The Pushback

Ten steps forward, nine steps back ...

I know at least part of this is grief, woundedness and malaise after the Sept. 3 death of my father-in-law, just five months after he was diagnosed with cancer after no warning at all, seemingly in perfect health - until he wasn’t.

Some of it is the wandering fatigue mixed with restlessness that comes at the time of the changing of seasons, expectations and excitement, mixed with a dose of sadness, as kids get older and life changes, irrevocably, as school bells ring and kids who you once looked down on with shining eyes at the playground now stand a head above you, their voices suddenly deep and sonorous.

But I think a big part of how I’m feeling goes beyond my personal life, and the normal ebbs and flows of everyday experience, into a broader national and global experience, at a hinge point for America and perhaps the world: certainly for the American Church.

Let me explain.

A few days ago, I was messaging with a writer friend of mine, an expert in telling the stories of abuse survivors in the church, and raising the alarm, years and years before national media outlets started following these stories, of what was happening to women in conservative Christianity. (Fast forward to today, when one of our nation’s political parties is basing much of its campaign on circumscribing the bodily and electoral rights of women).

My writer friend told me that, in all of her experience writing about the Church and lifting up the stories of abuse survivors, she thinks for women in the Church in general, it’s often 10 steps forward. And then nine steps back.

I felt so heard and seen by her words, even as I find myself with 11 years of clergy ordination under my belt as a Pastor in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, even having just celebrated my installation as Pastor of Visitation and Public Theology at Lake Nokomis Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, a service presided over by our new woman bishop, led also by my church’s lead pastor and our neighboring church’s lead pastor (all of whom are also women) - and cheered on and prayed for and supported by several retired and active male clergy members who sat in the pews.

10 steps forward.

Last month, I began writing officially as a contributing columnist for the Minnesota Star Tribune, and one of my favorite parts about that is seeing just how many people I know still read our local (print) newspaper! Even though the stories usually go online first, I often end up getting the most comments the following day, when the article runs in print. As a woman with a magazine journalism degree who started my career as a sportswriter for regional newspapers, this makes me really happy and proud. Newsprint is anything but obsolete, much as Elon Musk might want us to believe it is.

Yep, 10 steps forward.

Three days after my installation and the announcement that I’d be starting as a columnist at the Star Tribune, Minnesota Gov. (and fellow ELCA Lutheran) Tim Walz took the stage at the Democratic National Convention to officially accept the nomination as vice president to Democratic presidential nominee (and current VP) Kamala Harris. While Walz gave his speech, the camera panned to his son, an emotional and visibly tearing up Gus Walz, who was saying: “THAT’S MY DAD!”

For me, you just can’t make that be a partisan moment. It was much bigger than that, and more important. In a nation aching for moments of love, family, and togetherness, I felt this huge sense of collective exhale: and it just got better, as the Mankato West high school football team took the stage, and then Tim embraced his wife, Gwen, who is well-known here in Lutheran circles in Minnesota, and happens to hail from the small town just 15 minutes east of the little town in Southwestern Minnesota where I pastored for three years from 2019-2023.

I wrote about their marital embrace caught on camera the week earlier in my official first column for the Star Tribune, and a week later I got to talk about that column on the paper’s stage at the Minnesota State Fair. Everything felt like it was changing, and quickly, from the dour expectations of earlier this summer when President Joe Biden was incoherent and seemingly feeble during most his Presidential debate against former President Donald Trump, and then Trump’s rally was interrupted by a violent assassination attempt, seeming to guarantee a season ahead of political despair, violence, and anger.

10 steps forward, but …

Less than two weeks after that shining moment of family pride and Midwestern high school football taking center stage at the DNC, Minnesota kids went back to school the day after Labor Day. Shortly after dropping off our youngest son at his new school, we got the phone call that my father-in-law had died.

Twenty-four hours later, news headlines broke of another school shooting, in Georgia. The shooter was just 14 years old, and his mother, grandmother, and aunt had been warning authorities for months. The family had been beset by chaos, poverty, and domestic violence.

Six days later, Trump claimed on national television that Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating family pets; his claims were preceded by similar claims made by his vice presidential candidate, U.S. senators, and some of the world’s wealthiest men.

Schools were cancelled due to bomb threats in Springfield, Ohio, where the false claims originated.

Another assassination attempt.

And last week, when I wrote about parental stress with school shootings and dehumanization of immigrants and loss of bodily autonomy for American mothers: I received an email in my inbox, a photo of my picture in the Minnesota Star Tribune, circled with red ink, calling me evil, lazy, a bad parent, and to blame for school shootings.

I heard from church leaders that they were being visited by pastors and other leaders who were boycotting upcoming speaking events I had planned to discuss the theological roots of Christian Nationalism.

A pastor friend of mine emailed about an abuser who’d been working in her church, without her knowledge, but with the knowledge of the lead pastor and other administrators.

A beloved longtime church member was on hospice and near death, and despite a well-lived and long life, her family grieved. Another life gone.

I got an email about measles circulating in my children’s schools: a disease once eradicated in America now back due to conspiracy theorists riling up parental fears about vaccines, and discriminatory attitudes toward autistic people.

There was so much to fear.

Nine. Steps. Back.

***

On March 31, 1968, to a nation torn apart by the Vietnam War, a nation restless in the wake of a Civil Rights movement whose work was not yet finished, grieving the death of a president, not knowing two more devastating assassinations were yet to come …

To this nation, seeking freedom but also opposing it because of its cost to the unjustified privilege given to white, wealthy men in America …

The courageous and embattled Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said:

“We will overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” (quoting Unitarian pastor and abolitionist Theodore Parker).

I believe we are in the long part of the arc. I know, when my heart is heavy and my spirit besieged, I am in the long part of the arc. I can see justice on the horizon, can taste the Spirit of Justice, as heralded by

Jemar Tisby, PhD

.

10 steps forward.

Nine steps back.

That one step has to matter.

We’re not going back.

Keep the faith, I say to you and to me.

P.S. …

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