13
It Can’t Be Carried Alone
There is one Body, one Spirit, and you were all called into one and
the same hope....
And each one of us has been given his own share of grace, as Christ
allotted it.
—Ephesians 4:4, 7For the last few years, I have had to stop watching the evening news because I
could not bear to see any more women and children running for their lives in
Syria or babies starving in Africa. It all made me deeply heartsick and even
nauseous. I did not like being human. Then my country entered into an election
cycle where words seemed to lose all meaning. It was about illusion and naked
ambition on all sides. American politics felt vacuous, delusional, empty—and
thus vain—a foundation on which it’s impossible to build a civilization. And yet
large numbers, including 82 percent of white Evangelicals and 52 percent of
white Catholics, seemed to think blatant racism and rather universal mean-
spiritedness were somehow like the Jesus they loved so much. My heart ached
for something solid and real. How could this be happening?
Then, days before I began writing this book, I learned that I would have to
put down my fifteen-year-old black Lab because she was suffering from an
inoperable cancer. Venus had been giving me a knowing and profoundly
accepting look for weeks, but I did not know how to read it. Deep down, I did
not want to know. After her diagnosis, every time I looked at her, she gazed up
at me with those same soft and fully permissive eyes, as if to say, “It is okay, you
can let me go. I know it is my time.” But she patiently waited until I too was
ready.
I cried off and on for a month after Venus’s death, especially when I saw