THE DREAM OF SOMETHING BETTER - Mike Riddell

Our friend Mike Riddell writes “It took a long time for an anger at injustice to rise in my soul, despite the fact that I’d been an activist for many years before. Anger is a raw force with many faces — it is more often destructive than constructive. I imagine I was in my mid-forties before I started to understand that the best part of my anger was generated by a sense of loss.

In general terms, I think it evolved into an approximation of what Walter Brueggemann calls “the prophetic imagination.” By this I understand him to mean that you can measure the present against a vision of what the future might hold — what indeed humanity is capable of and is called toward. This creates a hugely generative gap, a chasm of despair and longing.

The dream of something better was a long time coming, but once it lodged in my heart it was inescapable. It became the catalyst for dreaming of something more. I dreamed of something deeper and richer, not for myself, but for all of us bound together by our humanity. The sneaking suspicion grew: We are better than all this.” How that better can arise even when fear threatens to quiet it, is the subject of Mike’s lovely new piece for The Porch, Issue #2, available here. (Haven’t subscribed yet? Click here to find out more.)