The Way of Love --> đź–¤
Dr. Chris Townley has been a trusted friend, accomplice, colleague, and pastor for almost two decades, faithfully engaging in the good and challenging work of justice and community building. He is a gifted writer and recently completed his dissertation, A Trinitarian Vision for Shared Leadership: Embracing Hospitality as a Transformative Pathway, which will soon be published as a book! We are honored to count him among our dearest friends and to have him serve on our Board of Advisors for BLK South. Learn More
A couple days after the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, Kate and I took to the air, a planned excursion months in the making, but one that seemed a bit like flying away. On our flight to Argentina I was thinking about what has become (and what has always been) of my home country.
In flight I found myself scouring the words and pages of Barry Lopez in search of something to illuminate a path on which I might continue to write and work for the greater good. In one of his essays titled, “Love in a Time of Terror” I expected to encounter a vision to guide me (and perhaps the title was enough). I did and I didn’t find what I was looking for.
Lopez quips that “evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us.” This is the pulse to my rage, a rage aimed mostly at the Trump regime and his cronies. A movement famous for a failure to love. But my frustration is not only fueled by the failure to love present within the MAGA movement, it is that it is glaringly obvious that a Trump presidency is devoid of love, assuring he’s placed in the pantheon of Bullies.
To be fair, regardless of whether you agree with this assessment, I am not saying anything that hasn’t already been said by people much more astute than myself. Yet, what unearths the “evidence of the failure to love” most shockingly for me (at least this second time around) are those who I’ve known to carry love when our lives intersected only to find them so publically promoting the bullying tactics of the MAGA movement. To say nothing of the way they strain to associate such promotion with the blessings of God.
Lopez again, reflecting in years past, “we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter.” To which I’m nodding along. He continues with the warning that if we do not reimagine “we will only continue to push on with this unwarranted hope that things will work out.” Those who I find myself most heartbroken with over their full sail alignment with a type of Trumpian Savior Ideology are those who appear content on believing that with more of this (gestures wildly at his first month in office), then the flourishing of the Created world is sure to follow.
Barry Lopez and his studio in Finn Rock, OR
However, as scourging as my assessment may be, I don’t believe the Democratic Party offers a solution that suits me in many instances. But this is not an essay on the deception of a radical middle. Indeed, many of my values find a home within a progressive agenda and what they claim to care about, but I am not content waiting for them to organize and deliver on their promised ideals. Greed is festering here as well and distorting the goals and vision for good.
This is why I am a Barry Lopez acolyte. Like him, I hope to “know and love what we have been given, and urge others to do the same.” The wounded world, humanity and the planet alike, is dependent on our action.
The lingering sentiment of my own failure, which is maybe a failure to love or maybe only failure, rumbles through my nervous system in such a way that probes regret. What didn’t I do, or say, during the days in which I have been entrusted with some level of transformative spiritual persuasion as peoples’ pastor? In all my years as a pulpit preacher I had presumed I was contending for the type of Love that is prone to traverse unjust boundaries rather than construct them.
It is one thing to wield a pen and fill in an oval next to Trump’s name on a ballot and it is quite another to rally the throngs to welcome a savior, the capital “S” very much in question. The virtues have been signaled and when such virtues are overlaid with the life of Jesus they are, well, virtueless. An orange faced lie. Two separate circles.
This has me thinking, perhaps my own failure was like water. I sought to baptize in the humble love of Jesus, and yet now it seems with far too many I’m witnessing the imagery posed by Christian Wiman: Seeing my ministry is “to look at a body of water, which, like all water, leaves no trace.” A vocation engulfed in the flow of life, no match for the media, algorithms, and incessant longing for power. And so perhaps one more time I find myself tossing a crying rock in the stream of our lives, and the rock is announcing (with less praise and more prophetic plea) a proclamation as a question: Is there even an ounce of the humble love of Christ pulsing through president Trump and his saluting ilk? Are there ounces enough within us to sustain us in these uncertain times?
Herein lies the kaleidoscopic complexities of being human. My own complexity has been protesting on and on in alignment with those who’ve shown me the way. For more than a decade we have announced the incongruous characteristics of Trumpian politics versus the ways of Jesus. Yet, if one were to read Howard Thurmans’s “Jesus and the Disinherited” (and you’ve had since 1949 to grab a copy!) they’d see the complexities of humanity on full display. Thurman is writing from the underside, from the margins. He was a Black man writing to inspire a movement before the movement had commenced. He claims the complexities of humanity rest in the way the perfection of humanity, Jesus, is understood. In Thurman’s view (to which I ascribe), Jesus is most powerfully present among any and all who “have their backs against the wall.” Or as the title of this work suggests, the disinherited. This framing is what has both broken and restored my faith in Jesus. And it so happens that it is also this framing that which most condemns the Trump-praising-Christian, at least in my own view, because I do not understand how enthusiastically supporting Trump can be reconciled with a Jesus who embodied humility and died the death of a radical while proclaiming liberation for those who suffer with their backs against the wall (Lk 4:18-19).
The Rev. Howard Thurman was a theologian, mystic, and civil rights leader. From the Howard Thurman and Sue Bailey Thurman Collections, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.
Therefore Jesus, who entered the world as a poor minority, sought to, in the words of Thurman, bring a “message focused on the urgency of a radical change in the inner attitude of the people.” This. This is why I’m grieving. Out of the mouths of those I believed to carry the love of Jesus another flame of burning has surfaced, and it illuminates my own naivete and blindness to once again be surprised at the unabashed support of one who is not like the Prince of Peace, but an instrument of hate.
Thus Thurman’s manifesto from 1949 still rings true today, and in fact it summarizes the entire essence I’m attempting to wrestle forth. I lift up his words again, wishing they weren’t so prescient for my own failures and also the lives of those I hope will reconsider their Christian invoked support of Trump.
Thurman writes of how few interpretations of Jesus deal with what the life and teachings of Jesus have to say “to those who stand, at a moment in human history, with their backs against the wall.” This Christian alignment with Trumpian politics isn’t such a word for any of these people. Thurman says of that, therefore,
The conventional Christian word is muffled, confused, and vague. Too often the price exacted by society for security and respectability is that the Christian movement in its formal expression must be on the side of the strong against the weak.
As we take that in, it is the next sentence that is of most significance for this cultural moment. He continues,
This is a matter of tremendous significance, for it reveals to what extent a religion that was born of a people acquainted with persecution and suffering has become the cornerstone of a civilization and of nations whose very position in modern life has too often (emphasis mine) been secured by a ruthless use of power applied to weak and defenseless peoples.
All I can see from my vantage point is this: The ways of Trump are antithetical to the ways of Jesus.
Then I looked out the window of the plane as we began our descent into El Calafate. The landscape was brown, appearing desolate, only pockmarked with different shades of dirt. However, the closer we got to the city and the lake on which it resides, the colors transformed. Glacial blue flowed, carving its way through the desert. And I thought, maybe the trace water leaves are cut into the banks, a pathway for the driest season. I was surprised to witness such a juxtaposition speaking to me through the land.
And then I thought, are we on a trajectory to lose the path forming agent altogether? Is the driest season only expanding and prolonging?
Enthusiastic alignment with Trump and his movement might only be part of the complexities that make up the humanity of those I’ve pastored, and it is my own (therapy) inspired challenge to love the other parts of the whole, as well. But it is this part we have been discussing, the part unironically flowing Red that needs to be addressed (again) and I suppose I’m mustering my best attempt for this season of my life. These are only words. Only my words. But it is my offering.
It is these words here, blinking on the screen, in which I am trying to love those from my past and the present. And to love is to urge, again, an invitation to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter. As we do so, may we follow the Jesus of Thurman’s description, and thus stop pressing people and our planet against the wall, instead join in the work of Liberation that Jesus invites us to undertake together buoyed by the Spirit of Love. May we receive the Spirit of Jesus and proclaim alongside him in word and action.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released,
that the blind will see,
that the oppressed will be set free,
and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.
R E C O M M E N D E D R E A D I N G
