Hindus at prayer on the Ganges, 1983.
A
Facebook friend puzzled over my last post, wondering if it implied a kind of us-vs-them
outlook. What I intended was assurance to those of us apprehensive about the
Trump-Pence inauguration, including possible Trump voters, who may themselves
now face loss of health care coverage, rising prices, diminished Social
Security and Medicare benefits, reduced personal safety, and international
insecurity.
That’s
not to mention immigrants, refugees, women, minorities, and the environment who
may suffer as a result of everything from current executive orders to future
Supreme Court decisions.
To
me, these are not simple “political” issues, but more vitally, moral and
spiritual concerns.
I
find myself praying for President Trump more intently and regularly than any
previous president. And I am praying for the electorate and the electoral
process that put him in office.
I
am praying for our healing, and I am praying that our demons will be cast
out. It’s easy to point to our leadership in Washington as possessed by ideologies or ideologues at odds with
our American dreams, but demonic possession, as cultural anthropologist René
Girard has pointed out, is as communal as it is individual. It takes a village
to make a person crazed with fear, prejudice, self-absorption, and
self-certainty.
It’s
easy to judge another; harder to judge ourselves. In my first parish after
seminary, on Holocaust Remembrance Sunday, I gave a sermon entitled, “The
Holocaust of Our Minds and Hearts.” The gist of my talk was that we can easily
point to historical expressions of hatred, violence, and prejudice, but we are
less inclined to examine our own minds and hearts. Within us there is another
Auschwitz and another Selma: a place where we curse, confine, scourge and
crucify those different from ourselves.
Those
who deny the Holocaust or the cruelties of slavery or the indignities suffered
by women over the ages or the inequities of class are likely those most fearful
of confronting the Holocausts in their own minds and hearts. That’s something the LGBT movement surfaced
as we recognized those most opposed to us were fearful of their own sexuality and
gender expectations.
Though,
with the poet Robert Frost, “there is something in [us] that doesn’t like a
wall,” we build our own walls to exclude those of different cultures, faiths,
races, gender, gender identity, and sexuality. The contemporary examples of
this ghettoization are our social networks, which often serve as echo chambers
for our limited perspectives.
Our
better natures—God’s own image—often keep such feelings in check, and our
spirituality may redeem and transform misguided passion, making it instead work
for justice and peace, sisterhood and brotherhood. That’s what conversion is
all about. But conversion is not a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience: it is a
constant effort of the will to align with God’s will that we love our neighbor
as ourselves, and that we find ways to love strangers, even enemies.
The
demons of anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, Islamophobia, nationalism, nativisim, ableism,
transphobia, homophobia, and more, need to be cast out. Like the Gerasene
demoniac, their names are Legion.
Another
response to my post suggested a “yes, and” to its spirit, which I never
intended to exclude. We are not only to be comforted that “this too shall pass”
or that God or Jesus are with us “in the mess” (to quote Evelyn Underhill)—we must
be challenged. We must be challenged to speak up, not to silence
others, but to encourage others to tell us what’s on their minds and hearts,
what are their needs, fears, hopes, and dreams.
We
are also challenged to actively resist the demons and temptations of our time,
in ourselves, our communities, our nations. Naming them in others will put them
on the defensive; confessing them in ourselves may lead to conversation, if not
conversion.
And
we must put our bodies, voices, resources, and votes in the direction that our
better selves urge us to go.
This
is what I’m praying for these days, in myself, in others, and in our leaders.
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Copyright © 2017 by Chris R. Glaser.
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