One of the ways I have chosen to help deal with the past four years of presidential insanity as well as the caustic, turbulent, always spiritually exhausting climate on which MAGA supporters continue to thrive, has been to read of similar disquieting times. I have done this in search of reasons for hope and to discover how – despite all the evidence where America has often failed to aspire to be its best self – our country has been evidence of better angels guiding our national agenda and social outcomes.
I have read extensive biographies of Presidents Washington, Adams, Lincoln, Grant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Truman. I have read the biography of our government’s designer and implementer, Alexander Hamilton. And, as the George Floyd murder at the hands of police in Minneapolis sparked national awareness that Black Lives Matter as well as the critical need for racial understanding along with knowing something of the American History of brutal, white supremacy, I read Isabel Wilkerson’s incomparable books, “The Warmth of Other Suns” and “Caste.”
In all this reading there were MANY times when I would put the books down and wonder, “How did this nation ever survive itself?” And then, there were MANY times when I would put the books down overwhelmed by the powerful moments when, in spite of all manner of hell on earth, we aspired to implement the promise of this land and enable real justice for all persons.
Here is a FOR INSTANCE.
It was 10:00 p.m. on the night of June 27, 1936. One hundred thousand people were crammed into the stadium of The University of Pennsylvania. Millions more were listening to their radios in anticipation of hearing President Roosevelt – described by biographer Jean Edward Smith as one who “lifted himself out of his wheelchair and lifted this nation from its knees” – speak.
The speech Roosevelt gave that night to an emerging from a Great Depression nation, galvanized our country with a sense of hope. It has become known for the last line when Roosevelt said that the American generation of the time had “a rendezvous with destiny.” But, there was also this:
Governments can err. Presidents do make mistakes. But the immortal Dante* tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.
Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.
Perhaps like me, you will find this statement helpful in understanding our times.
Indeed, when everything from mask wearing, to getting a vaccine shot, to accepting people different from us, is for far too many an issue of “my right and I don’t care much for you,” I see great hope in thinking about different scales and deciding how I want to be weighed…and never found wanting.
In our time when frozen people who think themselves chosen, threaten the very lives of a politician’s family in retribution for that politician’s vote in favor of impeachment of a former president for fomenting insurrection, we must think of the different scales of what is valued and promote the warm-hearted nature of what builds a society.
In our frozen time when states seek to restrict voting all the while making it harder and harder to cast a ballot if you are not white, suburban, and privileged I want to be gaining weight on another scale.
In our frozen time when IN AMERICA a law is passed in Texas rewarding persons with $10,000 for turning in his or her neighbor for a personal health choice there must be a renewed dedication to tipping the warm-hearted scale.
In our time when the institutional church is absolutely frozen in its various dogmas, rituals, and ecclesiastical certainties – absolutely frozen with indifference to the beating hearts of people who experience God differently or seek to experience a vitality of faith which transcend the frozen prayers and disciplines of their institutional church leadership – it is essential that we hold up a different scale.
In our time when a whole portion of people who claim special knowledge of Jesus substitute his crown of thorns with a MAGA hat and drain his blood from a white, listless body on a cross of political nationalism, it is essential that we hold up a different scale.
Here is an historical truth:
What is frozen in righteous indifference will melt. Ice ages or decades or years, recede. Warmed hearts ALWAYS usher in the new day. Don’t choose the wrong scale.
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*Dante Alighieri, Italian poet, born c1265. Died September 14, 1321