Blessed are the suffragettes.
In the autumn of 2018, I was spending my days attempting to channel Mary Poppins, Mr. Rogers, Ms. Frizzle, and my favorite children’s church director as I wrangled two wild and precious girls so their mama and dad could work at one of the local plants. Between the hours of 7:00 am and 5:00 pm, we crammed in as many backyard worm hunts and games of hide and seek in as we could. I knew that my job was more than kissing scraped knees and refereeing spats over who got which tool in the sandbox. For however long I had them, they would learn how to be little women in the world by watching me. They could learn how to be kind and brave and generous and empathetic—or they could learn how to be impatient, selfish, and cranky. I did the best that I could to teach them, but ever mindful of my own weakness, I know they probably got just as much of the latter as they did the former (admittedly, it is hard to feign cheerfulness when, for the third time in a week, you give the four-year-old the macaroni and cheese that she asked for only to be told that she now wants a peanut butter and jelly instead).
State and local elections were scheduled for November 6, and I had decided that it would be a good opportunity to take the girls on a field trip. I told LG that it was a very important day because we were going to go vote.
“A long time ago,” I explained, “girls were not allowed to vote because boys thought we were dumb.” I bit my lip to keep from grinning as I watched her eyes grow like a cartoon character. When you’re four, “dumb” is just about the worst word there is.
“But we’re not dumb, are we?” I asked. She cheered that we were not.
I told her about Susan B. Anthony, and how she knew that girls were smart. Susan and her friends were brave and worked hard until girls were allowed to vote like the boys—but that was not the end of the story. There were still a lot of people who couldn’t vote because their skin looked different than ours did. And now, we have to be brave and work hard like Susan so that everyone can vote—because we know that we are the same on the inside. We get to vote so that the world is kinder and more fair for everybody.
I was feeling pretty good about my storytelling ability, and thankfully, it was enough to get her on board. She was giddy when I let her push the button to submit my ballot, and even more giddy when the silver-haired lady at our polling place knelt down to give her a sticker. Of course, what absolutely did her in was the announcement that we were going to celebrate our vote by getting ice cream, which turned out to be the only part her baby sister cared about.
It wasn’t until this year―just recently, in fact―that I learned that the archaic definition of the word suffrage is intercessory prayer. Literally to petition on behalf of another. To set aside our privilege and pride and upright sensibilities and let the scales fall from our eyes so that we might be better attuned to the plight of our neighbors and love them in the same way that we love ourselves.
I was stunned to find that the child-friendly version of events that I had shared with LG two years ago was not so far off base after all.
Over the past few years, I have been wrestling with the ways that privilege and pride have played out in my life. I’m certain that this consternation was the result of watching some things fall apart. Had life’s twists and turns been smooth and predictable, I might have been more apt to blithely sit at the water’s edge, swallowing my wonderings about what life might be like beyond my own experience of it. Instead, God in God’s mercy invited me to step outside of everything I thought I knew and learn how to walk on the water.
I wasn’t much older than LG when I kneeled down beside my mom and a family friend in our living room and asked Jesus to come into my heart. I remember it vividly. I was as in love with Jesus as any little girl could be. Growing up in the rural south, you couldn’t go to any supermarket without seeing multiple wooden signs announcing Jesus loves you or Jesus saves. I was certain that it was actually someone’s job to put up those signs, and that someday, it would be my job, too. Of course, I couldn’t have imagined that the withness and humanity of Jesus would turn me into a radical. I had no idea what it meant to lose my life only to find it again, more whole and abundant than before.
In his book “Falling Upward,” Friar Richard Rohr describes our lives as being broken up into two halves. The first half is characterized by our drive to build our lives through the means of accumulation and security, while the second half is characterized by the realization that our lives are not our own and a new willingness to forsake our security and whatever we have accumulated for the sake of others. Or, as Jesus might put it, the selling off of everything we have and giving the profits to the poor.
Our little church just finished reading through the book of Esther together. Esther is the only book of The Bible that does not explicitly mention God. Thus, we are challenged to look for God between the lines. A few millennia later, I find myself dumbstruck by the daily invitations to search for God when God’s presence does not seem readily apparent.
Where is God when a virus sneaks in to rob us of more than 160,000 of our neighbors and loved ones?
Where is God in the eight minutes and forty-six seconds it takes for a Black man to suffocate and die face down in the asphalt under the weight of a police officer?
Where is God when my neighbors are oppressed by poverty and violence and injustice?
Could it be that God is issuing an invitation for the suffragettes to break camp?
Esther’s cousin warns her, “if you stay silent, deliverance will come from somewhere else.” There is an inevitability there that I had never seen before―and when I did, it sent me straight to my knees.
The rescue is assured, and we can choose to participate, or we can choose to get out of the way. The beauty, of course, is that God is holding the door open. “The promise might not be fully in hand,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “it may still be on the way. But to live reverently, deliberately, fully awake―that is what it means to live the promise.”
How we care for our neighbors, our willingness to intercede and suffer with them, is the very best evidence that rescue is coming. It is our only hope of keeping hope alive in these hard and mean days.
“Christianity will have power,” Donald Trump boasted at a 2016 rally. Whether or not he actually thought that he could or would be able to offer that power, 81% of white evangelicals took him at his word―perhaps because we have forgotten what is already ours.
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes…
Not power to dominate or oppress or pillage. Not power to hoard or climb or accumulate. Not even power to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.
Power to bear witness to suffering and the promise that shalom is on the way.
In other words, power to become living signs that hope is alive. Hallelujah, our calling all along.
The late pastor Jarrid Wilson once said “if the church wants to be the hope of the world, then we have to step into places where people find themselves hopeless.”
How we talk about things like healthcare and wearing masks, immigration, the budget for the military, funding public schools, rape culture, the “American Dream,” LGBTQ+ inclusion, Confederate monuments, gentrification, regulated access to firearms, police brutality, abortion, welfare, the justice system, and climate crisis reveals the inclination of our hearts towards our neighbors who find themselves hopeless.
And our vote is one of the ways we cry loud and long for the world to become a kinder, more equitable place for everyone. The choice is ours to make, to leverage our privilege on behalf of others or to hoard it for ourselves. This truth is always at the forefront of my mind: no matter what, I cannot take anything with me—I can only decide what kind of world I leave behind.
I do not want to walk away sad when I learn the cost of following Jesus. I don’t want to be, in the words of Carlos Rodriguez, “so stuffed with my own privilege that there is no hunger for justice.” I don’t want to gain the whole world only to lose my soul. Mordecai, Esther’s cousin, makes a point to tell her that if she fails to use her position, she and her family “will surely die.”
So I pray along with the liturgists that my thoughts and words and empathies would articulate God’s heart, even if it means the breaking of my own. This brokenness is promised to us as believers―a gift to remember our baptism. Lost to found, enslaved to free, orphaned to called, dead to alive.
For such a time as this.
For more information on how to vote in your state, click here.
For more information on women’s suffrage, including resources for kids, click here.
Never would have expected that the only podcast I would give my dollars to is one about politics.
Psst: If you’re curious, I listened to this song on repeat while writing this (I just learned that it was written in the wake of the massacre at Mother Emmanuel in Charleston).