In his poem "The Cure at Troy," Seamus Heaney writes "Call the miracle self-healing; the utter self-revealing double take of feeling... someone is hearing the outcry and the birth-cry of new life at its term. It means once in a lifetime that justice can rise up and hope and history rhyme."
"...New life at its term..." It feels as if many around me are caught up in the hope, "the outcry," "the birth-cry" of hope for change, a word which unfortunately has gotten tired in itself from sheer repetition. But add to the hope of presidential change, and financial change, even change in the way we sell cars (hopefully? is it too much to ask?) it is Advent for some Christians, a time when birth-pangs and cries in the wilderness resonate and promise to bring about revolutionary change. Because if we don't believe that each coming of Christ brings about revolution, why are we wasting time reading the Gospel and celebrating the Eucharist, where every sacramental act is an earth-shaking offering of God's power visited on our earthly selves?
This last several months leading up to this presidential election saw young people pounding on doors for voters to come out and be counted, and retirees who had once been active in the peace marches and picket lines of the 60s, but had grown jaded and discouraged suddenly bursting again with new hope for the future of our country. If nothing other than that sheer hope I joined in. Me, one of the products of the "Me Generation" who had sold out the legacy of the 60s for our MBAs and economic pragmatism and guzzling gas in our SUVs and Ford F-250s. And while I was never wealthy enough to completely sell out, I got caught up in the self-analysis and psychological entitlement that comes from worrying more about my inner child than about the starving child in Africa, focusing more on self-empowerment than empoweringthose in Second and Third World countries.
If nothing else comes out of the election of Barack Obama than making history, at least it can be said that the generations of the 60s and 70s got caught up in the idealism of Gen-Xers, and many people, the majority of people in this country came to believe that they could make a difference and their voices were heard.
But I believe even more than that will happen, if we also unite our political voices with prayers that we be given the strength to sacrifice ourselves when that is called for, that we put the needs of the rest of the world on the FRONT burner when we act as a country. This new president has the vision of a larger world that comes from living in other countries, a world view that does not assume that everyone shares the values of affluent white Americans.
Can you feel the synchronicity of faith and justice colliding? Out of this confluence of values a new world is being birthed.
