This week was terrible. This past six months have been difficult, but this week before Easter felt like the climax of all that, and not in a good way.
Part of the reason it was bad is because it was bad, and part of it is because instead of letting all the feelings and experiences flow through, I let them take residence in my body.
I’ve been struggling with my association with Christianity for a long time, but like many of us who grew up evangelical, the inflection point was the 2016 election cycle.
When Supreme Court Justices began to be appointed during that presidential term, they included someone credibly accused of sexual assault, and another person shoehorned in just before the next presidential election. That’s the very thing the Republicans had blocked the Democrats from doing prior to the previous election, except in the case of the Republican appointee, the timeline was so much shorter that the hypocrisy was eye watering.
This is all tied intimately to evangelical support of the Republican party, a party which regularly chooses to persecute the most vulnerable in our society. They look to force sexually nonconforming folks back into hiding. They would rather let immigrants die rather than give them safe passage into our country, which has plenty of resources for everyone, if we choose to share them. They oppose feeding food-insecure kids. They say All Lives Matter when their white lives matter more than Black lives in our society, if not in word, then in deed.
I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me!
Matthew 25:40
I turned to the other party, only to have the carpet ripped out from under me this year as I’ve seen Uncle Joe become Genocide Joe before my eyes. A professed Catholic, no less.
I attended March for Gaza on January 13, 2024 with six of my kids, along with thousands of other people. Imagine my surprise and disappointment when there was almost no news coverage of the event.
Even when I searched for coverage, anemic articles a couple of paragraphs long described the protest. Longer articles mentioned the DC event, but focused more on other protests that happened around the world the same day, particularly in Paris and London. Several articles implied that the DC protest was characterized by violence.
I was at the DC protest.
I will bear witness if the media won’t.
Several years after that, I posted similar sentiments. We struggled to get a tree in a timely fashion, which meant we had to drive from tree farm to tree farm only to find all the U-cut trees sold out and the precut pickings slim. It was hard to get the holiday foods made. One year we never decorated the tree at all.
This summer I got TMS and blasted the depression out of my brain, although I hated every second of it. I’m pretty sure this is the first Christmas I haven’t been depressed in my entire adult life.
My emotional cell membrane is vapor-thin these days. Everything makes me cry. Mainly the pain in the world, and there is a whole lot of that.
It feels like every interaction is a reminder of how difficult life is. Positive interactions make me cry because I can’t take kindness for granted anymore. Negative interactions make me cry, often because it’s frustrating when seemingly simple things are complicated because of rigid thinking or bureaucracy or both.
