Am I Strong Enough for This Journey?

The January 25, 2025 post in Dr. Diana Butler Bass’s blog “The Cottage” inspired the poetry, readings, and advice of this service and sermon. You can find her blog on Substack if you are interested in following her.

Many things in life can have us feeling like we just can’t make it—big things like the failing health of a loved one, little things like the ding in the car door that is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Overwhelming things like an unfolding coup in the country south of your border. Dear friends, I think you know what I mean. You have your own list. I do. I am living in the middle of that coup. I am consumed with worry as Alzheimer’s Disease subsumes my mother in a slow-motion loss. And I am more than a little irritated that the ice is built up so thick on car that the so-called pre-collision sensors won’t work. With crashes all around this morning, I felt a deep and profound need of those sensors. Why, oh why must I endure all this!!??

Oh, such things, all these things piled up like the ice on the front steps to my house that I can’t scrape away, all this can have me feeling dry as a sun-bleached bone—tired, sapped of strength and sapped of thought, of creativity.

In a drought. Cracked in pieces. “We, too, storied to have come from clay, can crack in times of drought, drought of love, drought of touch, drought of death, drought of compassion and justice.” I really do not like it, not one bit. And why should I?! And still, what can we do to build stamina with internal resources, to foster resilience, to resist despair and suffering, to weather the drought?

Recall that photo John displayed while Charlotte read the reflections of the Rev. Traci Blackmon, an African American minister in the United Church of Christ tradition, a liberal Christian faith. In the midst of the Los Angeles fires, she looked for some sign of hope, some sign that a literally burning world was not the only future open to us in this time of climate crisis. And she found the houses that escaped the flames, with devastation all around them, those houses that survived the apparently unsurvivable.

Now, let me tell you what some of my spouse’s evangelical Christian relatives would say when they saw an intact house in the middle of a burned-out zone. It’s the same thing they’d say if they saw an Assembly of God church standing after a tornado or a tree fallen on their neighbor’s home but their own passed over, unscathed. They would say, I have heard them say out loud, “Look how good our God is to spare us. . . . Look how good our God is to spare us.”

With no thought for their neighbor’s tragedy, with even the implication that maybe their God didn’t really love that neighbor at all.

I have heard this from their mouths, and it has pierced my heart. I don’t like to imply that their faith is so narrow they can think a god loves them more than other people, but the sad fact is I speak not ill of them. They speak ill. This is, in fact, their theology, their teaching about god and righteousness and sin, with the rest of us, those who weather the devastation, the sinners. And these days, some of us, many of us, of so many faiths, are accused, guilty, of the sin of empathy. Have you heard that? Some Evangelical Christians have proclaimed empathy as sin.

To Rev. Joe Rigney and Rev. Franklin Graham, empathy is sin. And, by the way, my presence in this pulpit is an abomination, a feminist cancer. Dear God, “Jesus wept.” Surely, “Jesus wept.” Don’t we all weep for such hardness, a drought of compassion and mercy.

But let’s return to Rev. Traci Blackmon’s observations, very different from the ones I just recounted. “Every day,” she said, “I look at a photograph from a house in Los Angeles. Although it was surrounded by complete devastation from the fires, with entire neighborhoods wiped out, this one house remained.” And the image strengthened her hope, not simply because it survived but because of how and why it survived. And its survival—it did indeed come down to some luck, for sure—but it also came down to science, the science that led to “fire-resistant technologies and architectural building techniques intended to do exactly what they did—not burn down in such a conflagration.” As federal firefighter Jacob Ruana said, “This house was perfect; it was built for this. Not all homes are built like that.” And that’s it right there: “This house … was built for this.”

Folk rightly wonder how we are to survive the climate crisis, with the fires, the droughts, the floods, the severe weather bearing down on all of us. We see the effects of it all: eroding the shorelines, instigating migration from areas now underwater or unable to grow sufficient crops to feed the people, enabling insurance companies to consider building coverage just too costly for their shareholders and their bottom line. If money cannot be made, abandonment is the new reality.

Now perhaps your home is not threatened by flood or fire, not at the moment. But you know what it is like to live through a season of choking smoke as communities to your north burn.

We south of the border, and maybe here, too, as you look to your near south and to the far south and also east to Europe and beyond, “We are all vulnerable now.” To climate crisis and the foul dehumanization of immigrants and transpeople and so many other people. Autocracy is on your doorstep. It is surrounding my house, people I care about, neighbors I don’t know. And so I ask, I ask with you: Is my house built for this? Is yours? Is ours? What are the materials that will work, like the science that created fire-resistant technologies and building techniques? What can we do to build stamina with internal resources, to foster resilience, to resist despair and suffering, to recover from the drought of compassion and justice and move forward with actions of repair and healing, for ourselves, our societies, and our world? What will make us strong for this journey, a journey we did not ask for but one we are on, nonetheless?

I don’t know how this will land with you, but these extraordinary times, these unprecedented times we are living in, they are really quite ordinary. Really, living brings pain and suffering, our human selves prone to accident and disease and inevitable death, built only to last less than a century, most of us. We will all mourn and still ask why it must be so for us. We will not like it one little bit. Really, environmental destruction, oppression of the vulnerable, abandonment of the defenseless, these, too, all a very old reality. The powerful have always exploited and abused, have always dehumanized and destroyed for their own gain. If we benefited from the world they constructed, we are not immune from the burning and the drought. Let’s not pretend. Some people have always been disposable. Let’s not delude ourselves. In such times as these, in all times, the question is always, how will we participate in the devastation, as individuals and as communities. With whom do we cast our lot? Are we answering the call of our values? How will we have the stamina to answer, to maintain equilibrium and equanimity when we cannot unsee the destruction. “The ordinary is tough,” this extraordinary that has always been the case. And “The ordinary is tough, it seems to me, demanding as it does not only endurance but imagination.”

And wherein lies this imagination, this sense of possibility? Last week, we talked about music and dancing and joy. Let that not slip from our imaginations.

And “by our presence here together we find comfort and even hope in the gray days of February, in the dailiness of our lives, in the returning light of the late afternoons,” all calling us with “simple stamina and with faith in renewal.” The natural cycles of life can reassure us, “the miracle of how when the drought is over, the clay of my soul expands again, absorbing what it most needs. Is it strange how much comfort I take in knowing it’s natural, it’s part of the cycle, awed by its force and how little it takes, even a small bit of rain, for deep healing to begin?” Sometimes we just cry, regardless of chocolate pudding. We need to look for the good things, with gratitude for the goodness of life. We need to press ourselves to find the tenth thing good thing and more.

Diana Butler Bass offers what she calls Ten Ws, some internal and personal work that enables us to be present to life in all its challenge so that we might have stamina to live fully, consciously, creatively in our individual sorrows and within our larger communities. I’ve put the Ten Ws on a sheet of paper for you, that you might imagine how they might serve you. Bass encourages us to try them out and to add our own. What gives us stamina doesn’t have to be a W.

And so, she invites us to:

• “WAKE UP (everyday) Sleep is important, but hiding under the covers is bad.
• WELCOME THE DAY (everyday) With gratitude. Say ‘thank you’ first thing when you wake. The night and day are still doing their thing, no matter what.
• WALK (everyday) Get fresh air and exercise. Walk to feel the ground under your feet and notice all the little things on your street, in your neighborhood, at the park. Feel your body in the world.
• (BE) WITH OTHERS (everyday) Don’t isolate yourself. Reach out or connect with someone every single day.
• WORK (most days, but take Sabbaths too!) Keep doing your work. Do what you love. Practice your vocation. Don’t try to do everything all the time. Focus on your own gifts and calling.”

And she continues,

• “WRITE (everyday, weekly, or often) Or something like it. Have a creative way to work through your fears, losses, or doubts.
• WATCH THE NEWS (as able) You must stay informed. The arsonists want you ignorant. Be cautious with sources. You don’t need to know everything, but being aware of at least some things is important.
• WIDE-SIGHT (a practice to develop) When we feel threatened, we narrow our vision. We focus. Instead, cultivate a practice called “soft eyes,” in which one learns to widen one’s periphery, to take in more of the world. Is there something on the periphery that is helpful, healing, or hopeful you might otherwise have missed?
• WEEP (whenever) Embrace whatever emotions come up. Joy and woe are woven fine.
• WONDER (as much as possible) Go out into nature, spend time at an art museum, listen to your favorite music, read books and poetry, get obsessed with space photos from the Webb telescope — anything that connects you to beauty and deepens your awareness of awe. “

Here is what Bass says about her list: “Some are everyday practices, some occasional. Some need to be learned; others are intuitive. This isn’t a to do list. It is a map. Mix them up. Borrow what you like or need. Whatever helps. Add your own Ws. Keep it simple.” “But these ten things seem like a good foundation for a fire-proof house. We didn’t want this disaster, but the wildfire is burning and shows no real sign of being contained. The conflagration comes closer. We want to survive, we want to help others survive, and we want to somehow shape a better future from the ashes.”

So let us remember that in the ground, everything changes. Every day brings a chance to learn something new, not thought of before, as long as we tune ourselves this way.

I know I can, I have faith that we can, because I must, we must. There are actions to take, coalitions to build, organizing to do. And, as African American poet Lucille Clifton reminds us, in the “In the bigger scheme  of things the universe is not asking us to do something, the universe is asking us to be something. And that’s a whole different thing.” May we build our stamina for the long haul, together. May we keep on imagining new ways, together. May we keep on singing, in joy and woe, together. May it ever be so.

The Cottage