Healing the nation? For whom?

Here we are, in the dust of a fight for our lives and the lives of our Black and brown and queer and trans and migrant and disabled and poor beloveds.

And, it’s complicated, right?

As my 4 year old daughter put it, “We elected the kind one.” And the Black woman, thank God.

But we did not get the landslide, the wholesale repudiation of white supremacy and toxic patriarchy that we wished for.

We got something far more real. A reminder of the work that was always waiting for us.

Another level of awakening to the depth and breadth of the rotten foundations that our nation of stolen land and stolen labor built upon, and upon which our very lives still rest.

And, if we are paying attention, we got an essential lesson. The one that keeps coming back for us again and again… that our liberation is bound up in the liberation of those most marginalized by this system.

We learned again that the organizing and the hard work and the vision of people of color and queer folks and disabled folks and migrants and women provides us the road map forward and the blueprint for building the world where we all thrive.

That a better world is possible and here and breathing beneath us in the communities who’ve been organizing for their lives all their lives. Who always knew there was no savior; who knew that we save ourselves in community.

This election belongs to queer Black & brown abolitionists in Detroit who know that we need someone in office that we can organize against.

This election belongs to the Navajo nation, who turned out almost 80 thousand votes in Arizona to protect their lives and the land, still sovereign.

It belongs to the Black mothers in Philly who were on the streets just days ago because the police murdered one of their beautiful boys, and who showed OUT at those polls to fire the racist in chief who emboldened and praised his murderer.

It belongs to Stacey freaking Abrams, of course, and the hundreds and thousands who organized with her against voter suppression because all of our voices matter.

And yes, there is a very small portion of this election that belongs to the white people who woke up at last four years ago, and who have been looking around in growing horror ever since and signing up to add their shoulders to the wheel of Movement.

If you are one of the folks in that final group, I want to speak to you specifically for a moment as a peer.

Don’t go back to that long sleep.

You can celebrate. You can rest. You should probably even take a good restoring nap. But set an alarm, because the real work was never about who is in electoral office.

It always had to do with telling the truth about who we are as a nation and awakening imaginations drugged by small comforts into accepting large brutalities.

The work was always building beautiful, flourishing alternatives to the systems that deal us death. The work was always showing up at the margins with humility, love, and resources.

Listen the new administration wants to bring healing our system, and for their capacity for human empathy I am grateful.

But let’s be careful not to pray healing over wounds that are still being cut open.

And let’s be careful not to accept the small luxuries that cloud our faithful dreaming of the world made new.

Together we can always dream more thriving than the powers that be will deliver to us, no matter who is in power.

It is our job to keep imagining.

When I heard Joe Biden last night ask us to begin healing, I had a sinking fear that I knew what he meant… That we need to get all these conflicted white folks in the same room: Trump-supporting white person and Biden-supporting white person, sitting at a kitchen table over a plate of something bland empathizing with one another.

But the people we need to get in the same room are the Guatemalan mother and the child that was snatched away from her at our border. And if we want to talk about healing, we need sit by her feet as she strokes her baby’s hair and weeps, and we need to learn her indigenous language so we can understand every shade of what she needs for her healing.

The people we need to get in the same room are the police officers who murdered Breonna Taylor in her bed, and that room needs to be a court room. And if we are to speak of healing we must know from her father’s aching heart what could help him imagine that one day the gaping hole in his life might begin to scab and scar, and then we’ll need to think of the healing of her sister’s heart too and her mother’s for God’s sake and her beloved who watched her die.

The people we need to get in the same room are the oil executives and the Indigenous elders. And the executives must be silent before the elders’ songs until they can hear the way the water speaks at the heart of creation and the earth cries out when wounded. And then to aid in the healing they will be given hand tools and sent out to break down every oil pipe and carry them away.

I say none of this to diminish our relief and even joy. The one who is killing us and lying with more brash gusto than the system had ever allowed before has been fired. I will be the first to join in dancing.

But we were dying before he came to power. Dying under police knees, dying without healthcare, dying of thirst in the desert at the border, dying lonely and isolated as the system demands.

This death cult of white supremacy and toxic patriarchy and extractive capitalism may be losing one of its loudest heads, but we know it has more to spare.

So yes, my God, we need healing, but as people of faith it is our calling to dream a deeper healing than the ones serving these systems can imagine.

Healing means competent health care and discrimination protections and safety for trans folks and queer folks.

It means land returned to sovereign nations from whom it was stolen. It means tending the ways we’ve wounded the earth.

It means supporting Black women and welcoming migrant men.

It means wresting out the supremacy and fear nestled in where our brains meet our bodies, and closing the prisons and replacing the police with community investment.

It means abundance and equity and every space accessible and unbound.

It means joy and thriving with all of the walls between us crumbling to dust under the fierce and nurturing light of our love for one another.

An elected official will not give us any of that, but we can build it together. We can grow it from the seeds of this moment. We can water it with joy and feast on its harvest.

And what about those 70 million we left alone at their own kitchen tables, stewing and spiceless, clinging to the consolation prize of whiteness in the economy that grinds them to bone?

Friends, we set them a place at our table. We invite them, inexorably, joyfully, dancingly, to leave behind the culture of isolation and death and come to the Love party instead.

We show them, because we have been living it in small ways and large, the joy and freedom of Beloved Community. We live with rigorous generosity and abundance. And we remake our systems to do the same, with room for all.

The Salvadoran poet and revolutionary Roque Dalton once wrote: “Todos juntos, tienen mas muerte que nosotros, pero todos juntos tenemos mas vida que ellos.” All together they have more death than we, but all together we have more life than they.

We don’t win these folks by telling them they are wrong and trying to convince them rationally to adopt our world view. We win through this work of liberation from the margins in, making their lives better too because thriving for the most vulnerable makes everybody’s lives better.

We create flourishing that is irresistible and desirable and that people want to be a part of. And we create that flourishing to be inclusive. We let it be known that there is a place for everyone at that welcome table, if they will let go of the lies and come inside: “We are creating liberation and there is a space for you in it. There is thriving and feasting and dancing, and if you can let go of the harm, there is a space for you here.”

Wednesday in Philadelphia, before it was clear which candidate would win, opposing groups were out advocating around the vote count, some insisting it should halt and others that it should continue. The images of the groups are stark. In one photo you can see them just across the street from each other. One group armed, screaming, clenched of fist. The other, rainbow hued and rainbow clad, line-dancing in the street. I know which folks I want to be with… the ones making liberation irresistible, joyful, connected.

On Twitter this weekend a comic book publisher named Adrian Wassel wrote: “Do not shut down the joy of this moment. Do not doubt it. Do not sober it. Add to it. Reinforce it. Build a wave of joy that carries us forward. Work can be done joyfully. Hope can be built joyfully. Futures are meant to be seen joyfully, even as we roll up our sleeves.”

Dear ones there is so much work to be done. But the way we win is by finding the work that is joyful, that is hopeful, that is abundant, that is free. Stay awake, keep imagining, keep working, keep rejoicing.