a Place to Stand)

Thus, mourning is not a matter of sinking ourselves into a morass of self-pity from which we never emerge. Mourning is, rather, a chance to make acquaintance with the things we deeply care about, which is the first step in summoning new energy for life.