where is persistence

This has been an amazing week. Went to a lecture celebrating Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr which was outstanding. The lecture hall was filled - overflow crowd went to watch a live feed in another room, I am so hopeful for our future with all those young people joyfully carrying on King's legacy and work, especially his work against poverty and for social justice. Then on Tuesday watched the inauguration with hundreds of college students and grad students - again, a joyous and hope-filled occasion for our country.

Gathering with other people in lecture halls, listening to speeches, crying together, laughing together - these are bodily ways of continuing to walk together toward God's vision for all humanity. As I listened to the benediction at the inauguration, I saw a bit of the spirituality of persistence that has been in my thoughts lately. Pastors and persons of faith have not worked as individuals but as gathered people of faith - sometimes in front page ways and for many years now in quiet ways that don't make the news. Persistence can be a speech that echoes through a crowd of millions down through the years - but I think most of the time persistence is a quiet movement, a bodily experience.

Spirit and body, or mind and body, cannot be separated in a spirituality of persistence. To carry on in spite of.... to keep walking even when you are exhausted... to keep praying on your knees in spite of all evidence to the contrary... to reach out and hold another person's hand when you are too weak to carry on....

"To a feminist theologian the splitting of our bodies from our spirits, minds, or emotions simply does not make sense. I don't know where the spirit resides other than in my body. What happens in my belly is not unconnected to my brain. I am not advocating that one collapse different aspects of the human person into an amorphous jelly, or saying that my longing to be held is exactly the same as my ability to explain an isosceles triangle. What I do reject is a hierarchy that gives more importance and therefore more power to certain qualities of being human over others, and does so in terms of gender." Denise Ackermann, pg 78, After the Locusts

Ackermann says it well - spirit and body are not one undifferentiated substance, but my understanding and experience of spirit is mediated through my understanding (my brain) and my experience (my body). To persist in following the journey of my questions, to persist in my journey of prayer, to persist in faith when the way is dark and uncertain, this spirituality is what I have lived and what has carried me thus far.