The Antidote to Despair: What Faith communities Offer a Divided World

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of EPIC.

By Rev. Martin Elfert

Ezekiel Kweku describes the trajectory of pandemic and, in particular, the trajectory of the days of lockdown in this way:

We turned inward, 

and then we turned on one another.

Now six years after lockdown began, the legacy of our self-focus and our resultant rage is everywhere. Witness the sign at the doctor’s office all but begging us not to yell or swear at or (God help us) physically assault the staff. Witness our almost casual willingness to sever relationships and to call our shunning boundaries. Witness the bullying that we do online (don’t read the comments) and how we dress our bullying up as justice.

That, sadly, is nowhere near a complete list.

To endure this pain, to participate in it, is to ask: How do we escape from this mutual hurt? Is there a better, kinder way of living? And if so, how do we find it?

Here is the beginning of an answer. It’s a small example. But my trust is that small things matter.

The church I serve in Portland, Oregon, Grace Memorial Episcopal Church, is starting the work of renovating two houses on our campus in partnership with the not-for-profit Family Promise. Our restored houses will serve as temporary homes for families exiting homelessness. In furtherance of that goal, we’ve held a couple of workdays in which we cleaned out the houses, patched the walls, and tore out old carpet.

At our last workday I visited with a number of volunteers as they swung hammers, pulled up forgotten staples, and (for those of us drawn to something a little less physically intense) weeded the garden beds. Everyone was full of the unique delight, the camaraderie, that comes of working with your hands, of doing something meaningful and getting dirt under your fingernails as you so do. 

One person after another said to me:

This kind of work? 

It is the antidote to despair.

And I thought: Yes. That’s right.

Another way of expressing my friends’ idea might be to say that work such as this is the antidote to turning inward and turning on one another.

My conviction – my experience – is that faith communities have a particular capacity, skill, and calling to offer the antidote that we need today. Specifically, faith communities know how to nurture five things. I’m going to call those five things beauty, mystery, community, service, and joy.

Where faith comes in

Beauty is picking the paint colors for the houses in which the families who come to us will live. It’s also the concert that we host in the sanctuary, it’s the children’s art camp in the parish hall, and then it’s Sunday morn, in which story, symbol, and song intersect to nurture possibility. That thing Dostoyevsky said? Beauty will save the world. I can never decide if it’s the most naïve thing ever or the most true. My compromise is to think it’s both.

Mystery is trusting that a web of relationships bind us to our ancestors, to the earth, to each other, and to the numinous itself. Because of these ineffable connections we proclaim that the folks who will live in our houses, few or none of whom we have met, are our kin, that we will be welcoming family home. All those years ago that flawed saint, Augustine, said If you understand it, it’s not God. And I don’t understand. But I say yes to this work anyway.

Community is the conviction that our work is best done together. Again, see the delight at our last workday. I rarely experience such delight working by myself: I experience it so often with others. Even when I have trouble liking those others and they have trouble liking me. Maybe – is this possible? – especially when we have trouble liking each other. It is Brené Brown who said The most important part of church is coming to the communion rail with people you want to choke. The invitation, if we dare accept it, is to see Christ in those people – and, if we dare, to let them see Christ in us.

Service is finding yourself by giving yourself away. It is saying yes to God’s call, as Frederick Buechner put it, to the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger intersect. How often have you volunteered at a soup kitchen or some similar project only to realize that in helping others you were helping yourself? When we give a neighbor a ride to the doctor, when we take care of a friend’s pets while they are out of town, when we house people: this is when we become most completely ourselves.

And joy is the realization that our work isn’t work at all, not really. We would do this work even if we didn’t need to make money. I have given each of these categories a quote and I will give this last one to my late Uncle Gord. Martin, Gord said, if you can do what you love then you’ve got the world by the balls. (Thanks Uncle Gord!) When we serve God and neighbor we are doing the work that will find its way into our obituary, that folks will speak of when we die. When we serve, we imitate Christ.

Those five categories, all of them, overlap. And we could probably add to them, getting up to seven or nine or twelve categories. But these five are the beginning that I have for now. They are, for me and – dare I hope? – for you, the beginning of an antidote to turning inward and turning on each other. They are the antidote to despair. Together, with God’s help, may we take the antidote and may we offer it to others. May we turn outward, to neighbor, to Jesus, to love.

The Rev. Martin Elfert is the rector of Grace Memorial Episcopal Church in Portland, Oregon. He came to faith after the birth of his son, Ami, an experience that drew him to The Episcopal Church’s embrace of ambiguity, beauty, doubt and social justice. Elfert was baptized at the Easter Vigil in 2005 and, after discernment and seminary training at Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, CA, served as associate dean of St. John’s Cathedral in Spokane, WA, before being called to Grace Memorial in 2015. Before ordination, he worked as technical director of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. He and his wife, Phoebe, have three children and a cat named Enid Punter II.