Many years ago—in the 60s and 70s—I was an activist in the integration movement. I had the ardor and the guts to put myself in potentially dangerous situations. At that time it felt like a calling. Now, I am in my eighties in a time of outrage. What can someone be and do to contribute when they are in this stage of life? What could be a calling now? Sometimes it seems that being elderly just adds to the weight of whatever is already dangerously sagging with sorrow, rage, hopelessness, and fear.
It came to me in a conversation with friend, more or less my age, whom I suddenly recognized as a placeholder. Those words were a gift to me for I saw in her and now in anyone who by temperament or circumstance is not an activist, but who can nevertheless be profoundly active in a different way. To be there fully for someone in our lives is to be a placeholder. They will know that they are re-membered; i.e., brought into the membership of being in the human family and so are worthy of care.
We can re-member with cards, telephone calls, prayers, and other ways of witnessing that all people count. We can re-member that Black lives matter, that nature needs our nurture, that loneliness is rampant and asks for steadying hands. To be a placeholder is to take up the sacred task of being present (as we can considering our age and situation) for what is troublesome, poignant, searing, and also for whatever small triumphs and hopes that should be celebrated and not canceled because the world is bleeding.
This is activism of an inward kind. It is making internal space for the vulnerability that it is to be alive in a time of disease and upheaval. It is not to flare, protest, or collapse but to be open, to be available to that which is ours to make room for. Those things may be small perhaps, but they are not nothing. Ultimately it is not so much what we are able to do, but the spirit in which we do them.
If you are of this company, know that you have consented to be fully human, to mourn as well as to carry hope in your heart and so reach out as you can. Being in place, because that is where we are and often have to be, we can yet make that place a dynamic alchemical space where we hold possibility and care alive for others. Today and every day why not spend a little time reviewing how many people and things you re-member into the family of being, holding them alive in friendship and care?
No matter how tough things may turn out to be in the future, we can be such placeholders and so paradoxically find that we, too, are tenderly held somehow in the beauty and suffering of being human.