The day after the
election, I posted the following on our hermitage blog, where I normally only
post my homilies. I did it with some hesitation, only because there I am
speaking for the entire community and I do not pretend that we all agree on
these things. I am going to re-post it here on my own old blog and follow up a
little.
* * *
I try so hard to
be non-partisan from the pulpit or when speaking in the name of New Camaldoli,
but I’ve gotten so many traumatized emails already I feel impelled to respond.
I am not preaching today, but I want to address the situation as I see it
from the Word of God and our Catholic tradition.
Today in the
Catholic communion we celebrate the Feast of the Lateran Cathedral, the
cathedral of Rome, in honor of the basilica which is called omnium
urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput––‘the mother and mistress of all
churches of Rome and the world,’ and a “sign of love for and union with the See
of Peter.” As our friend Barry Huddock, now an editor at Liturgical Press,
wrote on his blog three years ago:
It’s been over 50 years since the
conservative American magazine National Review, under the
leadership of Catholic William Buckley, published its now famous “Mater
si, Magistra no” in response to Pope John XXIII’s just-published
encyclical, Mater et Magistra. Good
Pope John had, for the first time in that 1961 encyclical, moved the
Church a few steps away from the socially-politically conservative institutions
and ideas with which it had generally aligned itself until then and placed it
more clearly on the side of policies and reforms that favored the poor. He
voiced strong support for government involvement in issues like unemployment,
and he called for respect for the right of workers to just wages and to a share
in the wealth generated by the corporations that employed them.
Today as we
celebrate his See, I feel confident that we can and ought to fall back on the
authority of Pope Francis, hopefully with our own bishops here in the US
following his line, in regards to Catholic social teaching, and regard the
Church as both our mother and our teacher.
It was almost
eerily prescient that this should have been the reading that I chose for us to
hear at Vigils this morning. Imagine this coming from the Word of God at 5:30
AM the morning after Election Day:
Rid yourselves, therefore, of all malice, and all
guile, insincerity, envy, and all slander. … For the Lord’s sake accept the
authority of every human institution, whether of the emperor as supreme, or of
governors, as sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to praise those who
do right. For it is God’s will that by doing right you should silence the
ignorance of the foolish. As servants, live as free people, yet do not use your
freedom as a pretext for evil. Honor everyone. Love the family of believers.
Fear God. Honor the emperor. (1 Pt 2:1-3, 13-17)
The challenge
will be to do this while still fearlessly speaking the truth in love (Eph
4:15), while still being like yeast in the dough (Mt 13:33).
Now more than ever it is important to fall back on the non-violent example of
Gandhi, Dr. King, Dorothy Day, Nelson Mandela, and all the more reason to keep
doing what we do, living as we live. As Therese the Little Flower so famously
wrote, “In the heart of the church, my mother, I will be love, and thus shall
be everything.”
I found this
below to be comforting and good practical advice, from Dr. Ali Michael,
PhD.
“‘What should I say to my students after the election
if Trump wins?’ a principal asked me recently. Good question. What should we
tell our children?
Tell them, first,
that we will protect them.
Tell them that we have democratic
processes in the U.S. that make it impossible for one mean person
to do too much damage. Tell them that we will protect those democratic
processes ― and we will use them ― so that [Mr.] Trump is unable to act on many of the false promises
he made during his campaign.
Tell them, second, that you will honor the
outcome of the election, but that you will fight bigotry. Tell them bigotry
is not a democratic value, and that it will not be tolerated at your school.
Tell them you stand by your Muslim families. Your same-sex parent families.
Your gay students. Your Black families. Your female students. Your Mexican
families. Your disabled students. Your immigrant families. Your trans students.
Your Native students. Tell them you won’t let anyone hurt them or deport them
or threaten them without having to contend with you first. Say that you will
stand united as a school community, and that you will protect one another. Say
that silence is dangerous, and teach them how to speak up when something is
wrong. Then teach them how to speak up, how to love one another, how to
understand each other, how to solve conflicts, how to live with diverse and
sometimes conflicting ideologies, and give them the skills to enter a world
that doesn’t know how to do this.
Teach them, third, how to be responsible members of a civic society. Teach them how to engage in discussion—not for the
sake of winning, but for the sake of understanding and being understood.
Students need to learn how to check facts, to weigh news sources, to question
taken-for-granted assumptions, to see their own biases, to take feedback, to
challenge one another. We need to teach students how to disagree—with love and
respect. These skills will be priceless in the coming months and years as we
work to build a democratic society that protects the rights of all people ―
regardless of the cooperation or resistance those efforts face from the
executive branch.
Finally, remind
them―to ease their minds―that not
everyone who voted for Donald Trump did so because they believe the bigoted
things that he has said this
year. Many of them voted for him because they feel frustrated with the
economy, they feel socially left behind, and they are exercising the one power
they have. We need to challenge [Mr] Trump and his supporters to differentiate
between their fears and the bigotry catalyzed by those fears.
In the aftermath of this traumatic election, I
hesitate to even exercise my voice in this way. In the past year, I received
hate mail and a death threat from white supremacists for blog posts like
this―blog posts that are, let’s be honest, fairly insignificant expressions of
personal opinion from a person with very little power. I am not a threat. And
yet people have threatened me―and my family―for expressing my view that we
should build a world in which all human beings can live freely in the wholeness
of their identities. I fear that this kind of intimidation will only increase
in the event of a Trump victory. I
fear that it will worsen tomorrow―as soon as I hit send ― if Trump supporters
are emboldened in their aggression towards people with whom they disagree. And
yet the only thing that makes me feel safe in this moment―as I stare into the
face of a possible Trump victory―is to speak up and speak out,
and to invite others to do the same.”
That last
paragraph of his was chilling, and is somewhat my own fear, but let us be
courageous and take good care of each other. Let none of us, red or blue, feel
emboldened in aggression toward people with whom we disagree. Instead,
let’s rid ourselves of all malice, and all guile, insincerity, envy,
and all slander, so as to be yeast in the dough, salt for the
earth, speaking the truth in love. As our Br. Timothy said
this morning, calmly and wisely, “God is still God.”
* * *
One of my friends
responded saying that while it may be that “not everyone who voted for Trump
did so because they believed the bigoted things he said,” everyone who voted
for him did so, in spite of those things
he said (and did) as though they did not matter, as though that level of
bigotry and contempt for women and immigrants and war veterans and the poor
were not significant. And they must now take responsibility for that
decision. Another sent a link to this very powerful blog, entitled: “White
Christians who voted for Trump: Fix this. Now!” (I’ll attach it below.)
Two folks
reflected (“chafed”?) at the same verse about “obeying the emperor” (and why I
myself said that “challenge will be to do this while still fearlessly speaking
the truth in love). One said that this was ever the problematic verse:
“it’s the tension with not unequivocally doing the above that gives us
the necessary moral guidance we so desperately need: Gandhi, Dorothy Day, ML
King, Mandela. Because, of course, not all political governance is God-sent and
too often ‘governors’ do the opposite of what Paul supposes.” Another said that
the admonitions to “obey the emperor” and honor the outcome of the election sit
differently now. She thought that the implications of the devastation that our
President-elect and the Congress are “poised to wreak on the poor and most
vulnerable among us, and upon the planet itself, are catastrophic.”
As a Christian (and a Christian monk), the first
insurmountable hurtle seems to be the
conversation that I almost can’t imagine happening but has to happen: a dialogue among Christians who overwhelmingly, at
least the white ones, had to be Mr. Trump’s voting block, and the many
Catholics, even clergy (my own classmate made national headlines for this) who
thought Mr. Trump was the “lesser evil.” Time will tell, but would the election
of Secretary Clinton have unleashed a wave of hate crimes and panic?
Unfortunately, the kind of intimidation that preceded
the election is continuing now that Mr. Trump has won, I suppose they do feel emboldened now, given license and vindicated in
their aggression.
Another friend
wanted to know what to say to one of his relatives who voted for Mr. Trump
based on a singular issue: he could not vote for Secretary Clinton because she
said abortion is between a woman and her doctor. I have no better answer to
give him than he himself gave to that relative, the “seamless garment,”
pro-life in the broadest sense possible, which includes the environment, the
death penalty, and caring for the poor. And again, if a vote for someone other
than Mr. Trump (there were three other candidates, we seem to forget, and
always the possibility of a write-in) was an evil at all, would it really have
been the greater evil?
