فصل 08

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فصل 08

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8

I prayed a lot. I can almost see the cynics rolling their eyes. But pray I did, as fervently as I can remember ever doing. Novelist Anne Lamott once wrote that the three essential prayers she knows are “Help,” “Thanks,” “Wow.” You can guess which one I reached for last fall. I prayed for help to put the sadness and disappointment of my defeat behind me; to stay hopeful and openhearted rather than becoming cynical and bitter; and to find a new purpose and start a new chapter, so that the rest of my life wouldn’t be spent like Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, rattling around my house obsessing over what might have been.

I prayed that my worst fears about Donald Trump wouldn’t be realized, and that people’s lives and America’s future would be made better, not worse, during his presidency. I’m still praying on that one, and I can use all the backup you can muster.

I also prayed for wisdom. I had help from Bill Shillady, the United Methodist minister who co-officiated at Chelsea and Marc’s marriage and led the memorial services for my mother. During the campaign, he sent me devotionals every day. On November 9, he sent me a commentary that originally appeared in a blog by Pastor Matt Deuel. I read it many times before the week was out. This passage in particular really moved me:

It is Friday, but Sunday is coming.

This is not the devotional I had hoped to write. This is not the devotional you wish to receive this day.

While Good Friday may be the starkest representation of a Friday that we have, life is filled with a lot of Fridays.

For the disciples and Christ’s followers in the first century, Good Friday represented the day that everything fell apart. All was lost. And even though Jesus told his followers that three days later the temple would be restored . . . they betrayed, denied, mourned, fled, and hid. They did just about everything but feel good about Friday and their circumstances.

You are experiencing a Friday. But Sunday is coming! Death will be shattered. Hope will be restored. But first, we must live through the darkness and seeming hopelessness of Friday.

I called Reverend Bill, and we talked for a long time.

I reread one of my favorite books, The Return of the Prodigal Son by the Dutch priest Henri Nouwen. It’s something I’ve gone back to repeatedly during difficult times in my life. You may know the parable about the younger of two sons who strays and sins but finally comes home. He’s welcomed lovingly by his father but resented by his older brother, who had stayed behind and served his father honorably while the younger brother did whatever he wanted. Maybe it’s because I’m the oldest in our family and something of a Girl Scout, but I’ve always identified with the older brother in the parable. How grating it must have been to see his wayward sibling welcomed back as if nothing had happened. It must have felt as if all his years of hard work and dutiful care meant nothing at all. But the father says to the older brother, “Have I not taken good care of you? Have you not been close to me? Have you not been at my side learning and working?” Those things are their own reward.

It’s a story about unconditional love—the love of a father, and also the Father, who is always ready to love us, no matter how often we stumble and fall. It makes me think of my dad, a flinty, tight-lipped man who nevertheless always made sure I knew what I meant to him. “I won’t always like what you do,” he’d tell me, “but I will always love you.” As a kid, I would come up with elaborate hypotheses to test him. “What if I robbed a store or murdered somebody? Would you still love me then?” He’d say, “Absolutely! I’d be disappointed and sad, but I will always love you.” Once or twice last November, I thought to myself, “Well, Dad, what if I lose an election I should have won and let an unqualified bully become President of the United States? Would you still love me then?” Unconditional love is the greatest gift he gave me, and I’ve tried to give it to Chelsea and now to Charlotte and Aidan.

Nouwen sees another lesson in the parable of the Prodigal Son: a lesson about gratitude. “I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment,” he writes. “I can choose to speak about goodness and beauty even when my inner eye still looks for someone to accuse or something to call ugly. I can choose to listen to the voices that forgive and to look at the faces that smile even while I still hear words of revenge and see grimaces of hatred.”

It’s up to us to make the choice to be grateful even when things aren’t going well. Nouwen calls that the “discipline of gratitude.” To me, it means not just being grateful for the good things, because that’s easy, but also to be grateful for the hard things too. To be grateful even for our flaws, because in the end, they make us stronger by giving us a chance to reach beyond our grasp.

My task was to be grateful for the humbling experience of losing the presidential election. Humility can be such a painful virtue. In the Bible, Saint Paul reminds us that we all see through a glass darkly because of our humbling limitations. That’s why faith—the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things unseen—requires a leap. It’s because of our limitations and imperfections that we must reach out beyond ourselves, to God and to one another.

As the days went by, November turned into December, and that horrible, no good, very bad time came to a close, I began to rediscover my gratitude. I felt the good effects of all that walking and sleep; I was getting calmer and stronger. I found myself thinking of new projects I’d like to take on. I started accepting invitations to events that spoke to my heart: a Planned Parenthood dinner, the Women in the World summit and the Vital Voices gala celebrating women leaders and activists from around the world, and gatherings with students at Harvard, Wellesley, and Georgetown. Those rooms were full of purposeful energy. I soaked it all up and found myself thinking more about the future than the past.

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