Fitting the Pieces Together

These are times when all the issues we face can seem simply overwhelming. The struggle for justice and our work for peace are needed on so many fronts and all, it often seems, at the same time. You can get to feel that your life is full of endless battles over one life-and-death question after another--battles we usually lose and ones which must take place in the middle of our personal, family, and community lives.

I often fear that Sojourners readers will become heavily burdened by the monthly litany of crucial concerns in the magazine to which the imperatives of biblical faith must be addressed. Sometimes it begins to feel like too much, and you just can't handle it all anymore.

This past summer I found myself in a Nevada jail in the middle of the desert after the August 6 prayer vigil at the nuclear test site. While sitting in the cell, I was handed a phone through the bars. On the other end was Dennis Marker calling from the Sojourners office in Washington, D.C., to tell me that the Witness for Peace delegation had just been kidnapped by the contras on the San Juan River, which runs along the Nicaragua-Costa Rica border. He asked me to come home as soon as possible.

I was immediately filled with grief and fear, and my heart quickly went out to my friends whose lives were in danger and who might have already been killed. But I also felt demoralized and torn apart, as again I had to quickly shift my thoughts and emotions from the nuclear arms race and our Nevada vigil to Central America and the war that seems endless.

This example is dramatic, but the problem is a common one. We can easily feel so scattered, tossed to and fro by events and pushed into a reactive posture by crises beyond our control. In the Reagan era, it often feels like crisis has become a way of life. To be grounded in faith, rooted in prayer, and based in community becomes absolutely essential in such a time.

BUT THERE IS something else that is necessary--seeing and feeling the integral connections between the many issues we confront. To both survive and be sustained in our lives and our work, I believe we must come to a far deeper understanding of the spiritual and political relationships among the many things we are up against. We too easily fall into the age-old problem of missing the forest for the trees. We end up succumbing to a perspective that is far too shortsighted, much too affected by immediate results, and one that seriously underestimates both the power of evil and the spiritual power required to overcome it.

This issue of Sojourners tries to help with these problems by seeking to paint "the big picture." Danny Collum describes how we got to where we are and what it means to be here. William Willimon probes the failures of liberal Christianity in our present crisis. And I attempt to expose what the Religious Right is really up to, from my own perspective of having been raised in the evangelical community.

Our hope is that this issue can help us fit the pieces together, gain a more long-term view, and put into perspective the crucial question of effectiveness and faithfulness.