A Word for Cowards

Some of us have surrendered to irreparable despair, a vortex of exhausted gloom that’s drained us of everything good, leaving only hopelessness and resignation as we withdraw into isolation. Some of us have succumbed to a swift-burning rage, an incinerating force that’s consumed our perspective on our common life and fueled an inferno charring every vestige of our joy, faith and goodwill. God knows there’s justification for either. These are troubled times. More senseless killing. More entrenchment. And the saddest thing: I could write this on almost any Monday; little would need to be altered.

Both of these responses, different as they are, seem to be the wounded responses of those of us who are overcome by futility. Are we so lost we will never be found? Are we, as a people, so collectively infested and diseased that we will never be healed? Perhaps we have crossed our Rubicon. Perhaps it is indeed the time to throw up our hands and retreat into our cultural silos and just finish out best we can. Or perhaps it’s time for the final, desperate measure: maybe we should light the torches and burn the whole thing down. Perhaps.

But surely you know me well enough to know I don’t believe that at all. I may flirt with capitulation and despair for a day or a week, but I’m a man of faith. I’m a man of hope. As Wendell Berry says, “The word ‘inevitable’ is for cowards.”

This is the hour when we need poets and storytellers and seers and wisdom-seekers, women and men of fresh imagination and steely courage, to walk out in front of us and show us another way. When we are locked into an intractable spiral of death, God inevitably sends us (and often from the margins) people who see a possibility we could not imagine, who envision a future that seems ridiculous. Their words pierce like a hot iron. Their life disrupts our certainties, reveals our foolish vision or commitments. Of course, we do not always listen or follow. Sometimes we refuse to see the new future as anything but a threat. Sometimes the One Who Shows Us The Way gets crucified.

 

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