dancingthroughchaos

‘Rebuild, reconcile and recover’ – Amanda Gorman

In the same way that the girl in the red coat was my abiding memory from Schindler’s List, it’s the girl in the yellow coat who will stick forever in my mind after President Joe Biden’s inauguration this week – a very different genre of event but nonetheless striking for that..  

This impressive lady, twenty-two year old Amanda Gorman, first US National Young Poet Laureate and an activist from LA, owned the podium for over five minutes with her powerful spoken word piece, ‘The Hill We Climb’.  Standing tall, with the aura of an African queen, her beautiful hair ringed with a crown-like, red, Prada band, her confidence and clarity were mesmerising and inspiring.  Snippets from her own story scattered through her poem gave glimpses of her own experiences in life so far: ‘a skinny Black girl / descended from slaves and raised by a single mother…’  

Her use of words was masterful and will doubtless be studied by generations of American schoolchildren for years to come.  How’s this for a classy piece of wordplay: even as we hurt, we hoped / That even as we tired, we tried / That we’ll forever be tied together…’?

Already, social media is deluged with her closing words: ‘For there is always light, / if only we’re brave enough to see it / If only we’re brave enough to be it’.  Her words echoed my thoughts from Christmas time, that there is still a light that no darkness can quench.  Coming as this does in the middle of another lockdown and the ravaging of a relentless pandemic, words of hope are a welcome balm to our weary souls right now, regardless of our nationality or politics, and they’re in short supply.  I think we’ll all be holding on to these as we struggle to soldier onwards, to keep our heads above water and resist the beckoning blackness of despair.  

However, the words that struck me most forcefully were the alliterative triplet: ‘rebuild, reconcile and recover’;  a call to healing and health for a nation in pain, a rallying cry to set aside the brokenness of the past and strive forwards to a brighter, better future.  It was designed to serve as an anthem for the Democratic administration sweeping in to Pennsylvania Avenue this week, and it’s a weighty one.  Republicans may squirm at the imagery and take offence that the activities and outcome of the past four years have been so unceremoniously lumped together and discarded in an unseemly scramble to reset the compass on the good ship USA, but the theme is applicable around the world today.  Let’s put politics aside for a moment if we can – reminding ourselves that the DisUnited States of America and the DisUnited Kingdom have both proved to be tragically divided within themselves this past season (something that is still unresolved here) – and focus on our immediate and universal challenges.  Where Covid infection rates are soaring, where health services are overwhelmed, where death rates have spiralled and ‘normality’ all but forgotten, the idea of rebuilding our lives, reconciling the uncomfortable reality of what we’d hoped for with what has actually been the rhythm of our lives for nigh on twelve months, and recovering to the point where pandemic stories are a distant memory we will be telling our grandchildren, is very appealing.

In a spiritual sense, this is actually the message of the gospels; the good news of Jesus.  We might change the order, but He came to reconcile us to God: to mend the broken relationship between God and humanity who still insist on choosing to ignore His instructions and too often reap the consequences of their ‘I-know-better’ lifestyles.  He came to restore us to who and what we were made to be, and so recover the blueprint for living an abundant life according to our original design.  Rebuilding lives from brokenness is His speciality, and those foundational truths of forgiveness and surrender allow us to rebuild healthy relationships with the people around us regardless of their political persuasion.

In many ways Amanda Gorman’s poem, with all its echoes of the great Maya Angelou (check out that repetition and clever plural echo of her predecessor’s line: ‘I rise’ – it appears four times here as ‘we rise’, an indication of how an individual voice has multiplied into a resolute, collective one during more than forty years between their creation) is an anthem of redemption; a hymn of hope.

I hope we can all raise our voices in agreement with the heart of her work as together we set about climbing our own hills.  But, for everyone’s sake, and yes, for God’s sake, let’s not climb alone.