As a pastor, I get to listen a lot. I also get to talk and sometimes I talk too much, but there’s a lot of listening that comes with this work. I’m generally conscious of the privilege it is to listen as people share their stories. Earlier this week I told the person I’d been listening to that, given the sacred ground to which the conversation had led, I felt compelled to remove my shoes.

Some of the stories I hear are joyful. Often, though, people want to talk with a pastor because life is proving difficult. Typically the pain is acute– a fracturing relationship, a discouraging sickness, a fruitless job search, a pastor – me! – who has disappointed them. I listen as intently as I can, echoing back what I hear so that we can listen together. Now we’re listening for the Spirit’s quiet invitations, the ones that are often drowned out by the sources of pain.

Recently, though, I’ve noticed something in addition to the discreet challenges which typically lead to these conversations. Not that people aren’t still grappling with particularly painful stuff. Marriages are still complicated, bodies still ache, and violence still wreaks havoc. But now, after reflecting on the origin of their ache, my conversation partners will say something like, “Not to mention everything else that is happening.” This is usually accompanied by a slight wave of a hand, shoulders shrugged in frustration, a quick eye roll, a deep sigh, or some combination of these.

You can probably intuit what “everything else” means in these conversations. It’s wars and rumors of wars. It’s unprecedented presidential corruption. It’s the grotesque resuscitation of Jim Crow in the wake of the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. It’s gas and grocery prices. It’s the race to dump trillions of dollars into a handful of companies while our public schools and libraries are purposefully underfunded. It’s… well, you get the point. You understand the shrug followed by the sigh.

I’ve begun to notice how many of my conversation partners are finding the everything else-ness of these days to exacerbate the human-scale difficulties they’re enduring. While there’s nothing obviously connected about the destruction of Gaza and the quiet pain of a couple’s infertility, or the presidential administration’s disregard for our climate and a person’s debilitating back pain, or the attacks on Black citizenship and another job interview which went nowhere, or the oppressive presence of ICE and a young parent’s loneliness, somehow the grief and anxiety of the big stuff is picking at the raw patches of personal vulnerability.

Is there a connection between the existential sources of our collective dread and the particular griefs we’re each navigating? I think so. When it comes to the systemic, global events which feel so weighty, there is very little most of us can do which will actually shift our circumstances. Choosing to take to the streets, agitate our elected officials, and lean into the systemic work of generational change are all good and necessary actions and will rarely yield quick or visible change.

The sense of powerlessness that so many of us are experiencing these days about the big stuff has, I think, filtered into the more intimate causes of personal suffering. In her wonderful book Trauma Stewardship, Laura van Dernoot writes about different warning signs of trauma exposure response. The first one she notes is a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. “Success, markers of improvement, and the opportunities for growth can be hard to keep in focus. Instead, a person may believe only that things are plunging into greater despair and chaos… Personally, one may feel overwhelmed, as if nothing can remedy the situation.” It seems to me that the legitimate sense of our limitations before global catastrophes has contorted into a loss of agency over our more personal struggles.

Bombarded as we are by tidings of distant trauma, we can come to believe there is little we might do in response to the hard stuff within the limited scope of our bodies, friendships, and neighborhoods.

But the two are not the same. That I cannot stop the president’s war against Iran does not mean that I have no agency in my marriage. Or that I cannot learn to care more lovingly for my children, check on my isolated neighbor, tend more graciously to my aching body, honor a few extra minutes of prayerful stillness. The distortion these troubling days have introduced is that our limitedness in the face of enormous tragedies means we are equally helpless before the closer troubles which always characterize the human experience.

But though we creatures are always limited, we are not only limited. And as we reclaim our God-desired agency over the small decisions, gentle words, and generous actions which make up a human life, we find that we are not as helpless before the systems of violence as we were led to believe. If the scale of systemic wickedness can diminish our personal agency, the reverse is also true; recovering our resolve among the people and places we inhabit will subvert the principalities and powers clamoring for our helplessness.

So, here’s to reacquainting ourselves with the humble agency of our humanity. Let the forces of evil quake at our small and tender actions.

(Photo credit: Andreas Schnabl)

The Race Against Gun Violence

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