Normally in the first weeks of January, gyms fill up and bars tone down. After a short burst of healthy choices, the drive for forming new habits diminishes and people go back to their typical routines. Change is easy to envision and hard to embody. This January, however, I have not heard of anyone attempting to make big changes. I think that people are tired.
We live in an exhausting era. On top of the cultural and economic pressures to constantly perform, we have layered the unending uncertainty of this pandemic. The new variants, the tumultuous public health guidance and the stark differences among people on our assessed risk that COVID poses have worn people out.
Prophets have long known the challenge that exhaustion poses for both spiritual growth and revolutionary organizing. We can see this in Rev. King’s first major speech, at the mass meeting to vote on a Black boycott of Montgomery’s buses.
If you listen to the audio recording of his speech, you can hear King speaking persuasively and eloquently for several minutes with only a mild audience response until he is suddenly interrupted in the middle of a sentence by a cacophony of enthusiastic shouts and applause. His sentence in full is: “And you know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.” The crowd explodes at the phrase “…people get tired…” and you can almost hear the surprise in his voice. He carries the energy forward and continues to vocalize how tired the people are. They rise up in response, creating a mass movement that would fundamentally alter the fate of our nation.
Exhaustion is a real and present danger to which I believe there are two spiritually healthy responses. One is the path articulated by King, which is a call to collectively stand up and fight. But there are also times when it is wise to lie down and rest. Capitalism places moral value on unceasing effort and conjures heroic figures with bottomless energy. Leftists, with our old Marxist hymns likes “All For the Cause!” often do the same. The former is self-aggrandizing and the latter is self-erasing. My spirituality calls for self-inventorying and self-loving.
The wisest prophets teach humility, which acknowledges that we have limits and weaknesses, that our bodies are sacred and deserve rest and tenderness. The ruling class will offer us numbness as an alternative to rest, but that only distracts us from our exhaustion. True rest invigorates us. In community and humility we can fight when we have energy and rest when we are drained, knowing that our comrades are there to keep the movement going. In these times, may we have the wisdom to eschew numbness, accept our weakness, sink into rest and discover ferocious, revolutionary power in community.
Rev. John Helmiere is co-convener of Valley & Mountain in South Seattle.
Read more of the Jan. 12-18, 2022 issue.