“We are living in unprecedented times,” is a well-known phrase spoken often to describe the divided state of the world today.
The meaning is that there are no historical points of reference that can help us move through these uncharted waters of broken relationships, alliances, promises.
And, no part of our lives have gone untouched: We are fractured personally, politically, economically, societally and religiously. With the most unprecedented aspect being the breadth and depth of these divisions.
“Paper Girl” is a recently released (Oct. 2025) book that describes, what Author Beth Macy, calls “a fractured America.” It is written from the experience of someone who grew up living in poverty in a small, middle-class town in Ohio.
Macy writes about her hometown having a healthy economy and thriving schools during her youth in the ’70s and ’80s. But after leaving for college and then pursuing a far-away career in journalism, she returned in 2020 to take care of her ailing mother and discovered that her hometown had become poorer and angrier over the years. Her book chronicles how she maneuvered through relationships with old friends and relatives with whom (after years of separation) she had cavern-sized ideological differences.
Although Macy’s stories are only about a few people in one small town in America, they are also a microcosm of the sad divisions being suffered throughout the country. This is especially true in her dealings with family and friends who have wide divides from her own political ideology.
Like never before, people all over this nation and world are frantically trying to maneuver through stressed and broken relationships caused by deeply-held political and religious beliefs. Scores of professional and self-help gurus are cropping up all over the internet, offering help to people frantic to stay connected to loved ones with whom they have fundamental ideological differences.
Macy wrote about some tactics she employed with family and friends attempting to stay close or, at least, on friendly terms. Although she was forced (out of a need for self-preservation) to excommunicate some, she mostly kept doing what she called “throwing things at the wall to see what would stick” in order to keep fading bonds from dying.
She put boundaries up; refusing to talk with certain people about certain topics (mostly political). She worked to hold her tongue when some divisive topic got through her boundaries.
She did a lot of what relationship professionals are suggesting. She kept the door open when conversations got heated despite all of her attempts to keep the peace; she tried to keep people with whom connections had frayed in mind; she was deliberate about staying vulnerable whenever unavoidable encounters happened with people who had distanced themselves from her.
In one of the many recent public interviews about her book, she slipped beyond giving advice to people who asked “How do I get through Thanksgiving with my family?” into complete honesty. “It’s hard work,” Macy admitted to a packed room of people. “It really tears at the heart. It hurts.” And then she posed a question that has evaded her throughout the years of trying to heal broken relationships, “How do we love beyond what we can’t understand or agree with?”
The pivotal word in the question is “love.” How do we continue to love each other?
Almost all of the advice available to help people through this pandemic of brokenness consists of things you can “do.” However, as we have asserted many times in this blog, it is more about “being” than doing.
Acting on some of the advice is valuable; such as building a closer relationship outside of the disagreement, mining common-ground memories and shared-beliefs, asking questions to understand a different viewpoint, and avoiding confrontational language. But many times the best that these measures can achieve are “white knuckle” relationships where there is a constant need to avoid the pitfalls and deal with an underlying uneasiness.
At these times when there seems to be no real answers to the very real problems we are facing, what becomes necessary is to envision and move into a “new reality.” How about getting really honest with ourselves about the immense losses we have suffered? How about getting in touch with the sadness this has caused us? How about grieving the loss? How about weeping?
Walter Brueggemann, author of “Prophetic Imagination,” wrote that grief is a necessary step in moving from denial to hope to healing after the destruction of certainties (like relationships) in our lives. An honest expression of the loss will pave the way.
By engaging our grief, we can break free of our past into a refreshing newness found in God – an authentic end of the old and the beginning of the new.
Jesus is our reference point. He refused to accommodate, what Brueggeman calls the “royal consciousness,” which blocks us from imagining a new reality and forbids the grieving that would usher it in. Jesus refused to abide by the world’s reality where new arrangements and configurations are mostly just rearrangements of the same old pieces.
He spoke out another reality that gives way to real change.
Jesus wept.
Lord, help me, I pray, to open my heart. May I grieve for the pain in this world. When I see injustice, racism, oppression, and violence, may I mourn. Help me not to harden my heart, Lord, even and especially against those with whom I disagree, or those whose behavior I disparage. As I weep over the state of our world, may I also join you in your mission of peace. Amen.(Derived from the writing of Dr. Mark D. Roberts, a senior fellow for Fuller’s Max De Pree Center for Leadership.)
Image: “Jesus Weeps” by Linda Richardson
Catholic Apostolic Group 