Gaslighting and the Gospel … on Post-Pandemic Faithfulness
April 28, 2020 – David R. Weiss

This is a longer than usual piece. These are other than usual times. I hope you’ll read it all the way through because I think it’s a pretty important one.

I’ve seen a number of my friends share an article on Facebook: “Prepare for the Ultimate Gaslighting” by Julio Vincent Gambuto. It’s a provocative, insightful essay. In this companion piece, I want to lift up several of his insights and then carry them a bit further in terms of Christian faith. However, I think this essay is important to anyone of goodwill, so I hope you’ll stay with me all the way through. Here’s my thesis: Progressive Christians have distinctive resources that can help us resist the gaslighting about to hit us—and our readiness to resist may be how we awaken the Gospel in our midst in this moment.

I’ll begin with a pretty thorough explanation of gaslighting (which may be an unfamiliar term to some of my readers). The more fully you understand this concept, the more you’ll follow everything else that either Gambuto or I are saying. Then, after a quick summary of Gambuto’s piece, I’ll turn to my own thoughts.

Gaslighting: it’s a word from another era recently in vogue again, but not at all self-evident in its meaning—unless you know its origin. Who even uses gas lights anymore? The term originates in a 1938 play, Gas Light, later made into a 1940 British and 1944 American movie sharing the same title, but with the space now removed: Gaslight. The plot—set still earlier in 1880—involves a husband who is determined to make his wife question her sanity by making subtle changes to their home and then denying that anything has changed—insisting she is imagining them. The title refers to his deliberate dimming of the gas lights in their home, all the while convincing her that the lights are bright as ever and that she is losing her grip on reality.

Hence the definition of gaslighting: when one person or party presents false information for the purpose of making someone else question—and ultimately mistrust—their own perceptions … and accept the presented reality as true.

As in the play/film, gaslighting is common in abusive interpersonal relationship, where one person may use it to undermine another person’s self-esteem and thereby control them in the relationship. Gaslighting, as a descriptive term, does not necessarily denote pre-meditated intent; plenty of abusive persons gaslight almost by instinct or reflex, likely without full awareness of what they’re doing. And in some relationships gaslighting moves in both directions.

However, gaslighting also occurs outside of personal relationships. It’s a common tactic in religious cults and is often used by other authoritarian leaders. In these cases the victims are an entire community led to surrender their own reality to the one chosen for them by the leader. Jim Jones (of the 1978 Jonestown massacre) and David Koresh (of the Branch Davidians and the 1987 Waco siege) were cult leaders who gaslit their followers—successfully and tragically destroying their ability to perceive reality for themselves—with deadly results. Similarly, gaslighting is readily apparent in much of the state propaganda of Russia and North Korea, where leaders define reality for entire masses, even when that reality is in stark contrast to what is objectively available.

Gaslighting is also a favored tactic of narcissists, who compulsively seek to arrange the world to meet their needs. Unfortunately for us as a nation, we currently have a president who is a self-avowed narcissist. (Not that he admits to this, but his self-aggrandizing narcissism runs so rampant in his public words and actions that he seems almost eager to have us notice.) From his first claim of a record-breaking crowd at his inauguration to the now more than 18,000 false or misleading claims made by him (as tracked by The Washington Post), our president has been gaslighting the American public with a torrent of false claims all the while insisting that his words alone match reality.

While this creates endless opportunity for derision among many of us, it also creates right here in America—at least among his base (and no less than in Russia or North Korea)—a population that willfully surrenders their own interest in taking any objective measure of reality and readily accepts the measure provided by the president. We saw that with the foolish ferocity evident in the wave of “Liberate” protests. Although not directly organized by the president, his nonstop gaslighting from day one of his presidency and through his response to the pandemic clearly shaped the people willing to attend these protests, and his tweeting about them is itself an instance of gaslighting. It’s fair to say that, under Trump, the entire GOP and a host of far right, white nationalist, and neo-Nazi groups have entered into a tacit agreement to gaslight the American public around issues of our common life.

Okay, that’s gaslighting. It’s not pretty. It’s not healthy. (It is, sadly, all too common.) And there’s one other expression of it that sits at the heart of American life—having become as American as apple pie over the last century: advertising as the defining, functional feature of a consumer society. And this gets us, finally, to Gambuto’s essay. (I’ll return to advertising below.)

Gambuto observes the following: the pandemic has given us an undeniable glimpse of an alternate reality, a different pace of life—a different pace of production-pollution-consumption. He calls this “The Great Pause,” during which we have seen bluer skies, heard more birds chirping, and sensed what life might be like were we not so driven by the busyness of our lives.

(Set aside for a moment the several glaring exceptions to this. Clearly, this is no Great Pause for the sick and dying—or for the healthcare workers involved in their care. And this is no Great Pause for those at home in quarters now dangerously close because of relationships—even with oneself—marked by emotional/physical violence or illness. Or for those whose lives were already so framed by economic precariousness that any pause at all meant something more than passing hardship. These latter two are perhaps real gaps in Gambuto’s angle of vision, but their absence in his essay does not weaken its claim.)

Here’s his claim: Having just experienced firsthand—as an undeniable reality known by some/many of us during this pandemic—a version of a “better world” (cleaner, quieter, in many ways more hospitable to human life despite the awkwardness of our distancing), we are about to be gaslit. As the economy opens back up, we’ll be relentlessly invited-urged-pressured to overwrite the reality we’ve just experienced … and race to buy our way back into the ‘normal’ life we had pre-pandemic. The corporate sponsors of that once-normal world will do this with an onslaught of ads (augmented no doubt by political ‘patriotic’ rhetoric) that subtly ask us to reject all the better-ness of the world we’ve just experienced during The Great Pause. We’ll be urged to deny—by the very act of rushing to buy our way back to ‘normal’—that we just experienced something unexpectedly refreshing and more life-giving than the non-stop consumption that benefits our corporate sponsors and their political allies.

Note that the non-stop consumption that defined the pre-pandemic ‘normal,’ is, by any rational account, destroying the planet’s capacity to support human life (and countless other life forms as well). Indeed, unrestrained global development (a near-sacred assumption of free market capitalism) presses humans ever further into once wild ecosystems while also pressing animals ever more densely into industrial livestock operations—and both of these pressures press the likelihood of pandemics ever more deeply into our future.

But this awareness would be undeniably bad for business. So it will be Big Business’ first order of business to gaslight any such awareness to smithereens. This isn’t new. Advertising has operated on a basic model of gaslighting for almost exactly 100 years. It was in the 1920’s that ads shifted from a singular promotion of the practical function of an items to linking items (cars, cigarettes, clothing, diamonds, beer, soft drinks, you name it …) to the emotions of our social lives.This has always been gaslighting. It is the subtly manipulative, increasingly savvy pressure to overwrite what we know (by immediate experience) to be the sources of human well-being … with mere stuff. Shiny and new, bells and whistles, yes, but nonetheless mere stuff. And the stuff doesn’t lie. The ads lie.

There is a whole other level of lie at work as well. The nonstop proliferation of stuff-to-be-sold requires the nonstop exploitation/destruction of the natural-animal world and the nonstop exploitation/oppression of our fellow humans. So, in the background of advertising’s gaslighting, upon which is built our shiny consumer world, there sits also both racism (its own gaslighting project championed in a thousand ways to tell us we are separate “races”) and ecocide (a cultures-wide gaslighting project that overwrites the deepest truth of our being-in/with-nature).

How have we not seen this before? Gambuto says—and he is largely right—we’ve simply been too busy. Our own lives are too haggard by trying to work enough to earn enough to buy enough to do enough to have enough to be happy. And however much of this busyness is well-intended, it keeps us from ever noticing or attending to the multiple ills around us, the growing fractures in our natural world, and the escalating tensions in our social world. We are simply too busy. Yes—And. We are intentionally kept too busy. Suppressing wages and unions, burgeoning student debt, evaporating health coverage, and the rise of the gig economy (read: the infinitely precarious economy)—these things, coupled with the insatiable appetites sown by advertising, are designed to keep us too busy.

In his classic text, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer recounts the purpose behind the endless marching of Nazi soldiers. It dulls the mind, preventing any individual thought. So does ceaseless scrambling to work to earn to buy. We have been gaslit fervently (that is, not by accident or merely by an inner impulse wrapped in religious credo—although that is surely at work, too) for at least 100 years by advertising. The alliance between corporate/wealthy interests, willing politicians, and marketing forces that have known exactly what they were being paid to do has had as it primary goal to overwrite the reality of human life that is ever aching within us simply to be known. (This is why so much money is spent on developing ads; it is no simple match to plant a lie within our very appetites.)

And Gambuto, in his essay, admirably highlights much of this … and pleads for us not to allow ourselves to be gaslit this time. He rightly declares there is too much at risk to simply slide back into ‘normal.’ At both the level of global ecology/climate crisis and the social ecology of our lives, we have providentially glimpsed the chance to live differently. And we may not get another such glimpse shy of the first wholesale collapse of social systems as the climate crisis begins to tear our social fabric in ways that will make this pandemic seem like little more than a nasty allergy season. In other words, if we buy into the “Ultimate Gaslighting” about to be rolled out, we will be choosing the deadly mediocrity of more stuff over the myriad more life-giving ways of inhabiting the world.

But what if we instead decide, as Sonya Renee Taylor so eloquently puts it: “We will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment. One that fits all of humanity and nature.”

We can choose to stitch that new garment … or we can allow ourselves once again to be gaslit. The stakes could not be higher. For our corporate sponsors—or for us. And, as critical as it is for us to choose to stitch that new garment, it will be a far harder choice than the one made by thousands already to stitch facemasks. Because this choice will garner little praise and much antagonism—at least at the start. It will threaten the assumptions and practices of our economy and our politics and our society and our culture … and our religion. Except—

Buried in our Christian tradition (and, no doubt, in other traditions as well) is a truth claim capable of harnessing and unleashing the energy required to stitch that new garment. We call it “gospel,” and although the word is heard often enough today, I am here to tell you that the full power of the gospel has only rarely been embraced unreservedly in human history. And while it may be audacious to think this moment, here and now, post-pandemic—I mean right HERE, right NOW—is somehow a moment in history when gospel erupts, well, yes, that is audacious. But it’s also now or never. We likely don’t have another chance coming our way. We get gaslit this time … and the planet will be in flames before we come to our senses. So there’s nothing left except audacity right now. This is it.

Remarkably, the earliest layers of our tradition saw this challenge quite clearly. When Paul declared that in our struggle to be faithful, we contend not merely with flesh and blood—not merely with the frailties and temptations of our own humanity, nor merely with the malice of others—but against “powers and principalities” (Ephesians 6:12), he was speaking to this moment. He was, of course, speaking to his moment first and foremost, but his words echo with truth we need today. Paul recognized the human capacity to set up empires, societies, cultures, and the like—including the contemporary intersection of wealth, corporate/political interests, and advertising—that function as whole systems with an inertia greater than any individual person—an inertia that seemingly takes on a life of its own, manifesting an institutionalized energy that will seek to gaslight us in the days ahead … despite the fact that such gaslighting carries within it the seeds of our own destruction.

But the glimmer of hope here is that Paul spoke not as one resigned to defeat, but as one confident that the power of the gospel was greater than the principalities and powers. They deserve to be regarded with sober recognition. Even as the gospel is embraced with faithful audacity.

The gospel—the astonishing good news—is the recognition, announced from beyond us and echoing from within our lives, that we are beloved by God. Each one of us. Bar none. Each corner of creation. Each ecosystem and habitat. Each plant and creature. Each human being. Beloved. BELOVED! This dawning recognition—proclaimed in the words and deeds of Jesus—carries within it the pattern for that new garment that Sonya Renee Taylor foresees. This dawning recognition, as it fills our souls, challenges every false claim made by the forces that wish to gaslight us yet again. It so fills our vision that we see clearly how interwoven the whole of reality is. And it so fills our hearts and our minds that we not only disavow those forces beyond us that speak lies, we even challenge the lies and the habits that have been sown into our psyches and rooted into the routines of our daily life.

I hope I’m not understating what we must do. We must remake pretty much everything. And there are powerful forces with smiling faces and glitzy ads (and some glowering faces and fear-mongering words, too) that will promise us anything if we just return things to ‘normal.’ Still, when Jesus says, “Repent, for the kin-dom on God is at hand,” he means—against the backdrop of the gaslighting principalities and powers of his day—precisely this: “Turn around, for the infinite belovedness of all is here at hand—close enough to touch.” If we welcome that gospel—that world-altering good news—into our lives, we will be able to stitch that new garment. Not one by one. But together, leaning on one another, learning from one another, upholding one another.

This isn’t only a Christian possibility. Written as it is into the very fabric of reality, it’s open to anyone willing to be grasped by an utter reverence for the wonder of all that is. I just happen to know that the Christian tradition has its own distinctive energy for bringing that reverence into being and to bear on the world. For Christians, in the days ahead we will either be gaslit, or we will open ourselves more deeply than ever to the gospel. One or the other. And this isn’t about working out our salvation (which is clumsily vague language anyways). But, no. The belovedness that the gospel declares is already given. Absolute. Unconditional. Secure. Instead, the choice we face is about working out the fate of the world. For ourselves. Our children. And far beyond. The power of the gospel, refracted through our lives, is the saving of this world.

We are about to experience the ultimate gaslighting. And behind all the shiny things to be dangled in front of us, lies once again—as always—the desecration of all that God loves. Gaslit or gospel? A whole aching world awaits your choice. And only one will help you stitch that new garment. I hope I’ll find you stitching alongside me. It’s a big garment. And it’s going to take all of us to stitch it. Together.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, doing “public theology” around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in writing Community Supported Theology at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

“Liberate Minnesota” Didn’t Liberate Anything
April 18, 2020 – David R. Weiss

NOTE: I did not attend Friday’s Liberate Minnesota rally. I followed it via Unicorn Riot’s live feed.

I am not sure what I expected, but not this. And I am struggling to make sense of it.

It was a carnival atmosphere. Maybe a thousand people (of all ages) gathered in front of the Governor’s house in Saint Paul. There were megaphones shouting and horns honking, while a slow parade of cars with placards drove along Summit Ave to cheers and claps and nods. Sure, there were some angry shouts about ending the Stay-at-Home order and fervent calls for opening the economy. But there were lots of smiles. People lined the streets and sidewalks shoulder-to-shoulder, plainly happy to be there—and plenty close together. There were a few—but only a few—face-masks in sight. But more than a few references to “faith” and “God” as though speaking these words was a sufficient substitute for responsible human behavior.

And now I’m struggling to process the horror of what I saw on Friday. People jubilantly dispensing with any recognition of the real stakes of this pandemic for us as a state. People gleefully ignoring the medical plea for social distancing. People celebrating their defiance of the Governor’s Stay-at-Home order. People festively—and as families!—dismissing the very deep cost that their immediate actions and their larger aspirations—will surely pose to their fellow Minnesotans … especially to the elderly, the immune-compromised, and communities of color.

Some of it I understand. Folks are economically anxious. We live in a predatory economy that keeps most of us much closer to precarity than we recognize until a medical emergency, job loss, major repair—or pandemic—reveals just how near the edge our lives have always been. But that’s a set up. It doesn’t have to be that way. However, the wealthy and powerful in our society know they do best when the rest of us scramble. And this pandemic shows us how uncertain even our scrambling lives have always been.

Additionally, one whole slice of our society—and it’s a slice that cuts across many of our families and friendships—has been fed, for decades now (long before Trump), a steady diet of disregard for science, mistrust for media, and simmering bias toward anyone painted as other. Taken together those forces have rendered us a republic ripe for civic unrest, tilting toward tribalism, and ready to play into the hands of an authoritarian regime. You see this in the irrational polarization that impulsively pits worldview against worldview, eclipsing humanity in the blink of an eye.

There is another wild card at play in this as well: the insatiable appetite for stuff as the ultimate and most trustworthy measure of human worth (known as “economic growth” on the macro level—but simply the “capacity for personal acquisitiveness” in most of our private lives). This didn’t happen overnight. We were “bred” for this over generations. But today it is the water in which we swim. It is the invisible idolatry that makes us ready to engage (quite literally, goddammit!—and the curse is both intentional and righteous) in human sacrifice to appease our economic gods.

So, yes, economic anxiety runs deep into our psyches. Scarcity has real roots in the human condition. But today, for most of us, the experience of economic anxiety is framed by the forces named above. And under those conditions, our sense of community, our capacity for resilience, gets narrowed down to “taking care of me and mine.” Meaning that those that lack economic value, or those whom I don’t see as part of my tribe, or those whose differences gives them less value—when push comes to shove, and when shove comes to pandemic, all of these persons are obstacles to my worth. So they don’t matter to me. They can’t matter to me. In fact, if I’m told—as by a Stay-at-Home order—that they actually do matter, then their mattering becomes a threat. And threats … deserve to be eliminated. That’s just economics at work.

Trump might like to take credit for this—this Machiavellian politics that presumes winning (at any cost, by any means) is always self-justifying: that might makes right. That the wealthy and powerful deserve what they have, and that playing successive parts of the populace off against each other is both a pleasant pastime and a savvy social strategy to maintain their position at the top. But Trump merely inherited this moment. And despite his pompous narcissism—and the real danger he presents, because being President gives him unearned and unpredictable power—he is mostly a tool of forces that view him with as much contempt as I do (just from an opposite angle).

Nonetheless, this moment is real and its threat to our common humanity is here. Now. And on full display in the Liberate rally in front of the Governor’s house on Friday. On the surface it was a call to open the economy and let Minnesota get back to work, regardless of the risk. In between the lines it was a vigilante declaration of open season on the vulnerable. But at an even deeper level of social dynamics it played like a carefully choreographed desecration of the common good.

This moment—in Minnesota and in cities across the nations—has been months, maybe years in the making. Trump’s administration undertook a whole series of foolhardy (or perhaps strategic) moves to ensure the nation was as exposed as possible to a public health crisis. Then, with that crisis blooming in China and coming our way, it was dismissed, downplayed, even mocked—until it was more than upon us. When public health voices became inescapably public, they were portrayed as partisan opinion rather than medical science. When the degree of economic disruption that would be both inevitable because of disease and necessary to preserve public safety became clear, the administration and the GOP made sure the government response would be both top-heavy toward corporations and the wealthy and underfunded for everyone else—because only such a package would keep most of us sufficiently on edge so that some of us could be turned against others of us. Which is exactly what the festive mood of anger on Summit Ave reflected.

Trump’s daily pandemic briefings have focused less on presenting relevant information than on presenting bias, spin, and outright propaganda. The disinformation, the lies, the distractions, that come from both the podium and his twitter account aim to fracture any notion of the common good. This isn’t merely a character defect on Trump’s part. It’s a campaign strategy. The only America in which Trump gets re-elected is one in which the common good carries no coin. That’s the America we saw a preview of in front of the Governor’s house in Minnesota on Friday.

It’s true that for our entire national history our “common good” has been less than common. Reserved foremost for white men, with “guest privileges” only granted to others in prudent (that is, begrudging) measure and on relatively recent terms. It remains contested. But it also remains an ideal, a foothold for the dream of justice that can be called out by King or Baldwin, César Chávez or Delores Huerta, Ta-Nehisi Coates or Stacy Abrams.

Understand that today—in our streets—that foothold in under open assault.

I am on board to liberate Minnesota. But that’s not what was happening Friday on Summit Avenue. I usually write as a theologian, but I speak today simply as a Minnesotan, a responsible citizen, and a human being. In this precarious moment of multi-faceted anxiety, we “Liberate Minnesota” when we act to protect the most vulnerable in our midst by honoring the call to Stay Home, mask up, and keep our safe distance. We exercise responsible citizenship when we respect the insights of medicine and seek the welfare of the whole community. We show human decency when we bear one another’s burdens, including the burdens of those who are indeed other than us. Ultimately, we liberate Minnesota when we reclaim our humanity from a dehumanizing economy, and when we reject any “good” which fails to support the common good—of all. These goals are worth rallying for.

After Friday’s desecration of the common good in front of the Governor’s house, those of us who embrace a good that is common for all Minnesotans, for all persons everywhere, we should make sure we’re equally visible and vocal—even behind our masks and in our homes.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, doing “public theology” around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in writing Community Supported Theology at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

How to Empty a Tomb
April 11, 2020 – David R. Weiss

The past thirty-six hours have been a blur. There was anxiety and expectation heavy in the air during the meal on Thursday night. You didn’t want to go to the garden after supper. But he was restless and on edge. So the whole group of you went. Safety in numbers. Except not.

He prayed a lot. But usually by himself in a lonely place. That night he craved company—but seemed lonelier than ever. You doubt that he prayed for the soldiers to come. But come they did. And from then on things have spun more and more out of control.

Whisked away into the night. Hauled before both imperial and Temple authorities. Toyed with. Beaten. Tortured. Likely raped if the rumors were true. And then marched through the city, beyond the gates, and hung naked on a tree to die. Your rabbi—your teacher—your Lord. Your messianic hope now hoisted beneath a mocking sign that called him “King of the Jews,” but left him to writhe in agony until some hours later he breathed his last. (Which was mercy compared to some who lasted days on those damned and damning trees.)

You watched from the shadows as a soldier pierced his side to confirm his death. And next you breathed the sort of sigh of relief that comes after crying your eyes dry, retching your guts out, and then you realize that—at least—someone has taken him off the cross so he’s not left there during the Sabbath. And then you hate yourself for feeling relief of any sort.

Now it’s Saturday. And you’ve never heard of Easter. All you know is that the man you pinned your hopes on, spent yesterday pinned to a tree, and now lies in a tomb. Killed—murdered by an imperial power that might have felt a twinge of threat on account of his social teachings and impassioned followers … but a power that mostly acted out of the perverse joy it took in brutality, humiliation, violation, and public intimidation.

And today he is very much dead. Humiliated, brutalized, and violated. And you’re very much intimidated. Your grief is boxed in by fear. And that tomb harbors a corpse now waiting, like your hope, to give way to rot.

Or maybe that wasn’t you at all.

Maybe you’re the person shouting Black Lives Matter—fueled by holy rage at white supremacy too often dressed in blue, but equally at ease in the more subtle hues of daily life. Or the person marching for disappeared indigenous women. Maybe you’re the one arrested for protesting the way we’ve caged immigrants and refugees. Or the one aghast at how easily and often self-identified “Christian” people hurl hate at our Jewish and Muslim cousins.

Maybe you’re the person whose deep desire is keeping oil as deep as possible in the ground, while the imperial forces on this continent seem committed to rape the land and foul the water until Earth herself is as dead as that man in the tomb. Or the one so moved to empathy and anguish over the planetary collapse coming our way that your own breathing is breathless with grief.

Maybe, in this “greatest country on Earth,” you can’t escape the dawning awareness that this country has YET to be great. That, so far, it’s “greatness” has been so entangled with genocide and slavery and intentional ecological/human exploitation and systemic injustice, that only the most selective (i.e., perverse) sense of “greatness” is apropos.

Or maybe, as we hurtle ourselves unprepared and under-protected into a pandemic that could’ve-should’ve-would’ve been foreseen had our nation not spent the past years and months deliberately unpreparing and unprotecting ourselves—maybe on account of that, you feel more widespread anguish at squandered resources, endangered workers, and lost lives than any one body or psyche was designed to bear.

I don’t know who you are. This one or that one. Or still some other person whose hope seems destined to rot in a tomb on Holy Saturday.

But, even without knowing who you are, I might have some slim knowledge you’ll find useful. See, I’ve spent most of my life here in Holy Saturday. Paused (too many days) between the stench of death and the scent of lilies. Like Charon (Hades’ ferryman), except I seek to ferry folks the other way—back into the land of the living. My temperament seems awkwardly suited to be in this place: not quite fully alive, but convinced—as an article of faith—that life lies this way.

So I will tell you how to empty a tomb.

Photo by Bruno van der Kraan on Unsplash

Find a thin silver thread. Gratitude. Sunshine, springtime, friendship, beauty, music, rainbows. Hell, in my case, rhubarb. Small as a mustard seed. Take that silver thread, no matter how thin, and hold it in your aching, empty, hopeless heart. Just hold it. Nothing more. What good is this? I can’t say for sure, but I think, because it echoes, however weakly, the declaration of goodness that God spoke in the very beginning, that this tiny silver thread ties you, me, each one of us, back to the fabric of creation itself. But I’m just guessing.

Next, don’t run from your grief. Walk toward it. Hold it near. In the company of others, if you can. Sob if you wish. Let it move from sole to soul, from head to heart. East of Eden, the world runs on grief. Every creature knows pain; some handful of creatures know grief. We may not be the only ones to ennoble it by willingly embracing it. But we, at least, can do this. Your grief is the witness your heart offers to what you have loved and hoped and dreamed. Grief marks the reach of our humanity. So reach, dammit. That ache is your lifeline. Grab on.

Now, this is where the miracle happens. Tradition (Matthew 28:1-3) says that at about the crack of dawn, the tomb itself was cracked open. An angel (and an earthquake) get the credit. But read closely. Verse one says the women—the grieving women—were coming to anoint the dead body of the humiliated, brutalized, violated man who was their hope. Their coming precipitated the earthquake, brought down the angel, and emptied the tomb.

You say, but God did these things. I say, sure. But God chooses (or is bound—does it really matter, if it’s true?) to be moved by grief. (In Exodus—3:7, 4:31, 6:5—grief is what leads God to liberate the Hebrews from slavery.) This isn’t magic, as though we might manipulate divine energy and put our grief to self-serving ends. No. The grief that moves God is grief that aches for such sufferings as we hold in common with all persons, and the grief that rages against injustice that brutalizes anyone or anything. That grief—because it senses the oughtness of God’s desire for the cosmos and acts on that sense with compassion (they were bringing spices to anoint the body, for God’s sake!)—that grief-birthed compassion calls forth the miracle we call resurrection.

Chicken or egg? There is no single answer; they’re a matched set. Like holy grief and Holy God. Our lives are entwined more closely to God’s life than we imagine. Which is maybe what that mustard seed he spoke of was all about …

Do you find yourself today—on Holy Saturday—huddled in an upper room (or anywhere else!), gripped by grief and anguish and rage at that which is … but ought not be? Do you know the terror, the taunt, of a tomb that tries to tell you your hope is at an end? Then, standing in this in between place alongside you, I will tell you once again how God chooses to open tombs.

The tiniest sliver of gratitude. The deepest grief and anguish and rage—embraced without reserve. And the intent, the act of compassion. God waits. These mere means: gratitude, grief, compassion. And BANG. This miracle.

Alleluia.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, doing “public theology” around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in writing Community Supported Theology at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.

Grief upon Grief
April 5, 2020 – David R. Weiss

Photo by Mike Labrum on Unsplash

Our world—yours and mine—is changing before our very eyes. I watch the nightly news and see the pandemic numbers—the daily counts of both cases and deaths. They rise unabated. Unimaginable. 8500 deaths in the U.S. as of early this morning. We’re likely to triple that—by Easter. We’ll be loading tombs so quickly, I doubt many of us will even care to shout Alleluia.

Two thirds of our population is too young to have much memory of the Vietnam War, our country’s last encounter with daily death on the nightly news. Between 1965 and 1972, about 58,000 U.S. soldiers died in Vietnam. We’re likely to see more than 60,000 Americans die from this pandemic in the month of April alone. If we’re not too late and too lax in our responses of distancing and school/business closures and mask-wearing—all of these grotesquely delayed in their deployment—then those 60,000 deaths will be slightly more than half of our total loss of life. But it’s also still very possible that those 60,000 deaths will be only a fraction of those who die from COVID-19 before it fades away.

The other large-scale epidemic that crossed many of our lives, of course, is HIV/AIDS. In the next two months we will see as many deaths from COVID-19 as in the deadliest two years of the AIDS epidemic. Which is simply to say, none of us alive today can truly imagine the period of history we are now entering. Over the next two months—the next 60 days—we will be initiated into a level of national suffering beyond anything those of us living today have known as a nation.

It will be more than just the number of deaths. But surely not less than them. The waves of rising and unremitting grief will be overwhelming. Grief upon grief upon grief. Already we see the deaths reach much more widely across demographics than we had told ourselves when the pandemic still seemed far away. While age is a certainly a factor—especially that the elderly are most at risk and youth are least at risk—many adults in seemingly prime health have been felled. And many survivors describe the illness as unlike anything they have ever endured.

Moreover, the deaths will fall disproportionately on communities of color because poverty and lack of ready access to healthcare are comorbidity factors (they make the disease more likely to kill). And never in our lifetimes have we seen a disease as quick to infect—and kill—healthcare workers themselves. By now many of us know personally someone who is ill or is at great risk of exposure because they work in healthcare. By June—in just 60 days—that knowing … will come to include death. Many of us will know someone who has died firsthand or secondhand; we won’t need five degrees of separation! Grief upon grief upon grief.

While these will be the numbers easiest to tally, when the dust—the death—has settled, other numbers will be tallied as well. The non-healthcare “essential” workers, from janitorial and sanitation workers to grocery workers and transit/delivery drivers and those in other jobs—for whom illness or death came because they worked to keep society functioning while the rest of us—too many of us begrudgingly or half-heartedly!—fought the pandemic by staying home. Eventually their numbers, their stories—and hopefully their obscenely low wages for doing this “society-saving work”—will be told. Collateral damage as it were. More grief upon grief upon grief.

Then there will be those who escape with their lives … in ruin. Yes, there is a “package” of relief on the way. And, yes, of course, it will “help”—even as it is woefully too little, too late, and too tilted toward the corporations at the top. But undeniably, the socio-economic-educational toll is beyond a price tag. Jobs lost. Homes lost. Apartment evictions. Small businesses closed, bankrupt, or buried in debt. Dreams delayed or altogether shattered. Families whose fortunes (by which I mean wellbeing not wealth) will be forever twisted by the scars of this pandemic. And, even if all these persons are grateful to be alive, they, too, will know grief upon grief upon grief.

Will there be energy enough left for rage? I hope so. Because while pandemics are always ugly—they always come bearing grief—this pandemic (especially in our country) rushes over us with such intensity because of something that approaches homicidal narcissism in the White House. This administration has acted—over the short years leading up to this outbreak, and also in the first days, weeks, and (inexcusably!) months as it began—to intentionally undermine our national capacity to respond to a pandemic. We have shuttered programs, slashed budgets, squandered leadership, betrayed international trust, and strained the very relationships needed in a moment of crisis. We aimed(!) to set a more disconnected fend-for-ourselves-at-the expense-of-others standard(!) of brutish behavior … in a world that is, in reality, more connected than ever—a truth we now see going viral around the globe.

This is the hard truth we dare not forget. This pandemic would have cost us grief no matter what. But the man in the White House—bumbling, joking, belittling, and lying at the microphone (and by twitter) on a daily basis—has almost single-handedly made this pandemic exponentially worse on our people. The blood on his hands will not dry for the rest of his life.

True as well, there are people around him eager to manipulate his pathetic insecurity, hateful biases, and insatiable greed in order to use him as a tool for their own agendas, which are to further fracture our country and our world. They hope to institutionalize authoritarian power that will be white supremacist, misogynist, xenophobic, and oppressive of anyone who doesn’t become subservient to their worldview. These people—who “herd” the bull in the china shop we call the White House—drove the policy choices over the past three years that set the stage for the grief that is about to sweep over us. And these people are ready and waiting to seize even this grief as an opportunity to press forward with their plans. They, too, will have the blood of our grief on their hands for the rest of their lives.

Meanwhile, we will be awash with grief. Grief upon grief upon grief. Reeling well into the summer. Our social safety nets (already deliberately weakened by the GOP) will be in tatters. Our economy in a shambles. Our lives in disarray. But through our tears and heartache, we ought make space for our rage. Because the vast majority of these people—including nearly all of the healthcare workers—did not need to die. Their deaths, and the severe disruption experienced by so many others, rest directly upon the choices of this administration. As real and deep as our grief is, our rage should run even deeper.

Justice is what love looks like in public, says Cornell West (and I agree). During this pandemic, in our personal lives, grief will be the form of love for far too many of us. Over-taking compassion and care and distancing—which are also the forms of love in our personal and communal lives during a pandemic. But in our public life, in our politics, if love looks like justice, then these days—and for many days ahead—on behalf of all the needless grief we will endure, that love ought to feel like rage.

But wait—is that even Christian? Well, it’s Palm Sunday today. In many a virtual worship service, palms were waved and “Hosannas” were shouted to honor Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem. But tomorrow? On Monday Jesus went to the Temple, where he saw people’s religious devotion and anxiety exploited for profit. And he flew into a holy rage. He fashioned a whip out of loose cords and drove the animals and their sellers out of courtyard, and he overturned the tables of the money changers. So I say, come November, it is our loving duty—to the dead and to those who suffered—to fashion a whip out of our ballots, and, with holy rage, to drive the man and as many of his party as we can out of the White House and out of Congress. Then I’ll say Alleluia.

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David Weiss is a theologian, writer, poet and hymnist, doing “public theology” around climate crisis, sexuality, justice, diversity, and peace. Reach him at drw59mn@gmail.com. Read more at www.davidrweiss.com where he blogs under the theme, “Full Frontal Faith: Erring on the Edge of Honest.” Support him in writing Community Supported Theology at www.patreon.com/fullfrontalfaith.