Photograph by Andrew Le via Unsplash

As I awoke yesterday to the news of Donald Trump’s reelection to the presidency, I experienced a range of emotions – fear, anxiety, sadness, and anger. I’m sure others felt similarly and still others are celebrating. It’s stunning to me to live in a country that has knowingly returned an authoritarian to office for a self-professed revenge tour that threatens to send our country backward. It seems like all the myths that we’ve been led to believe about America have been put to rest with this one election, and honestly, it would be so easy to give into despair, but I want to be bold in asking you to instead choose faith. I am not intrepid enough to suggest hope, but faith I can live with.

That faith is certainly not in our country or that democracy only produces positive results, but in the fact that, as first Theodore Parker and then Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice.” We are part of a cosmic drama that is beyond our sensing and knowing, and it does end with love being victorious. Love does win in the end, over the course of deep, even geologic, time, but that doesn’t mean that we will always see its victory.

But there’s more to do than just sit around waiting for the arc to bend. Jesse Jackson added to that statement a sentiment that is particularly helpful for me in times like these: “but you have to pull it to bend; it doesn’t bend automatically.” That makes my faith more than just waiting for something good to happen and puts what we do in the center of our considerations. We have to bend the arc.

Despair is nothing more than the feeling that what we do doesn’t matter, can’t change anything, and that even if we did change something, no one would care. The antidote to despair is faith, faith that we really can be the friends of God[i] that feminist theologian Dorothee Sölle imagined, touching and healing the wounds of the world.

Of course, there is no guarantee of our success. As Martin Buber put it, “Success is not one of God’s names.”[ii] Indeed, in the Jewish and Christian story, God can hardly be called successful. In the Hebrew Bible, Israel and Judah are scattered and live in exile. In the New Testament, God’s son dies, then is resurrected, and his followers face persecution. Sure, there is some sense that God will be successful in the end, but it has certainly not been an unbroken chain of advancement. What we are instead promised is faithfulness: wherever we go, we are not alone; we live in a God-drenched world.

Whatever you are feeling about this election is valid. Give yourself the time to grieve, to rage, even to despair. Feel your feet on the ground and pay attention to your breath as it enters and exits your body. It would be impossible to simply move on from this election as if it didn’t affect us, but when those feelings have run their course, it is time to work for a better world.

The president-elect has promised mass deportations of the type that has never been seen before as a core part of his platform. He has committed to using the military against his fellow citizens as he seeks to strike against “the enemy from within…[the] radical left.” We must dedicate ourselves to speaking out and organizing for justice in a real way. Again, success is not promised, but we cannot allow such a vision of our country to take place unchallenged.

God has called us to be the Church in precisely these moments, where it seems like all hope is lost. It is easy to proclaim love’s victory over hate when times are good, but how much more radical and important is it to proclaim that very message when it seems like all hope is lost? Despair is likely an attractive option at the present moment – I myself am tempted by it – but I think that what we really need is faith. Faith in that arc and its bending, faith that what we do counts for something, faith that we can be the friends that God needs now.

The next four years will try us. We will have to be bold in our pursuit of a better world, undaunted by the lack of success, undeterred in our pursuit of the vision of the beloved community that our faith implores us to build. But I believe we can do this work because we have each other. We are called to this work and to such a time as this.