Five Truths to Remember as Political Tensions Intensify

Love Is Our Binding Force

Franciscans believe that God’s trajectory in the world is a humble one. God poured God’s very self into the universe, setting it into motion, and also became human through the person of Jesus Christ. So, what are the implications of the humility of God, this incarnational trajectory of the divine, in a world of difference and political tension? Says Ilia Delio, author of The Humility of God, in the fourth episode of our Off the Page podcast (30:05 – 31:43), “We need to start understanding what the humility of God means for us today in a world of artificial intelligence, in a world of science, in a world of cultural and societal polarities and oppositions. What does a humble God mean when you have political differences?

“How do we love in the midst of differences? Love is our binding force, and differences are overcome by love. It’s really simple, [we need to] stop judging and stop having your big ideas about what people should be. We need to really meet the concrete person in a concrete way: look at them eye to eye, maybe touch them once in a while, see how they smile, see what their face is like—all of this is where God is being radiated as the humility of God. We tend to have our minds elsewhere…we are disembodied. The humility of God is about embodiment, perhaps that is a precise way to say it—a God who takes on a body, the love of God in an embodied way.”

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We Are All Children of God

Our identities, our true selves, are the great equalizer, a reminder that though we may disagree, we are children of God at the core. This alone can lead to empathy and curiosity. Says Franciscan School of Theology president Garrett Galvin in the seventh episode of our Off the Page podcast (29:35 – 32:17), “Poll after poll shows us that over the last 40 years, we’ve moved from about 50 percent of people really trusting their neighbor—feeling good about others—to now, I think, it’s around 32 percent. That has to be renewed, but how do we do that? Those are bigger questions than I can probably answer. But the Franciscans, I think, do have an answer to that in terms of really working with each other and meeting each other eye to eye and trying to have a space for dialogue. We’re called very clearly in the Bible to love our enemies—perhaps to conversation and recognizing that they’re made in the image and likeness of God, and the importance of realizing that we’re all in this together.

“As Franciscans, a lot of times we’ll just say, ‘A person is never a problem.’ And so we have to recognize that we might not get along with people, or we might see people at their worst, but that is not a problem. That is a child of God. And we have to try to come to a better understanding of people. People might have behaviors that we don’t care for, and usually there’s a pretty good reason for that. And so, we try to kind of come to an understanding. I forget who said it, but the idea is that to understand all is to forgive all. And so, we keep on pushing in the direction of empathy—to try to understand people better—that is is something that we desperately need now.”

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Winning Isn’t Everything

Our culture idolizes winning, power, and money, but St. Francis of Assisi spent his ministry gravitating toward the margins, standing in solidarity with the “losers” in his society. Francis took the themes from Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount seriously, and it freed him up to not have to play the world’s games. Says Richard Rohr in the sixth episode of our Off the Page podcast (36:31-40:26), “Unless you’re at home on the edge, you tend to idealize what the culture idealizes, which is always power and money and sex. I’m not saying that in a negative way, but it doesn’t get you very far. We see it in our politics, the idealization of being a winner and not a loser, being rich and not poor. The path of descent keeps us idealizing the loser, not the winner. It almost sounds like that can’t be right. It has to be right. Or we’ll keep excluding people, we’ll keep looking for who’s inferior to me, as if I’m so wonderful, as if I’m so perfect. When we can find divine perfection in imperfection, then you’re free. Please trust me on that.”

“It’s easiest to start with order, some grand plan to the meaning of life. But as you grow, you eventually face the exceptions to the rule. As we used to say, the exception proves the rule. The rule isn’t always the rule. When you include disorder with order, you don’t throw out order. That was the mistake of the protesting ones, the Protestant ones. They thought everything about Catholicism was bad. Some was not so good. They’re right. But when you can include order and disorder—exception, correction, reformation—then you have what I call reorder. That’s the rule with exceptions to the rule, the inclusion of the negative. We call it here in the teaching of contemplation ‘third-way thinking,’ where you cannot just think either-or, but both-and. It gives you a third something. That’s a rather good description of a mystic, of a saint. They see things in the third way. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount is reading the law, his Jewish law, in a third way—‘The law has said, you have said, I say’—and he includes the exceptions to the rule. That’s what we mean by contemplation.”

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Demonization Leads Nowhere

As St. Francis of Assisi’s faith deepened, he realized again and again that the people who he or his society demonized (lepers, Muslims, the poor) were actually the route to his own continued conversion, to oneness, to fullness. The “other” was where Christ was found. It is worth considering in our society how demonization and scapegoating might divorce us from the very places where Christ might be and in fact fuel the profit machines that thrive on our polarization (media, social media, political campaigns, etc.).

Says Mark Shea in the fifth episode of our Off the Page podcast, “American politics loves Manichaeism: this side is all white and this side is nothing but black. And Christianity refuses to do that. Christianity is so radical on this point, it even refuses to say that Satan is nothing but pure evil because Satan is a creature and therefore made by God. And therefore, to the degree that he retains existence—that he retains intellect, that he retains will—these are all good things that God made. And yes, they can be corrupted, but if any being is purely evil, it would cease to exist because existence is a good. And so Christian theology is very subtle on this point. And one of the results of it, as a priest friend of mine pointed out, which again—this is one of those things like ‘loving your enemies’ that I hated having to admit the truth of this because it just makes my life harder—but he said that we often speak of someone who does evil and say of them that the mask is off now that we’ve seen what they’re really made of. He says that is lousy theology, particularly lousy theology in the confessional.

“He says the reality is that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God. And so, at root, along with all other things that God has made, they are good. And, yes, of course they’re fallen. And when they sin, as Augustine puts it, they assert their nothingness. But when people come into the confessional and confess their sins, that’s when the mask comes off. That’s when their sin is forgiven and they enter into, at least, an attempted state of grace. They may be very bad at it, as are we all, but that’s when the mask comes off. And when you walk out of the confessional, you’re showing your true face. Your true face is when you are most truly the creature that God has made you to be.”

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Grace Is Not Zero-Sum

St. Bonaventure described God as a self-diffusive fountain of love and goodness flowing eternally (and constantly) into our universe and, thus, our lives. It is easy in our polarized age to adopt a scarcity mindset in which we seemingly determine who should experience favor and who should not. But as Bruce Epperly, author of Head, Heart, and Hands, says in the first episode of our Off the Page podcast, “Grace is not zero-sum.” He continues, “There’s no drought of God’s love. This reminds us that we don’t have to be self-interested in the small sense. But we can be self-interested in the sense that our self-interest expands to include others. It really does matter whether a child coming up from Central America. It really does matter. You know, Jesus, Maria, and Jose are always coming up from the border: the Holy Family is coming up daily. It does matter whether they are treated as human beings, apart from immigration policy; it matters that they are seen and treated as human beings. It does matter to our own souls that we do not get caught up in the hatred of those policies, or of the persons who have the policies that we disagree with. It really does matter to the quality of the whole nation and whole planet.”

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