Pastor’s Ponderings
November, 2024
In my sermon on October 27th I mentioned the anxiety that many people are facing because of the 2024 election. As we get closer and closer to November 5th, I sense that that anxiety is only becoming more palpable. I know that mine is. I have to intentionally stop myself from refreshing political news websites every five minutes and looking up the latest swing state polls.
One thing that has helped me obsess a little less over the coming election is rereading parts of a book I read several years ago. It’s called Healing the Heart of Democracy, and it was written by Parker Palmer, a noted author, educator, and sociologist. Palmer writes out of the Quaker tradition, and I find that many of his insights resonate well with my own Presbyterian / Reformed tradition.
The book opens with a quotation from another author, Terry Tempest Williams, who wrote, “The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up—ever—trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?”
In the book Palmer explores five habits of the heart. Each of these habits deserves its own lengthy paragraph, but here I’ve included brief quotations to underscore why each of these habits is needed.
1. An understanding that we are all in this together. “We must embrace the simple fact that we are dependent on and accountable to one another.”
2. An appreciation of the value of otherness. “Hospitality rightly understood is premised on the notion that the stranger has much to teach us.”
3. An ability to hold tension in life-giving ways. “At the center of America’s public life is a marketplace of ideas that only a free people could create, a vital, colorful, chaotic bazaar of religious, philosophical, political, and intellectual convictions.”
4. A sense of personal voice and agency. “We grow up in educational and religious institutions that treat us as members of an audience instead of actors in a drama, and as a result we become adults who treat politics as a spectator sport. And yet it remains possible for us, young and old alike, to find our voices, learn how to use them, and know the satisfaction that comes from contributing to positive change.”
5. A capacity to create community. “Without a community, it is nearly impossible to exercise the ‘power of one’ in a manner that multiplies: it took a village to translate Rosa Park’s act of personal integrity into social change. The steady companionship of two or three kindred spirits can kindle the courage we need to speak and act as citizens.”
It may seem like a very tall order. But Parker Palmer reminds me that we can dare to envision a very different kind of politics—one that looks more like the Sermon on the Mount (see Matthew, chapters 5, 6, and 7) and less like a state of perpetual war.
Grace and Peace,
Pastor Jack
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