A Word From David

This week we hosted another GW student gathering. This one addressed “religion and resistance.”

I joined the students having spent the middle of the day on Capitol Hill with several hundred participants in Sojourners’ Faithful Wednesdays gathering.

As you can see from the photo, I wound up in the choir loft, which is what I call that space right behind speakers. I think it was the clerical collar, keffiyeh, stole combination that inspired a Sojo staffer to ask me if I would stand there. But it may have been the hat.

Which is to say that I had no formal role in the event, and that’s true most of the time for most of us. Most of life is just showing up. What matters is choosing where and how to show up, because where and how we show up is how we show the world – and ourselves – who we are.

On the metro back to Western after that rally, someone asked me if I thought Congress was listening to our call to them to have moral courage. I said, “probably not, but the bigger question is, were we listening to ourselves.”

One key purpose of the church – of faith communities – is bearing one another’s burdens and sustaining one another so that we can show up. That’s why church matters.

Will we continue to have the courage to show up and demand a more just, peaceful, free, sustainable future or will we bow to the authoritarians and their oligarch paymasters?

That seems to me to be the question that will define our moment in history. Where and how aren you showing up? That’s the question I left the students with.

Adam Russel Taylor, president of Sojourners . Photo: Maryknoll Office For Global Concerns.