Indulge me for a moment, because, the following words express my own struggle with the times in which we live. I, like Flannery O’Connor**, only know clearly what I believe when I write about it.  So this is my own wake-up call, offered to myself, and to anyone who, like me, is watching with pain and sorrow the events unfolding in our world.

Yesterday was World Refugee Day.  The day before, the current administration withdrew our country’s participation from the one place in the world where governments come together and struggle with issues of humanity, the UNHCR, an imperfect, human institution, but the best we have been able to assemble so far.  Since at least 2016, the situation on our own borders has been questionable at best, worsening definitely, and a crime against humanity at its worst. And Tuesday, a large group of women of faith, many of them my acquaintances and friends, all of them, people whom I deeply respect, stood in near 100 degree heat on the sidewalks in front of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol office to state clearly what many of us have been afraid to say out loud:  Never again.

Those words have never been more important than now.  Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg said it succinctly on Twitter:  Never again is now.

Never again.  These are the words that haunt me.  These are the words that comforted an eight year old girl, who, upon learning of the Holocaust through the eyes of another young girl, confronted her parents with the question — how could you let this happen?  There I stood, with the open copy of Anne Frank’s diary in my hand.  We did not know until it was too late, they said.  But never again, they promised me. And yet, today, I am in danger of becoming one of the people who frightened me the most as that young girl — one of those who stood by while others paid the price for my silence.

And yet, I am beginning to find some hope in the events around me. Do not laugh; I have not lost my mind. Not that I think things are about to get better soon — we have so much work ahead of us.  But I see hope because more and more of us are doing the work ofclearing the cob webs from our eyes and from our hearts.  We are seeing more clearly, we are listening more carefully, and, where we can, we are taking action.   In a most terrible way, the shock of what we see may be a gift in a most awful wrapper.

We are experiencing the dreaded apocalypse in its most pure form (according to the original meaning of the word in Greek) — a great uncovering of that which we could not or refused to see. Hard as this is, we cannot change until we look honestly at our lives and the life of our country and world.  It is not enough to be an ally, to be sympathetic, to understand.  We must see and we must change.

I have spent most of my days on this earth living a life that is not in-step with the so-called culture of the moment, following paths that most would consider on the margin and in general, so unimportant as to not deserve their attention.  A life in classical music and opera?  Not so relevant.  A life devoted to faith and community?  Surprisingly again, not so important, not relevant, perhaps openly antagonistic to modern life.  A life devoted to the study and understanding of the path of humanity through time, that we label as the discipline of history?  Definitely not relevant or important in our now-culture of immediate gratification.   I have lived a life devoted to beauty, mystery, and tradition, in a world devoted to speed and I have often felt “not of my time.”

Until now.  Until these words of Sr. Joan Chittister, written in response to her own reflections on the famous passage from the book of Ecclesiastes, grabbed my attention and transformed my thinking:  “There is no such thing as being ‘born out of time.’ Our time is now. The era into which we are born is the era for which we have responsibility, the era for which we are meant to be a blessing. Whatever is going on now…is our affair (For Everything There is a Season, LOC 152).”

This is not about politics.  This is not about who did what when. This is not about who is right or wrong. This is about love.  And our time is now, whether we want it or not.

A few years ago, I had the experience of needing heart valve replacement surgery.  I discovered a congenital defect that had never been diagnosed, and, I might add, I discovered it the hard way — by passing out while traveling in Israel.  And yet, with the evidence before me, with three opinions from the very best hospitals in the country in agreement, it took me many months to embrace what I needed to do to continue on this planet.  All along that journey, part of me knew what needed to happen even as the rest of  my self fought it.  Finally, it was my wonderful heart surgeon who put it in words that I could grasp.  When asked by someone dear to me if I couldn’t just do nothing and see what happened, he replied, “Yes.  But now that she knows about it, her life will never be the same.  She should just be brave and fix it.  Because we can do that.”

I can never un-see or forget what I have learned about my world, just as I could never put aside what I learned about the Holocaust from Anne Frank, or about the condition of my heart valve, or our immigration practices, or the ways in which young African American men are treated differently, or the way women are marginalized or the way that schools for girls are burned down.  My knowledge of the atrocities that have been mythologized as patriotism and progress can never be put aside.

I am not, by any means, an activist in the sense of many of my sisters.  It is unlikely, at least for now, that I will take to the streets.  I am not a politician, although I live in the neighborhood of many, and honestly, I believe that no group holds the moral ground in this day and age.  I am but one believer with a slight ability to see and synthesize and communicate what I have found out.  And so, you might ask, just what do I intend to do, in the face of all that is now visible to me.

I will continue, every day, every hour, to confess.  The privilege granted me by the color of my skin and my status as a native born citizen of this country has granted me much, so when I find the sin of failing to love my neighbor as myself in me, in my world, I will confess.  I will repent.  I will talk.  And most of all, most importantly of all, I will listen.  If you are an activist on the front lines, and you are tired, and discouraged, I will listen to you.  If you are afraid because of the color of your skin or your gender or your religion, I will listen to you.  I will do the best that I humanly can to hear your story, to tell your story if you wish, but mostly to hear and hold your story for a while for you, so that you might find the strength to go on, so that you might know that one person’s life has been changed by your presence on this earth.

Sister Joan, I am listening. Anne Frank,  I hear you speak across the years.  My time is now; this is my responsibility.  The problems and the solutions belong to us all.   And I, along with the Psalmist, pray that the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart, as well as the actions that I take, will be acceptable to you, O Lord, that they echo the love that you have so lavished on me for all of my days.  Amen.

**Addendum (08/15/2020): I realize that since the original writing of this piece we have come face-to-face with the unpleasant truth of Flannery O’Connor’s racism.  I make no excuse for those beliefs and I do not embrace them.  But, in 2018, like many, I only knew her as an inspirational writer, someone who is linked in the popular imagination to the phrase, “I write to discover what I know.”  And that is still a truth that I share with her, and with many other writers, even though I do not share so many other thoughts that she clearly had, because as I have stated above, now I have seen her views.  Perhaps if she had not died so young, her writing might have taken her to a deeper understanding of the oneness of all God’s creation.  Given what we have finally seen about her thoughts, there is some comfort in the idea that she would have been very uncomfortable with my use of her words here.