Oh friends, this is not the sermon that I wanted to write. Even though I would never endorse any political candidate from the pulpit, I think you know me well enough to know that this was not the election result I wanted. And I’ve spoken with a lot of people this week who have had Feelings, feelings with a capital F.

What I have to tell you today is to feel your feelings. They are valid.

Listen to your body. I mentioned body scans last week, noticing how it feels to be in our bodies, where we find ease, tightness, heaviness, pain, stuckness. Notice that.

And notice your feelings too. Name them if you can: sadness, happiness, anger, fear, hope, loneliness, disgust, confusion. Notice them, name them. 

But also feel what your feelings feel like in your body. When you feel sadness, where do you feel it? Where is it in your body? What does it feel like? Is it hot, cold, tingly, heavy, staticky, buzzy? 

What would happen if you didn’t push it away or put it on the back burner? If you could just stay with it, listen to it? What might you learn from it?

The whole palette of feelings we experience tell us that we care. This is a huge gift. There’s a whole system in there to point out to us, hey, this matters. This is important.

Anger points to our experience of injustice. Loneliness points to our yearning for community. Confusion points to needing to slow down and understand something better, points to needing to give ourselves more time. Happiness points to resources.

What would happen if you listened to your feelings, if you really received their wisdom? Oh beloveds, our bodies are so wise. So clever. 

It’s also true that they can hold our trauma, that we can keep experiencing feelings related to past trauma instead of the present moment. This is because everything inside of us is trying to take care of us, even if it’s a big alarm still going off from decades ago. 

Author and trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem defines trauma as “a spontaneous protective mechanism used by the body to stop or thwart further (or future) potential damage.” He continues: “Trauma is not a flaw or weakness. It is a highly effective tool of safety and survival. Trauma is also not an event. Trauma is the body’s protective response to an event–or a series of events–that it perceives as potentially dangerous.”

If you are interested in this work, I suggest you read Menakem’s book My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. We are a traumatized country, and it really shows this week. It played out in the election and in our response to the election. It played out in our bodies and in the bodies all across the country.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to stand here and give you hot takes about the election. If you want those, they’re everywhere this week, and most of them don’t feel useful to me. What does feel useful to me is these feelings we have and the invitation to, like water, find the shape of our healing.

bell hooks, in All About Love, wrote, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” We’re here because something inside us told us that we wanted to bring our hearts into community today, that something inside us could settle, could give and receive kindness, could return to what really matters. 

I invite you to take a moment and thank your body for getting you here, whether that means up and out of the house or joining us online. You listened to your body. You trusted that being together was better than being alone today.

We may not know exactly what comes next, but we do know that we can share our strength with one another. No one has to have it together all the time if we rely on one another. We can remind one another of what matters and ask one another, what does Love have to say about this? What do our values have to say about this? Love, values, those are our true nature. Like water we take many shapes, but when we act from Love we usually take the right step.

So rather than taking up the cause that your feelings direct you to alone, bring it back to community. Ask for help, for collaborators. Find the people who have always led there, which is to say those most closely impacted, and hear their wisdom and direction. 

Rather than picking up some marker to say, I’m one of the good ones, take a moment to feel your feelings, settle your body, and find your people. Do you remember the safety pin movement from eight years ago? It didn’t actually help anything. There are rumblings on the internet of wearing blue bracelets now in the same way, to signal some sort of easy solidarity. Far be it from me to tell anyone which jewelry to wear to express yourself, but more valuable than signaling to one another is actually becoming safe, in our own bodies and in our communities.

So we practice settling our bodies together and listening for their wisdom. We prepare ourselves to do hard things from Love instead of an unexamined fight brewing within us. We practice welcoming each other and listening to each other. We recommit to dismantling white supremacy culture and heteronormativity and patriarchy and ableism, all the way up and all the way down, in our own bodies and patterns, in our interpersonal relationships, in this congregation, in all of our communities, in our culture, in our laws, in our world, until we can call the whole thing Beloved Community.

We don’t know the way,
But we have faith that choosing each step in Love
Will lead us in the end to Beloved Community. 

May it be so, in our prayers and in our actions. Amen.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash