Like so many of the injustices and inequities revealed by the pandemic, evangelical Christianity’s deepest values have also been unmasked. Now that more and more businesses are requiring those who return to work to get the vaccine, people who have already decided not to get the shot, often by feasting on misinformation, have also decided that their “personal freedom” trumps any biblical injunction to be our sister and brother’s keeper. But that is not all.
Most people, if they know anything about Julian of Norwich, know two things. First, that she said “all things will be well, every manner of thing will be well,” a testimony to hope or what Mirabai Starr calls “radical optimism” that arises near the end of her book Showings and ought not to be understood as “spiritual bypass” or denial of suffering. Second, people have heard that she talks about the “motherhood of God” quite often.
I’m thinking a lot about this moment. Under 70 days until the most important Presidential Election arguably of all time, close to six months into an unprecedented global pandemic, increasing racial uprisings, increasing inequalities, anxieties, looming questions, delayed and potent grief.