Wednesday, August 26, 2020
Vicki Boyd
Persevere
Whew, I thought. And then the next thing he said truly saved me: “I’m all for momentary despair. I’m all against permanent despair…You have to get up again. You have to. You have to build the world anew every, single, day. Even though it’s hard and you don’t want to.”
I write this from the makeshift office I’ve constructed at home: essentially, a folding table in a bedroom. It beats the basement, where I spent the first three months of quarantine, emerging so rarely from my work cave my family took to calling me Gollum.
I suppose I don’t have to remind you that we live our way through the previously unimaginable: Global pandemic. Economic collapse. An eruption of civil unrest that has given rise to what some social scientists believe is the largest protest movement in the history of the United States—this being the good news, if it can force at last the kind of reckoning each of us must make with the ways we have contributed to injustice in our nation and finally begin to reverse racism’s corrosive, oppressive, even deadly effects, particularly on Black Americans.
In our better moments, from socially appropriate distances, perhaps via Zoom or DM, we comfort each other. “We’ll get through this together,” we say. In other moments, despair finds us. It enters uninvited, no mask, stands close, breathes its toxic fog on us.
I’m not prone to gloom, but I found solace recently in an interview Rabbi David Wolpe* gave about how to make sense of suffering. “If you want to lay down in a moment and say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t take it any more,’ I’m with you,” he said. “Totally understand…I’m all for momentary despair.”
Whew, I thought. And then the next thing he said truly saved me: “I’m all for momentary despair. I’m all against permanent despair…You have to get up again. You have to. You have to build the world anew every, single, day. Even though it’s hard and you don’t want to.”
In other words, we have to persevere, in spite of ourselves. In fact, I believe this is what we are called to do in our most desperate moments. It’s how we make our faith visible and evoke the presence and strength of God, for ourselves and all those who are counting on us.
At this impossible time, I have no magic words to offer anyone, but I pray deeply for two things: First, may you and your family and all those you love be kept safe. Second, may whatever despair you feel be of the momentary kind. May you remember how to put your faith to work in these moments, how to replace anguish with the resolve to make the world new again for yourself and for those around you. Your perseverance is your faith made visible.
*On the podcast series “Future Perfect: The Way Through”
