A Word From David
Lent 2025: A Time to Break Thing
Finally, I can break my own silence.
Lent seems like a good time for it. A time to break silence, and, this year, break other things, as well. Sometimes it’s necessary to break things in order to build anew. This Lent calls me to remember the Jesus who flipped over the tables and drove the money lenders from the temple. Jesus knew that some things must be broken to make way for the beloved community.
I haven’t posted a word since the inauguration. I have not written anything much longer than a tweet since mid January.
It’s not for lack of words or even lack of focus. It’s because less than 48 hours after Trump took office I fell and broke a wrist and wound up having surgery. I call that accident the second-most-painful thing that happened that week.
The first six weeks of the hell of Trump II has been compared to a firehose but that doesn’t feel right to me. Firehoses are used to put out fire. The storm coming out of the White House is just fanning flames – of hate, of distrust, of distress, of confusion. Firehoses are useful tools. This president is a useless fool, or, for the oligarchs and the Kremlin, a useful idiot.
The storm coming from the White House is like a hurricane: powerful, unpredictable, and driven by too much hot air. This one seems only to lack an eye, a calm center.
I write my way to clarity in the midst of storms. I’m not like Alexander Hamilton – writing like it’s going out of style – but I do write my way out of my own confusions. I have felt silent and constrained by my own limitations for the past six weeks.
When writing is how you process the world, a broken wrist feels like enforced silence. I have no illusions that anyone else has been waiting to hear from me on the present crisis. I have no following or audience beyond a few score faithful Presbyterians who show up to worship with the expectation that I will have a good-enough word for them on Sunday mornings, but I have been restlessly awaiting the moment when it was not painful to write.
In thinking about Lent this year, I am hoping that years from now my grandkids will know that some of us tried to stand in the way and speak out against the madness. Toward that end, writing now is about making sense of all of this for myself. It is about a practice that focuses my attention, and perhaps shines a small light on possible paths through this nightmare.
The practices of Lent, including writing, are about breaking new ground for planting seeds of hope when the sun comes out again. After all, it is spring in this part of the world even though it feels like more is dying than being born. There is a time for both.
As there is a time for planting and a time for reaping, there is a time for putting things together and a time for breaking things. This year for Lent I commend breaking things and commit to the practice.
I intend, for example, to break a sweat. My kids insist that being outside is good for me, and as soon as the surgeon gives me the green light I’m intending to resume running. I know it’s good for my mental and emotional wellbeing as well as for my body. But in the urgency of this season I am remembering that flight attendants tell passengers to put on their own oxygen masks first. We’re useless to movements if we don’t take care of ourselves. That takes breaking a sweat sometimes because we are called to “run with perseverance the race that is before us” (Hebrews 12:1).
Let’s break into laughter as often as possible for much the same reason as breaking a sweat. In addition to being good for us, the oligarchs and their White House puppet hate to be ridiculed. Now is the time for the court jesters to play their prophetic role. Mary sung about bringing the powerful down from their thrones, but they don’t give up those perches without some pushing. Laughter is part of the push. Indeed, in Psalm 2 God sits in heaven laughing at the kings of earth. So break into a little holy laughter.
Let’s break the grip of these ugly times by creating, paying attention to, and sharing beauty. One practice I am resuming in these 40 days is sharing one beautiful thing that captures my attention every day. Sometimes it will be the beauty of the natural world. Sometimes, like today, it will be beauty that someone created. Sometimes it might be a song or poem. Beauty matters, and in an ugly time creating beauty is an act of resistance. The heavens still sing the glory of God. I intend to join that song.
Break the routine acceptance of the way things are in favor of creating new ways of being together. That might look like civil disobedience. It might look like noncooperation. It might look like supporting a mutual aid society or neighborhood group. It might look like breaking down a wall – whether it’s figurative or literal. It definitely includes encouraging public officials to stop pretending that things are normal and that institutional norms of civility are doing anything other than enabling the destruction of the commonweal. When the entire system is crumbling, breaking with the routine is essential to the survival of anything that is worth preserving. Surely this is what Jesus was up to when he flipped the tables.
Most of all, break the silence. When Martin Luther King decided to speak out publicly against the war in Vietnam he called his speech, given in April, 1967, a time to break silence. He said,
“Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation’s history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.”[1]
Nobody who sees this will ever have the influence that King had and still has. Breaking our silence is not about that kind of power. It’s about our own faithfulness, and about understanding that silence is complicity. What silences are you called to break in order to remain faithful through this fearful time? What can you break now that helps shape and form you for building a better tomorrow?
Lent, 2025: a time to move slowly and break things that should be broken.
(This was posted to David’s Substack today. You can subscribe at this link.)