My children, is this the best we have to offer you?
I am unable to stomach three white-haired white-skinned men all talking over one another at the same time. Even before I go down to the debate, I can hear from the kitchen that no one is listening, no one is respectful. Voices indistinguishable except for their insistence on being first, on dominating, sound inane. Absurd. Farcical. All the words I have been using to describe political discourse for the last few years. This can’t be happening, not with grown adults.
It’s happening.
I cannot stand the ire, the rancor, the accusations, and most personally, the dumbing down of the American language. I have given the Presidential debates three minutes of my time, and already I am wishing those minutes back.
In the darkness of the bathroom, after I’ve cleaned the filthy toilet while listening to a scripture meditation, I am moving my arms to Sufjan by candlelight: “I’m gonna love you anyway.”
Today I have had a vision of the loneliness of the White House. I have seen the President brushing his teeth alone, with no single person to whom he can turn for truth telling or succor. I have pictured the faces of those I love whose commingling of faith and politics I find baffling and horrifying, and I have breathed in “acceptance” and breathed out over them, over their beautiful faces, simply “love.” It is a practice, and I have been practicing it just long enough to realize that it’s working. The more I can accept myself, the more love I have left over. The less I want to change people. The more I see myself change. I have exhaled enough “love” over a visualized image of the White House, that cold and empty house-not-a-home, that the President should be smelling my minty toothpaste by now. Listen up you jackass, I am coming for you with the inescapable love of God.
If you think I’m sitting in a beautifully Zen space with a salt lamp and minimalist sheepskin covered furniture, nope. I do this meditation as my body relaxes itself into sleep. I do it when I lay with my children who still need my body in order to find their relaxation into sleep. I do it when I feel like I’m suffocating, anxious, waiting. So, often.
“The diabolical is when you separate things, the religious is when you connect things.”
All summer I watched as powerful young brown women led crowds of hundreds through the streets – for change, for freedom, for life and not death which is to say: love. My children, I hope by the time you read this that they are leading the nation with a power that is grounded in soul strength, not in how loudly they can each shout over one another.
