What difference have I made?

A Reflection for Tuesday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

Find today’s readings here.

My heart gets heavy. My spirit stutters and trembles.

I watch the news, listen to our political leaders, struggle to press through the short-sightedness and galling venality I perceive around me. How much do I contribute to it? Am I doing anything to clear the fog of anxiety and chaos that seems some days to overcome everything and everyone?

I am after all in the business of sharing information, changing minds and hearts, issuing clarifications and clearing some of that fog away. Am I successful at it? Have I ever been successful at it?

There are days I feel like I am plagiarizing myself, the young man 30 or even now 40 years ago who wrote with optimism and energy about universal rights, shoring up social safety nets and economic justice.

Decades away, I look around and despair that nothing has changed. Good Lord, are things even worse now? The words I wrote and the points I made then can be said again—need saying again. I merely have to update some stats and some dates.

What difference have I made? It can be disheartening, incapacitating to wonder.

A kind of paralyzing fear is at play across the land, no doubt about it, and perhaps it is driving some irrational judgments and rash decisions. On a recent trip to Washington, I brought along my passport—a U.S. passport to visit a U.S. city.

My concern was an attempt to interview a National Guard member or federal agent might go sideways on me, that I might need some super-powered ID to back my way out of it. Certainly I’d seen my share of YouTube videos and read the reports about people being unnecessarily roughed up or arrested in recent weeks.

Was it crazy to worry about that happening? Is this what paranoia looks like?

Turns out my conversations in Washington went well, even pleasantly. I was grateful for them. Can I continue to rely on the decency and kindness of my fellow countrymen? I hope so.

But today’s Scripture reminds us that in the ultimate reality, we have nothing to fear, though tremors and starts and anxieties always remain our lot.

Whom or what should I fear? I have always been in God’s hands. Sudden disaster may befall us, “like labor pains upon a pregnant woman.” But can I not likewise deliver new life and hope out of that suffering, that fearfulness?

I am part of a chain of humanity and grace, co-creating with the Lord of history. I have not seen its beginning, and I will not see its end until glory, but in the in-between time I inhabit let me draw comfort and sustenance from my point in eternity where every hair on my head has already been counted.

That is not meant to suggest a surrender or an abdication. I’m not going to simply lay down before the imperfections of the world but embrace in confident hope my place among them, continuing to “believe that I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.”

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