Grace Bats Last
June 2, 2020, was filled with news that filled me with fear and broke my heart. It was not a day for writing helpful divorce tips. It was a day for sharing something that broke me, and I hope, opened me. It was a day for reverently listening.
It was a day when the pandemic raged, polarizing people into openers and stay-homers, maskers and no-maskers, a day when protesters filled the streets, and senseless, raging mobs vandalized, looted and burned their own communities; a day when the presidential campaign illustrated that we were more divided than ever. But that day, I discovered grace in an unexpected place.
I share this in hopes you will receive the same blessing I did. I found grace that day, in a podcast called The Confessional, hosted by Nadia Bolz-Weber. Nadia’s podcast is about accountability and redemption. She is in recovery, and her show talks about steps four and five of the 12-step program. Step four requires a “searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves;” step five asks that we “admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.”
My discovery of Nadia’s episode with Megan Phelps-Roper came at a perfect time. Megan was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, a church founded by Megan’s grandfather and populated primarily by his family. At age five, her family put a placard in Megan’s hand that read, “God Hates Fags.” Westboro Baptist is the church that claims that the deaths of soldiers and victims of mass shootings are God’s punishment for the sinfulness of the world. They carry signs that say, “pray for more dead soldiers,” and “pray for more dead children,” as they protest the funerals of the victims. When the church discovered social media, Megan began to use Twitter to spread their cruel and hateful message. But then something happened on Twitter, that Megan could not have predicted. People who Megan interacted with on Twitter changed her.
It wasn’t the nasty, vitriolic rebukes that changed Megan’s mind. In fact, those people only made her angrier because she saw them as people who needed to repent their sinfulness; she thought they proved her point. The handful of people who were genuinely curious about Megan as a human being were the ones that changed Megan’s heart and mind. They were the people who didn’t argue, but asked questions and tried to understand what seemed incomprehensible to many. Who was this person; what had shaped her reality? It was that grace, those people’s curiosity and compassion, that changed Megan forever. The change and her repentance came because some people were willing to see her as valuable, despite her actions. The tiny disconnect between what those grace-filled people on Twitter said, and what the people in her church believed, became a chasm, until eventually - even though it meant leaving her entire family and everything she held dear - Megan left the Westboro Baptist Church. Megan’s 2017 Ted Talk is widely viewed, and she speaks openly and humbly about the pain she caused with her actions. She freely acknowledges what she took from people – their time to grieve and honor their loved ones – is something she can never give back to them.
That morning, June 2, 2020, as I read news headlines and saw the storm on social media, I wondered if the disconnect in our country was just too vast. I wondered if we could ever be reconciled – the maskers and the no-maskers, the conspiracy theorists, the protesters and the cops, the people of color, and privileged whites.
Then I heard Megan’s message: when we speak from our own fear and our own entrenched viewpoints, we don’t allow others the compassion and grace they need to change.
Friends, here is my own confession: I’m afraid. I’m afraid that our president follows his worst impulses and has too much hubris and not enough intelligence to lead the most powerful country in the world. I’m angry at the white police officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck until he died, but I’m fearful of the protesters who are raging through the streets, burning, and looting. I’m afraid when I hear that our president may invoke the Insurrection Act and flood our streets with armed soldiers. I’m afraid that I’m so entrenched in my white privilege that I can’t see things as they are. I’m angry when I go to the grocery store and see people not wearing masks because I’m afraid for the people I live with, who have risk factors that could make exposure to Covid-19 a death sentence.
Compassion and grace don’t require you to surrender your values; in fact, just the opposite is true. It was wrong for that police officer to kneel on George Floyd’s neck. By the way, that officer’s name is Derek Chauvin. He has a mother and a life that has been forever changed by his actions. Grace means trusting that compassion can redeem him, just as it redeemed Megan Phelps-Roper. Derek Chauvin’s redemption will never return George Floyd to his family. Still, it might mean that Derek Chauvin’s life isn’t also wasted because two wrongs can’t ever make a right, and looting the local Patagonia store isn’t going to bring George Floyd back either.
Megan’s message is that people are changed by compassion and grace, not by argument, no matter how convincing and well-formed. So how does a recovering lawyer, who’s spent her life making arguments, shift? I suspect it will be like turning the Titanic, but I have to try. I know it’s going to be hard, and I know I’m going to get it wrong more than I’ll get it right. I know there will be many times when I will retreat into my own fear and anger. I have to try, though, because it’s not Derek Chauvin or Donald Trump’s soul I’ll be saving – it’s my own, and because, as Anne Lamott says, “grace bats last.”
