A Vote and a Prayer

We were the only white folks at the polling station that day.  Boston allows voters to use any location available, and so we opted for the community center on Mission Hill in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, which serves the mainly African and Island communities that live in that area.  It was our first real outing in months.

We parked near the colossal basilica that celebrated the funeral of former Senator Ted Kennedy.  In its shadow, the community center offers after-school and meeting space to teens and local groups.  We followed poster board signs down a delivery driveway flanked by chain link towards an open gym door.  Two men stood guard with bottles of sanitizer and paper towels.  With a spritz, we entered the room, so like such rooms everywhere across America – green linoleum, low acoustic ceilings, lights a bit dim – and there were greeted by a buzz of busy energy and warm welcome.

Two long tables served as intake stations for the 8 or so ladies who’d volunteered to do it that day.  Our names were registered, a ticket was given, and we moved on to join the fairly large cluster already filling in their ballots in the central kiosks set up for this purpose.

“How has traffic been?” I’d asked her as I’d given my name.

“It’s been good, very good,” she replied.

“Fingers crossed,” I said, looking directly into her eyes.

“Yes,” she looked back in solidarity. “Fingers crossed.”

I voted, took my little “I Voted” sticker and stuck it on the back of my cell phone, and left the way I’d come.

When the world is burning up with rancor and hostility and suspicion and alienation, it was a humbling and healing moment.  No one in that room was under any misunderstanding:  we were in this together, women and men giving their time to a process they believe in, their neighbors bending to the one of the higher tasks of citizenship, an odd set of strangers showing up and being greeted with warmth and a sense of common cause.  That we interlopers were folded so gracefully and without a second thought into the scene gives me hope – more than I’d experienced in a long time, more than since the weeks of watching horror stories of white on black violence, protests, and dangerous polarization.

I voted.

And now I’m doing the other thing that needs doing:  I’m praying.

Not for a certain outcome, but for what happens after that.  When we wake up and realize how much mending and re-building is needed – of trust, institutions, common ground.  When we see that none of us is entitled to beg off.  That we will all be needed, as we are needed at the polls, whatever our color or ethnic tribe.  Our voices, spirits, songs, kindness, patience, and good will.  All of it.

That day in the polling station I saw the gentle grace that is still among us, that will still make this possible.

May it be so with you.