Sparkling moments in dark times

I put on a fancy dress and went to the big city

Many thanks to my friend and colleague Don Gonyea for snapping this photo of me receiving my Edward R. Murrow Award for reporting on the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Beside me is NPR producer Lauren Hodges, who has field produced with me on several occasions and is a fabulous colleague and friend.

The world feels like an especially difficult place right now and there is so much pain. I’m catching up here after spending yesterday working on an NPR Politics Podcast episode about the ways the Hamas attack on Israel over the weekend is reverberating in U.S. politics.

It feels somewhat frivolous to talk about an award banquet at a time like this. But life is never one thing. As the rabbi at my stepdaughter’s beautiful wedding noted poignantly on Sunday - the day after the attack began - life is always a mix of suffering and joy.

So on Monday night, my colleagues gathered in New York City to celebrate journalism at the Edward R. Murrow Award gala.

I’ve lost track of who took each of the photos we were swapping all night. But here’s a crew from NPR (and some friends), celebrating at a rooftop bar after the ceremony.

It is, I acknowledge, a bit incongruous to sit in a banquet hall wearing lash extensions and shimmering gowns and applaud each other for work which so often focuses - by its very nature - on human suffering and conflict. My colleagues won for coverage of life in Ukraine, the connections between climate change and extremism, and in my case, the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Well, except for these two, who won for doing cool stuff for NPR’s Planet Money on Tik Tok (I feel sooooo old just looking at them…):

Courtney Theophin and Jack Corbett from NPR’s Planey Money team./ Sarah McCammon

But in the midst of it, there is also goodness. There are courageous people: reporters - much braver than me, who are in our hearts and minds now - who cover these events. People who share their stories and give voice to the suffering. Rescuers who preserve life at risk to their own.

And so we take a moment to honor that, and rededicate ourselves to the work, and celebrate the moment.

On that note, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Mary Oliver poem, Don’t Hesitate, which gets at this tension between sensing both the joy and the brokenness of the world. I had a close friend read it at my wedding - the second marriage for both of us - because it felt like the right tone. “Much can never be redeemed,” Oliver says, a line that both haunts and somehow inspires me in its clear-headedness. Things are always breaking and being broken, she suggests, and yet in all of it there remains “some possibility.”

This week I’m also celebrating reaching the one-month mark since my serious car accident. My son and I are continuing to heal both emotionally and physically - and I even found a dress that covered my surgery scar.

Think that one-shoulder number was chosen coincidentally? Think again! On left: Ailsa Chang and me; right: Ayen Bior, Lauren Hodges, and me

And if you enjoy my writing, I’d be hugely grateful if you’d pre-order my book, The Exvangelicals, out in March from St. Martin’s Press.

One more! Thanks to colleague Noah Caldwell for this one.