In four years Nathan will be nine
Yesterday, after going through the usual morning routine, getting Liam off to school, playing with trains, and a suspenseful game of snakes and ladders, Nathan and I headed out the door to vote. On our walk to the elementary school gym Nathan said "Mama, I really don't want our country to elect a bully."
This morning when Nathan got up I told him the news - our country elected a bully. He literally crawled back under the covers. He wanted to know why.
All morning I've been asking myself if our privilege means my family will get through the next four years unscathed. And if so, how we will use that privilege to serve those who are targeted and marginalized. And how, how on earth, we will raise our boys so that four years from now when we are again electing a president, and sixteen years from now when Nathan can vote for a president, they are still saying I don't want our country to elect a bully. In four years Nathan will be nine. Nine year olds have heard a lot and formed plenty of opinions. I keep thinking of those lines from South Pacific: "You've got to be taught before it's too late, / Before you are six or seven or eight, / To hate all the people your relatives hate, / You've got to be carefully taught!" I have some confidence we're doing pretty well on the not hating thing, so I'm less worried about who my children might learn to hate than that we won't teach them well enough how to love.
So as a person of faith and privilege the best I can figure is to start with St. Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.