This past weekend our family took a last “staycation” before the start of the school year this week. We are grateful to Don Fox for covering for me on Sunday morning. We climbed Mt. Tamalpais together – something I had never done even though I grew up in the Bay Area. Monday we rode a cable car and walked the Golden Gate Bridge, two more things we hadn't done before as a family. We even did a 5K on Saturday—not quickly, but we finished. It felt important to get out together, to affirm our familial and communal relationships and embrace this beautiful place that is our home. It was important because the summer is coming to a close and the new school year is beginning (see below re: the Blessing of the Backpacks this Sunday), but also because so much has been happening in the news, in our country and beyond, that is so troubling, so downright depressing. It feels vital to affirm life and love in the face of hate, to recharge to remain grounded and sustained to keep doing what we can in community to help transform this world. It’s a long game, and as Bay Area singer/songwriter Margi Adam sings it, we’re in it for the long haul.
 
This week a Times headline declared: “Trump, Greenland, Denmark. Is This Real Life?” The President called the Danish Prime Minister “nasty” for rebuffing his bizarre, presumptuous desire to buyGreenland, reminding me of how consistently this president has used misogyny in his public speech. This pattern was evident again in his criticism of Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota over their planned, but thwarted, trip to Israel last week. When the President tweeted about Representative Tlaib’s decision, on principle, not to visit her grandmother after she was granted last minute permission to do so, what bowled me over was how the president put the word grandmother in quotation marks (…“allowing her to visit her ‘grandmother’…). As if her grandmother is somehow fake? Representative Tlaib decided to hold the line and not participate in the whole toxic dynamic, even if that meant not seeing her grandmother. It must have been excruciating. “I’m her free bird,” she explained in a press conference, “so why would I come back and be caged and bow down when my election rose her head up high, gave her dignity for the first time?” Her dignity, her history, her agency was so clearly bound up with her grandmother’s. Nothing can finally break that connection, not for her, and not for any of us, bound to one another across all borders, all political schemes, through all manner of evil.
 
I keep coming back to that bedrock truth of our connection, how it challenges us, how it can strengthen us, how God calls us to honor that bond and to honor one another, particularly in the face of evil.
 
I thought of that call to solidarity this week in reaction to the administration’s new policy to hold undocumented immigrant families in detention indefinitely. This new rule is expected to be challenged, which could delay its implementation. But the attack on migrant families clearly continues.
 
I returned to our call to stand together when I read of the President’s comments that Jewish voters who vote Democratic, as opposed to Republican, are “disloyal”—an old anti-Semitic trope. 
 
Again I turned to that vocation to mutual support and recognition as I read how the Justice Department  and the Department of Labor are seeking to overturn employment protections on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. 
 
All of these moves—sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, Islamphobic, xenophobic, homophobic and transphobic – are demeaning and dehumanizing. They are divisive, but not simply in the sense of creating discord or of threatening a unified status quo. Rather, these forms of speech, these strategies are divisive in the sense of splitting, of creating or reinforcing a “good” group and a “bad” group, of fortifying a hierarchy in which the dominant hold down the dominated. 
 
In response to this evil, we need not simply to come together but to be in solidarity. We need to come together with our eyes open, our hearts enlarged, our determination to work together. And not just now but for the long haul. 
 
In the first century of the Common Era the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Romans spoke of the travails of the earliest followers of Jesus amid a Roman Empire that sought to squelch them. Yet he felt strongly that no force could finally do that. “I am convinced,” he declared, “that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation,” none of that could finally separate them from the love of God (Rom 8:38-39). Nothing could undo their connection, the power of God working in them as they worked together. God is in this with us for the long haul.