Voting Lines and Church

This will not be the kind of post where I rail against pastors who are too political in the pulpit.  I will not be proposing that churches lose their tax exempt status.  I want to praise churches as one of the few places left where people of various backgrounds gather together.

There are other places, of course.  Certain grocery stores that straddle neighborhoods and urban wastelands might see the same kind of mix.  It's hard for me to think of many other diverse spaces in the stratified society in which we live.  Most of us aren't going to schools that introduce us to people not like our families.  Most of us work in places where we have more in common than more that separates us.

I am painfully aware that churches can be just as stratified.  I go to my Lutheran church every week, where I don't meet any Orthodox Jews or even many evangelical Christians.  But I've had more conversations with homeless people in the context of church than I have had in any other setting.  I have met people from a wide variety of backgrounds in church.  I sit in a space with both babies and people who are deeply old, which doesn't happen very often in any other context.

I thought about space and differences as I stood in the longest line to vote I've ever stood in, outside of presidential elections.  I stood between an Orthodox Jewish couple and a woman who works in a downtown Scandinavian bakery--downtown Hollywood--which is in South Florida.  People chatted in a variety of languages.  We were a variety of ages.  Even children were there, which made me happy.  Everyone was patient, again something that doesn't happen very often in South Florida.

As with church, many of us in that line had a yearning for something better.  Why else show up?  In our political lives, as in our spiritual lives, we participate in rituals that we don't fully understand, and many of us don't fully trust.  But what else can we do?

I realize that there are lots of answers:  building bombs or building houses for the less fortunate, and I could go on and on.  But with each answer I see a smaller sliver of humans participating.

Until this election, I might have said the same thing about midterm elections.  Usually, I show up to vote in midterm elections to find pollworkers happy to see me because the site has been so empty.  That was not the case this year.

I began the week-end by going to vote.  I will end the week-end as I usually do, by going to church.  I will be fed in ways that I expect and in ways I won't even realize until later.  These week-end bookends make me feel better about the future of the country.  If I spent the week-end inside, watching the various news shows and/or the unavoidable political commercials, which will be the lot of many of us this week-end, I'd have a very different view of the nation.

The U.S. is a fibrous construction of humanity, and I have faith and hope that while we are a bit unraveled, we're far from ripped.