People Above Ideas: Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd on Grief and Anxiety in the Wake of the Election

I promised myself a long time ago that I would never give my heart to a notion, an idea, or an ideal so far removed from real life that the loss of it would break my heart without putting me in relationship to real, live, hurting people. Never give your heart to an abstraction, I promised. Not to the idea of liberty, or the concept of faith, or the notion of people’s basic goodness. The idea of idealism has never been enough for me.

And yet, in the wake of a national election that sent seismic waves of uncertainty rippling in our lives and the world, I feel grief for the passing of notions that I long cautioned myself against turning my heart over to entirely. Despite myself, I grieved the death of partially fictive concepts that only the privileged could ever have believed in. The cracks formed and forming in the once-rock-solid idea of democracy. The story told behind sheltering walls during my 1980s childhood about America bringing “peace through strength” to the whole world. The great era of international cooperation ushered in by the institution-builders who filled our progressive sanctuaries in the middle of the 20th century. The dream that people, underneath it all, will look out for one another in the end. Though I promised never to give my heart to such abstractions, when the votes rolled in, I grieved what Langston Hughes once called, “the land that never has been yet and yet must be.”

Now, as we move through the end of this year, I am trying not to judge my feelings of loss and grief. I’m not self-flagellating for the purpose of being seen to publicly self-flagellate, though such behavior is well within the normal patterns of white progressives such as myself in these days. Guided by the wisdom of my colleagues including queer, BIPOC, trans, and immigrant beloveds whose bodies are at risk every day in this reality we share I am instead making space for those feelings.

Grief isn’t right or wrong. It just is. Like a stone in the hand or a cup of water on the countertop. It is.

In this moment, the stakes of grief work are profound because our collective liberation depends on our honest inner work. For those whose identities and expressions mean that they are most acutely at risk, unaddressed grief can take root in the body, bringing pain and suffering even beyond the inherent risks of an increasingly dangerous world. For those who hold privileged identities, unprocessed grief has a way of curdling into anxiety. Anxiety, left unchecked, has a way of coming out sideways, often incorrectly aimed at the very people among us who are most at risk. Conflicts over random issues erupt, to distract us from greater harmful patterns that remain unaddressed. We go after the ones closest to us when we don’t feel capable of taking down the structures of power that feel too far away.

If we do not do the work of grieving the ideals we mistakenly gave our hearts to, we might end up hurting each other when we need community the most.

This Advent season, I am reminded that the Christian tradition waits for the birth of a baby. Not a concept or an idea or even a king, but a vulnerable, small, very human child. The pause of the season is not held in liturgical spaces to make way for the king of kings, but for an embodied child lying right next to us—a child in need of our care, our devotion, and our sacrifice.

I can’t fully love the real human who is my neighbor, my friend, my fellow congregant, or my partner in holy resistance if I don’t grieve the concepts and ideas that I mistakenly loved in their stead.

So let there be sorrow even amid the twinkling of the lights. Let us wait for every real, embodied human to invite us into acts of greater devotion, courage, and resistance than we could muster alone. Let us grieve the ideas we have lost so that we can love the people with whom we share the way forward.