Weary. That is how many of you have described yourselves to me in recent days. Not tired. We know how to deal with being tired. Rest is recommended, and respite. Recovery is predictable and expected. Weary is a feeling of being worn down. Over time. Resources depleted. Spent. Rest may be recommended, but the weariness that has been described to me has more to do with demands on our strength that we have carried successfully, but not without effort, for just too long. 

Yet we are approaching an inauguration, a time “to begin” or “mark a new beginning” … those are two of the dictionary definitions of the term. 

I am not exempt from either the weariness, or the question of where to find the energy for yet another “beginning.”  

I am always on the lookout for spiritual guides, for those who have made this journey or a similar journey before and can point to some of the mileposts and share how they managed the challenges they experienced along the way. I have found myself drawn to Eddie Glaude, Jr.’s new book, Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own, frequently in recent days.  

Glaude is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton. Many of you will have seen him on MSNBC where he regularly offers commentary. James Baldwin was probably the most prominent Black author and public intellectual of the Civil Rights and Black Power eras. The book is not biography, not history, not scholarly analysis… It is all of those, but more importantly it is an engagement with Baldwin through which Glaude learns more of himself and something about how these current days can be survived. 

Midway into the book, Glaude reflects on the two visions for this nation that I described in last Sunday’s sermon: the vision that looks back toward a lost Eden of unchallenged white domination and the vision that looks forward toward a racially and religiously pluralistic future. Glaude comments: “…even in [this contest], the divisions in the country feel old and worn. Today feels like we are fighting old ghosts that have the country by the throat.” 

He then refers to Baldwin: “In his reflections on Dr. King, Baldwin wrote that we were witnessing the death of segregation as we knew it, and the question was how long and how expensive the funeral would be. … Something has died. But the ghosts will not leave us alone.” 

I resonate with that point of view. But Glaude and Baldwin go farther, and this is where I have found the book most helpful. 

First, Baldwin, who is perhaps best known for his willingness to name his rage as a Black man in America, consistently rejected anger and hatred as survival strategies. Writing to the angry young Black men of his day, Baldwin said: “…try not to hate [them]; for the sake of your soul’s salvation and for no other reason. …You haven’t got to hate them, though we have to be free. It’s a waste of time to hate them.” 

According to Glaude, the important questions remain the moral questions. Questions of identity and who we want ourselves to be. “Hatred, in the end, corrodes the soul,” and Glaude is clear that “only love can fortify us against hatred’s temptations.” 

The cost of hatred is too high to pay and the only defense…for our spirits…is love. Amen to that. 

But there is another milepost on this journey toward which I want to point as we approach the inauguration, the day marking a new beginning in the life of the nation. That milepost marks the decision to remain present. 

Baldwin, like so many of us that lived through King’s assassination, had to find a way to move on, to move ahead, to continue after that violent loss. Perhaps it was the many violent losses of Baldwin’s day and the many violent losses of our own that cause such weariness. 

Baldwin writes:  

“When the dream was slaughtered and all that love and labor seemed to have come to nothing, we scattered … We knew where we had been, what we had tried to do, who had cracked, gone mad, died, or been murdered around us. 

Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost; it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.” 

The choice to be absent is an option. But I know that I will choose to be present. I do not have it in me to abdicate. Nor, I believe, do most of you. And therefore, since we refuse to abdicate, we will begin again. 

This does not mean, for me, that we do not have to confront the ghosts of the past that still bedevil us. Baldwin’s truth simply allows me to accept that I, and we, have no choice but to find the personal resources to work and dream our way forward. Baldwin’s truth allows me to be present to what is true in me. To accept that truth and relax into it. Perhaps it will help you to be present to what is true for you. 

Blessings, 

Bill