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There’s a tiny prayer tucked away in the recesses of my heart for the year laid out in front of us; a modest aspiration for myself and for the sleep-deprived, emotionally dysregulated remnant of compassionate humans still inhabiting the place I’ve called home for the entirety of my journey.
I don’t stretch wildly for the unrealistic, grandiose goals of fascism’s defeat or the driving out of despots or for the crafting of some impossible Utopian land freed from the malignancies of prejudices and ignorance that have been baked in since our birth.
This inaugural invocation is far smaller and closer to the ground: I pray for the intolerance of good people.
There is a danger to prolonged exposure to inhumanity, and it is acclimation; in the slow, steady moral anesthetization that occurs when a soul is so consistently saturated by evil acts that they begin to feel commonplace.
There is only so much suffering the human heart can absorb, until it understandably becomes calloused; a protective measure of self-preservation that renders it unable to be freshly fractured by what once was fully heartbreaking.
Gradually, the horrifying videos are less jarring than they once were, the atrocities no longer set off alarms screaming inside, and the breaking bad news becomes white noise that barely merits discomfort. It all just feels sad and ordinary… and permanent.
In these moments, I am not as terrified of those whose violence seems boundless as I am of those who seem to have exhausted their capacity for outrage in response. I worry about the truly decent people here who are so tired and disheartened that they are beginning to accept what people of faith and conscience should deem unacceptable.
And my prayer is that we might have eyes to see the dehumanization as if for the first time again, that our stomachs might be newly sickened at the ubiquitous suffering, that our souls might be profoundly discomforted once more, and that we will be compelled to marshal our every resource in confronting what must be confronted if we are going to survive as a nation and a species.
And this need not happen at rallies or protests or massive gatherings of civil disobedience (though it might). It can (and should) happen in the small and close spaces: in difficult conversations we choose to lean into, in unconscionable words we do not allow to go unopposed, in moments of courage where the needs of those under duress outweigh our fears at defending them.
This rejection of hatred can happen in seemingly insignificant gestures of kindness, in sacrificial and subversive acts of love that affirm the faith we espouse, in the quiet working out of our convictions wherever our feet place us.
Over the coming months, there will be no shortage of violence, no poverty of bigotry, no scarcity of suffering, but we cannot allow this abundance to numb us into abiding it.
This year, I pray for the return of our collective conscience.I pray for a Renaissance of awakened human hearts.I pray for a revival of hatred’s rejection.I pray for the intolerance of good people.
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