I am caught between a deep unease about where we are as a country and a yearning to embrace a realistic hope. The political middle has vanished and there is a cynicism that is infecting us. When we are in doubt about the integrity of our elections, we distrust our leaders and are suspicious about their motives, there is a stain on our capacity to feel connected to something larger—especially a sense of the arc of justice. I mean if we do not think tomorrow will be better than today, then we are in danger of losing our sense of purpose. I work hard because I like to work, but also because I believe I am part of a movement of making this world move towards God’s reign of peace, justice, and mercy. I need to believe my grandchildren’s world will be better than mine in order to fully engage in the here and now.

I urge you to read David Brooks’ editorial from yesterday’s New York Times: “The Unifying American Story.” He says what ails us is that we lack a cohesive narrative that binds us together and gives us hope in these bleak times. Our public narrative for centuries has been the Exodus story---once we were slaves but God brought us into a new land.

Brooks ends the article with this: “We have a lot of crises in this country, but maybe the foundational one is the Telos Crisis, a crisis of purpose. Many people don’t know what this country is here for, and what we are here for. If you don’t know what your goal is, then every setback sends you into cynicism and selfishness. It should be possible to revive the Exodus template, to see Americans as a single people trekking through a landscape of broken institutions. What’s needed is an act of imagination, somebody who can tell us what our goal is, and offer an ideal vision of what the country and the world should be.”

I have come to the limits of what I can do about the President, the Congress and the North Carolina Legislature, and the way I am interpreting their actions isn’t helping me and is making my world darker and smaller. In the Episcopal Church’s Eucharistic Prayer, we ask God to “lift up our hearts.” I think that’s about giving us a larger horizon or a broader story. We ask God to remind us that God is working God’s purpose out. God is in this and calling on us to be part of the story of moving from “error to truth, from sin to righteousness, from death to life.”

Once our horizon largens, we continue to work, but it’s not all on us, nor do we have to have immediate results. Perhaps we have lost our way but The Way isn’t lost. We as faithful citizens need to call our leaders back into our common story. We need to remind them and ourselves of who we are. Our story gives us hope.

This is all I know to do: pray for all our leaders and pray for the ones who drive you to despair by name. Pray for their wellbeing and that they grow into the person God intends them to be. Pray for your heart of stone to become a heart of flesh so that you can feel what you feel but not be hardened. Look at what is---it doesn’t help to hide—but hold on to what is promised. And the hardest thing: keep believing that our leaders can behave differently and our world can be true to its calling to move towards God’s kingdom because we are part of a larger story of God’s redeeming the world.

+Porter