Lent came early for me this year.  Lent came early for a lot of us.  It started back in November and has hung like a cloud over Advent, Christmas and Epiphany.  Shrove Tuesday was just another day because we had been unwillingly shriven for weeks and there was nothing left to shrive.   Ash Wednesday was an anticlimax due to all the actual and figurative ash that had already been blown in our faces.  Our foreheads were already marked with deep creases of concern and unpleasant astonishment. 

I realized as I puttered around my kitchen this morning that I have been feeling a bone deep exhaustion since the election.  My wise and reflective friend Phil said, “It seems like everything is a slug, doesn’t it? And when you think it can’t get any worse, well, there you go. It’s an odd feeling to feel depression brought on by national politics and experience the unexpected sensation of visceral anger.”  He hit the nail on the head.

I’ve been feeling—a lot of us have been feeling—an enervating, soul draining gloominess.  Phil called it depression, but out of respect for those who suffer from genuine clinical depression, I’m going to call it sadness.  It’s a sadness born in disillusionment, a melancholy arising from the realization that so many of my fellow Americans do not share the values that I always assumed were bedrock for us as a people and that a staggering number of us not only couldn’t see a psychopathic grifter for what he is but actually have embraced his greedy narcissism as a kind of virtue to be emulated. 

It’s a sadness arising from the realization that we as a country are deeply broken.  Our systems are compromised and corrupted by money and the persons now in power are busy undermining the safeguards and mechanisms that would give us some way to curtail their abuse of power.  Worse, they are dismantling the systems and structures we will need to rebuild and restore once their top heavy regime collapses.

And it will collapse.  History has taught us that despotism, after being horribly powerful for a time, always collapses.  Always. Government of any kind requires the consent of the governed, and by that standard a growing number of us are well on the way to being ungovernable.  

It helps me to name this sadness, because with sadness you can name what is making you sad.  But now comes the tricky part.  I need to turn this sadness into a particular kind of anger.  A fierce, loving anger.  Anger brings energy, and we need energy to confront the destruction of our democracy and our values.  But it has to be a loving anger.  Like I said, it’s tricky.  It’s not easy to hold love and anger in the same heart.

I’ve never liked the expression, “hate the sin but love the sinner.”  Those using the phrase have too often been quick to demonize and dehumanize persons who are inherently different in some way and too slow to show any kind of love or understanding. “Hate the sin but love the sinner” has too often been used to lay a thin veneer of piety over deep seated bigotry.  In this case, though, I think it’s appropriate.  Hate the sin of greed.  Hate the avarice for power.  Hate the disrespect of the people who are daily assaulting diversity, equity and inclusion.  Hate the bigotry, the racism, the willful ignorance and general obtuseness of the people who are all too gleefully pulling apart the carefully constructed framework of civil rights and the organs of generosity that have been our pathway to and our hope for a better country and a better world.  Hate the shortsighted economics that treats persons like inventory.  Hate the binary politics that divides us into us and them, that sneers at cooperation and makes everything a competition.  

Hate the sin, but love the sinner.  That’s the hard part.  Love the sinner.  Yes, even the misanthropic billionaire.  Pray for him.  God has been in the transformation business for a long time with some very surprising results.  Some have been world changing.  Pray, too, for the president with the bad hair who can’t seem to get his bronzer right.  It’s a long shot, but there may be a Road to Damascus in his future, too.  So pray.  Then act.  Go to the protest.  Write and call your representatives until they’re annoyed with you.  Boycott the business that are funding our destruction.  Let them know you are boycotting them and why.  Do justice, love kindness, walk humbly with God, as we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.