What are you pondering in your heart?
Enjoying rather than avoiding moments of insecurity, fear, and awkwardness
It’s 2025! I wonder what you are pondering in your heart as the new year rolls in. Old and good habits you will maintain, new goals, and incomplete projects you will tackle. Fresh and innovative ways to pause, do nothing, and intentionally spend more time with God. Perhaps become a “holy fool,” jump out of that holy box, and do something daring and exciting, unexpected and against all rules. St Francis of Assisi was a “holy fool at work from stripping his clothing publicly, appearing naked in the church, renouncing his wealth, befriending all creatures, and calling his community of brothers “fools for Christ,” reflecting the words of St. Paul.”
Maybe the new year feels surreal, like reading Octavia Butler’s award-winning novel Parable of the Sower, published in 1993. Butler’s speculative fiction takes place between 2024-2027 in a fictional town in California. Unregulated chaos, violence, drug use, environmental disasters, and a president and other leaders dismantling their country’s space programs, in which space is the future.
Yet, in real-time, there are plans to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education with Project 2025, and education is the future. Malcolm X, nee Malcolm Little, said, “Education is an important element in the struggle for human rights. It is the means to help our children and thereby increase self-respect. Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” Education is a symbol of hope.
In Butler’s novel, some believe the president is “only a false symbol of hope,” while others maintain that the president will restore everything to “normal.” Nevertheless, amid the apocalyptic disintegration of the U.S., religion offers hope and change in the speculative fictional world. Reading Parable of the Sower doesn’t seem so imaginative or fantastical when reading it in 2025.
Religion has always offered hope and change in real-time. It’s not a speculative, fictitious thought. (Or is it?) Even when, like the novel’s protagonist, we begin questioning how Christianity functions in a world that seems to be falling apart. Can you imagine the roots of our religion, whether Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, challenging our spiritual values, beliefs, and practices when we stand and look with spiritual eyes at the chaos surrounding us, regulated and unregulated?
Malcolm X did. He changed his mind about religion, race relations, and violence on a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1963. He converted to Islam, abandoned his belief in violence and separation, and began to hope for humanity of all races. He changed his name to El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz to mark what he said was his journey from darkness to light.
I would claim this example as spiritual eyes of religion. Spiritual eyes of religion see the presence of God in the world, in our everyday lives, and in the everyday lives of others. Spiritual eyes of religion see the presence of God in our churches, communities, and homes when people and things are messy and falling apart, but we don’t give up or give in. We press forward with stubborn hope.
When we look beyond legalist laws, church rules, and human expectations and reflect on and remember God’s goodness, as our descendants and ancestors have witnessed, we can stand with renewed hope in God and God’s people.
I believe Mary, the teen virgin who gave birth to the Christ child, witnessed through the spiritual eyes of religion a new thing that the spirit of God was birthing in her. She pondered these things in her heart with fear and trepidation. Perplexed when the angel Gabriel visited her, called her the “favored one,” and then said, “The Lord is with you.”
Can you hear and see Mary? What is happening right now? Mary pondered the greeting, trying to discern the call (Luke 1:29). Why are you welcoming me, and what are you welcoming me to?
Like Mary, God has disrupted and upturned my plans, leaving me pondering, wondering, and discerning what is about to happen in what seems like an impossible situation: not enough resources, undone grief, and something I did not ask for. The list can go on.
Have you ever received a message or an assignment from God, and you’re like, really, what’s that you say, Lord? Who me? But once Mary understood the magnitude of her responsibility, with renewed hope, she broke out in a praise song that was social and political. It spoke to the economic and the political climate. The great reversal, God has “brought down the powerful” and “exalted the humble,” “sent away in disarray the proud in mind and heart,” and those hungry for spiritual guidance God has filled with “good things.”
In 2025, I hope we can be like Mary and dwell in the promise of God, our divine liberator and warrior who offers us renewed hope generation after generation. I hope we can be “holy fools for Christ” like St. Francis: “being small, not strong, valuing joy over pleasure, avoiding positions of power and enjoying rather than avoiding moments of insecurity, fear, and awkwardness.” In 2025, with stubborn hope, let us ready ourselves for a renewed sense of the presence of God.
Your heart matters,
Angela
Love that I scheduled this for Saturday at 8pm instead of on First Friday! That’s called embracing my imperfection