From Rev. Karen Gustafson: November 20, 2020

Dear ones,

Next week we will find new ways to join in Thanksgiving. We may also find new reasons to be grateful.

While accounts of this time in history are emerging with threads from many voices, I have found myself curiously wordless as I search for my own voice in this unfolding story. In my place of privilege where I am sheltered and well fed in a place of beauty and peace, from which I can view the real events in the real world on a screen with an off-switch, I can tell myself that I am doing my part by not putting a strain on medical resources and risking pain and grief for my loved ones by avoiding un-due exposure to the Corona Virus.

And so the place I begin to look for an on ramp into the flow of this story is an examination of the assumptions embedded in the language I choose and language I passively accept from others.

I have used the phrase “challenging and uncertain times” to point to the dis-ease that I and others are experiencing in the face of the virus, the racial crisis and the seeming dissolution of democracy as I have known it.

What is occurring to me is that the idea of certainty itself is an illusion that is an artifact of white privileged culture.

Furthermore, I wonder if even the concept of “challenging times” is a reaction to the violation of the conditioned expectation of control through accumulated resources.

The loss of certainty implies to me that certainty is a thing that can be had and therefore can be lost. A lack of certainty and the presence of challenge is a constant in many, many lives. Uncertainty, it would seem, is the steady state of people of all races and colors and creeds who lack accumulated resources denied them by white supremacy.

COVID 19 with its insidious death threat and the increased attention by white people elicited by the murder of George Floyd has not created for these humans a state of uncertainty. It has only increased its magnitude as it adds to the accumulated uncertainty of how to meet the needs of basic survival and human dignity.

It has, in fact, not created the uncertainty that we white people of privilege are experiencing either. Maybe what we are experiencing is unwelcome exposure to all of our denied vulnerability to inevitable uncertainty.

Even in the best of times under the best of circumstances – even those times and circumstances that have been sustained by privilege for decades, there is the specter of unchosen change – death of loved one, sudden explained or unexplainable illness, economic miscalculation, natural disaster, random violence, and even the consequences of unguarded passion and risk that lurk at the edges of our awareness.

It occurs to me that I and other people of privilege are ensconced in an economic system that is based on the production and accumulation of more. This is fueled by the cultural myth that if we have more than we need we can use what we have to protect us from uncertainty. What we label as greed might well be at its base a kind of holding on, a protection against the real and inevitable uncertainty that is part of the human condition. I wonder if generations of this holding on have produced a class of folks who, in spite of our best efforts to manage our earnings and possessions responsibly, have failed to accumulate the kinds of resources that have sustained the disenfranchised for centuries.

Resources like:

• The will to fight for justice – every day.
• The capacity to make do with meager means.
• The capacity to endure unpleasantness while hoping for something bet-ter.
• A clear and present relationship with good enough.
• The kind of risks that happen when there is nothing to lose.

From the safety and protection of this sheltered place, this place of so-cial distance, can we find the words for a different story, one that is not defined by its uncertainty, one that creates space for untapped re-sources.

May this time of solemn gratitude include a a time of deep reflection on the limits of our unearned privilege.

Blessings, all. Stay well. The world needs us.

In love and gratitude,

Karen