Opinion | Relearning to Walk, a Personal History

My problem seems to have started in the summer of 2016. Which was just a few months after I lost much of my hearing.

It never occurred to me that there was any connection between losing my hearing and losing my balance. “But of course there’s a connection,” my doctor told me. “You’ve lost your sense of certainty in the world. Your gait and your stance are off because, with the change in your hearing, you literally don’t know where you are in space.”

That was also the year I expected to see the election of the first female president, only to witness the Oval Office occupied by a man who unleashed a dark font of vitriol aimed at people like me: feminists, progressives, L.G.B.T.Q. individuals, the disabled. Sadly, the election of Joe Biden failed to illuminate that darkness. Abortion rights nationally are probably about to be crushed, and one whole party now seems ever more determined to end American democracy as we’ve known it. On Thursday the governor of Texas directed state agencies to investigate categorized gender-affirming care for trans youths as “child abuse.”

I’m not the only one who’s lost her sense of balance in this world.

But if we’ve lost our sense of equilibrium, I know from experience it’s not impossible to get it back.

In mid-February I walked, for the first time in two years, the five blocks from my apartment to in-person worship at New York’s Riverside Church, a place with a long history of fighting social injustice and of working for peace. I sat down in my old pew, No. 523. Most of the people who I used to see before the pandemic were gone, but there were a few familiar faces; we shared the peace by bumping elbows. There at the pulpit was the Rev. Michael Livingston, whose sermon that day was about forgiveness — an idea he wove carefully around the forgiveness that Joseph showed his brothers in Genesis 45, when they appeared before him in Egypt, years after they sold him into slavery. Joseph, Mr. Livingston told the congregants, might have sought revenge. Instead, Joseph chose compassion, standing on the side of forgiveness.

“That’s what we have to do: stand. When your enemies surround you, stand,” said Mr. Livingston. “When all seems lost, stand.”

Using classic Gospel anaphora, he recounted examples of people fighting injustice and showing forgiveness, and then he repeated that word: Stand!