Call to courage

Joan Chittister is a great author.  I recommend her books.  This is a new one I will have to track down.  In these dark days of continuing cruelty, ineptitude and crisis we really need to re-evaluate and come around again to the higher standards in which we all believed at least at one time.  I never thought I would live to see people turn off to what is true and good and embrace a stubborn, unseeing vision of what is damaging to us all.  I had hoped there would be a Republican or Democratic candidate who could find a middle of the road that would speak to many people, but the Republicans have shut that door by eliminating primaries so Trump has no competition from that side and Democrats seem to be in a muddle.  It is like the ground giving way beneath our feet as we approach an autocracy that will brings us to defeat and ruin ll that was once good and gracious in this land of "new hope".

My column for the local paper:
    I have never believed in “re-inventing the wheel”.  If someone else can say or do it better I want to hear what they have to say.  In these days of turmoil there is a need for all of us to search out that higher power that speaks to our inner souls, demanding an integrity that stretches beyond the crowd.  Here Joan Chittister speaks to the crisis which is threatening our nation’s moral caliber:

(Joan Chittister, The Time is now: a Call to Uncommon Courage.  Convergent Books: 2019)
In every life there is a crossover moment, after which a person will never be the same again.  Somewhere, somehow the challenge comes that sets us on a different path: the path of purpose, the path of integrity, the path of transcendence that lifts us — heart, mind, and soul — above the pitiable level of the comfortable and the mundane.
It is the moment at which transcending the mediocre, the conventional, the pedestrian, becomes more impacting, more holy-making than any amount of beige-colored political success.
As a culture we may have come to that point.  As a people, we are at a crossover moment.  It is a call to all of us to be our best, our least superficial, our most serious about what it means to be a Christian as well as a citizen.
So, where can we look for oneing in the political arena. Only within the confines of our own hearts.  Politics — government — does not exist for itself and, if it does, that is precisely when it becomes at least death-dealing if not entirely evil.  Nation-states and empires have all “died the death” in the wake of such power run amuck, of such distortion of human community.
In the end, politics is nothing more than an instrument of social good and human development.  It is meant to be the right arm of those whose souls have melted into God.  It is to be the living breath of those who say they are religious people and patriotic citizens — a link to personal faith.
The democratic system, as originally conceived, upholds a vision that links “care for widows and children” with a commitment to provide food stamps and a living wage for families under stress.
It embodies the soul of a nation that considers the right to breathe clean air and drink clean water, to save wetlands and reduce fossil fuels, to be a responsibility of America’s own Environmental Protection Agency.
It includes the love for all of God’s creation that links Jesus’ cure of Jairus’ daughter and the man born blind with the moral obligation to provide healthcare and social services to all of us, not simply to some.
It embraces the courage of the Samaritan to reach out to the foreigner that made this country open arms toward an immigrant world.It fact, it is the strength of the link between religion and politics that will determine both the quality of our politics and the authenticity of our religion.
Many in the United States claim we are a Christian nation, but if we are to call ourselves such, we must sustain a sincere connection between our Gospel values and the political choices we make.  We cannot declare we are one body and then neglect to give that body the care it needs including food, water, and shelter.