Tell me how to vote (part III)
Tell me how to vote (part III)
Beyond election day: storytelling, love as a politic, and the best block parties ever
This is the third of three parts in a series called “Tell me how to vote!” You can read part one here and part two here.
I was deeply moved to see this series shared by at as part of his public discernment about the elections. I would be glad to hear about your process too. Feel free to share in the comments.
Dear Soulful Revolutionary,
With this series, I committed to not telling you how to vote in the US elections. To pose questions, rather than provide answers, in order to support your discernment.
This has been a helpful practice for me. It is really, really hard for me not to give advice. Nevertheless, I aspire to do the work I am convinced is the responsibility of any writer or spiritual leader worth their salt:
To help you recognize your hunger for self-integration in the face of dangerously disintegrating systems.
To provoke you to perceive more clearly the gap between your ethics and the complicity you bear within the systems in which you exist.
And then to inspire you to attend to this rumbling in your spirit through compassion, curiosity and the cultivation of greater capacity for discomfort in the context of community.
Today, I offer reflections on the work waiting for us on the other side of the election — the work that is always there for us to do, if we would have the spiritual fortitude and moral courage to embrace it.
Please, mind the gap
The decisions to be made this election cycle are as morally messy as they are strategically fraught. It is human nature to desire comfort and the assurance that we have made the right choice and so can go about our lives. At least, these are experiences for which I sometimes find myself yearning. Yet I wonder what is being missed when we conceive of elections in this way.
What if the swells of “Tell me how to vote” energy didn’t simply crescendo on Election Day, only to crash on the shore of unaltered realities? What if we were not collectively lulled back into complacency, as though the vote was the work itself?
What if learning to live in response to the dis-ease of unsatisfying answers is the rigorous work that would actually yield spiritual transformation and social change?
The discomfort of holding dissonance can be a powerful provocation, propelling ongoing action that far outlives a single election cycle. Being unsettled can enable movement that is intentional, careful and considerate. It is not easy to live in this place of alertness. But it is a spiritually vital way to live. It is a humanizing way to live. And it might just be the most loving way to live.
Love is my politic
In her seminal book All About Love, bell hooks defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
Love is a stretching thing. It asks us to go beyond our comfort level, to inhabit spaces of discomfort for the sake of change that nourishes and heals. Love can pull us out of our individual moral quandaries or political despair, into a space of collective responsibility and possibility.
Could it be that love is what the discomfort of this election is inviting us into?
“We have yet to figure out how to make love legislatable — and love is my politic.” — adrienne maree brown
As brown alludes in this episode of “How to Survive the End of the World", love can’t be crammed to fit within the constraints of electoral politics. But that doesn’t mean that love is not political. Love is profoundly political, because love demands we recognize that we exist in a network of interdependent relationships with the whole of life. Love calls us to think and act collectively for the sake of life flourishing everywhere.
That we don’t do this work alone is a spiritual and practical reality.
You may be familiar with the Seven Generations teaching that is present in many indigenous traditions. My friend the
recently taught me that, contrary to popular belief, this teaching is not simply about what we owe the seven generations who will come after us. Rather, it reminds us that each of us is sandwiched in the middle of seven generations. The choices we make are to be informed by the wisdom of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, and inspired by our responsibility to the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who will follow us.We are responsible and supported in every direction — past, present and future.
Consequently, as the Jewish proverb reminds us:
“The work is plentiful…It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”
Knowing ourselves well-accompanied can help lift the burden of individualism that insists we do everything ourselves. We can look up to see who we might join in the work of making the world more loving.
describes this as the shift from “What can I do?” to “What can we do?”My own response to this question begins by considering the various forms of “we” to which I belong:
I am a member of the Working Families Party I am connected to my local chapter of Moms Demand Action. I organize with Palestinian Anglicans and Clergy Allies, and we are connected to a network of likeminded organizations, including Christians for a Free Palestine.
But my primary site of day-to-day organizing is in my neighborhood, particularly through the faith community I founded, and through ecumenical and interfaith partnerships in our county.
Cultivating safety through belonging
In early 2022, I walked my then-infant twins around the block of our subdivision, inviting my neighbors to a block party. I would have been happy if a few households showed up. My neighbors, hungry for connection, left me astonished: Of the 18 homes on our block, 16 showed up. They stayed for hours, trading jabs about whose was the best BBQ, exchanging numbers while making plans for future get togethers, and watching kids gleefully run up and down our shared alleyway.
These are the relationships I am committed to nurturing over the long term. For all our quirks, for all our political differences, this is my community. We cultivate safety through belonging.
Knowing one another makes us more prepared for change and challenge — whether that manifests as climate catastrophe (we have anxiously texted one another about emergency plans while watching fires roll down the Rocky Mountain foothills), political unrest, or something local to our community like a tragic accident, an infrastructure issue, or systemic inequity in our educational system. We’re also always ready for celebration, which is what sustains relationship over the long haul!
I wonder: How are you engaged in ongoing political organizing? Are you building power in your community beyond the election by getting to know your neighbors and creating networks of mutual aid? Can you join organizations that are working between cycles to listen to communities and raise up candidates who care about their needs?
Love is the way into this kind of ongoing and transformative political organizing. It begins with an authentic interest in getting to know your neighbors and their stories. And it grows as you reckon with and share your own story in community.
On heart-changing stories
Several years ago, I heard Civil Rights elder Ms. Ruby Sales reflect on what enabled the white supremacist backlash that has rolled back much Civil Rights policy: hearts were not changed, she said.
It is often said that humans are creatures of story. Stories make us. They give us purpose, set us at peace with ourselves, connect us to one another. Stories transform human hearts.
But in the absence of liberating, humanizing stories of collective moral courage, the fear-based stories of our present, violently wielded to maintain the hierarchy of human worth, will be perpetuated.
We need just policies, yes. But perhaps even more so, we need just stories. As Ta-Nahesi Coates has written in his latest book The Message,
“A political order is premised not just on who can vote but on what they can vote for, which is to say on what can be imagined. And our political imagination is rooted in our history, our culture and our myths….”
“Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics…. The arts tell us what is possible and what is not, because, among other things, they tell us who is human and who is not.”
Beyond the vote is the possibility of transformative storytelling. Our stories can shed light on the truth of the oppressive systems we inhabit. They can reckon with the past that has brought us to this point. Together, we can tell stories of what could be for ourselves, for our country, for the world — stories that insist on a love politic as the only viable way for us all to be human together.