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How many people on either political side find themselves today on the razor’s edge of anxiety or even despair? Victory had seemed so close, or defeat so near, on account of the thinnest margins. Then suddenly to experience fate reversed: how fearfully capricious, luck!
For so many, politics is the ultimate concern, but one that must eventually cower before the vicissitudes of chance and the inevitability of death. The entropy of human flaws and fallibility can always dash political victories. A fleeting consolation, to win just for today!
How different it is when one is a Christian! For knowing two things makes all the difference: First, that we are subjects of a perfectly provident good God, who leaves nothing to chance. Second, that we are part of the indefectible winning side already; that victory is assured.
Not that politics isn’t important or that we shouldn’t care and work passionately for its cause. On the contrary: the passion of politics should reflect the fire of charity and justice supernaturally alive in our hearts, and the concern that one day we will face the Divine Judge.
In the face of human flaws and failures, we attest that God has revealed his loving plan to make all things new and right in his Son, a plan he will accomplish perfectly, because he is perfectly good and the universe is thoroughly subject to his providence and government.
This means that God makes good out of our flawed projects and defectible accomplishments. We may not see how, how this failure today could not be an unraveling, threatening the worth of all our enterprises. Or we obtusely tell ourselves that everything will work out just because.
But as Christians we know that victory IS assured: it will work out! Not because of human ingenuity or accomplishment. But because of a cost, because of the sacrifice of our Savior whose victory over death was a promise that his Church would not fail nor would he leave us alone.
What a beautiful thing, to step back from our rightly passionate concern for politics, having done what we could, and entrust the muddle of it all to God’s care, subjecting it to the higher end of the redemption of all creation, which true solidarity and justice must serve.
That subjection happens by not failing to pray that God’s will be done, as well as passionately working to order society by right laws and policies in conformity with his righteousness. But it also happens by not forgetting that our political rivals are not finally our enemies.
It happens by remembering that our rivals too are destined to be, just as much as ourselves, adopted sons and daughters of our Father in heaven. If they are suffering from temptations to anxiety, fear, and despair, the call is not to rejoice in schadenfreude over their weakness.
The call is to proclaim to them in hope and joy, in word and action, the higher cause to which all our enterprises must be subjected, the cause and membership of the Mystical Body, the New Creation, an enterprise that encompasses all human work, elevating and perfecting it.
But this call is not like a Roman triumph: rather it is to humility, to hear the concerns of another, to find the truth and good in their politics too and kindly, patiently demonstrating by our words and actions the resolutions of those concerns in the highest work of the Gospel.
How much further along we would be if we did not descend to a desperate frame, viewing the other side as intractable rivals and our own efforts as replacing the perfect providence and government of God! If we could step back in humility and say, as St Teresa of Avila reminds us:
