I’m as disappointed in the dysfunction of our government as anyone, Federal and State… Sound policy making is now blatantly being sacrificed to partisanship…electability being the driving force relative to all decision making or lack thereof, the old specter of racism manifested on the periphery. Our government seems now so distant from its people it represents, the population’s voice growing dim, protests notwithstanding. Perhaps that is because corp0rations now more than ever dictate public policy. The Supreme court has recently granted corporations the same rights as individuals vis a vis their freedom of speech as that freedom pertains to the influence of elections. Our government, like the corporate ethos it increasingly represents, and whose bidding it follows, is growing heartless.
I’ve just recently been clearing out some boxes that ended up in my office when we moved here for lack of a better place to put them; and I ran across a box of College stuff… some tests I had done well on…there were a few I didn’t save, and I found some of my old college notebooks….one on the Greek Classics….one on Modern British poetry in which we studied among others Thomas Hardy and Gerard Manley Hopkins and William Butler Yeats….And then the one I couldn’t put down was my notebook on Romantic poetry including notes on the works of Wordsworth and Blake; Coleridge, Keats and Shelly. I am reminded once again that our artists are our prophets….they all laud the creative human spirit, its ability to literally form the world in which it dwells into the fullness of its beauty for which it was and is created…they laud the power of the imagination to save us from the rude heartlessness that stalks the human enterprise….Imagination, the name of our God-likeness into which we are called to live. In a nutshell our leaders in government suffer from a chronic lack of imagination….Jesus called it hardness of heart.
What did our current legislators study in their formative years? Where is the imaginative spirit to serve with equity the good of the whole…the same spirit that formed these United States, a modern articulation of democracy coined by the ancient Greeks…Our legislators then, the so-called founding fathers, would have known the classics, have been educated in the liberal arts tradition, the sole purpose of which was to nourish the imagination which sets free the human spirit to do its singular job which is to create…..to nurture the joie de vivre of living in an egalitarian world… We live in an age in which education to a much greater degree has become vocational training: business, management, accounting, hotel management, on and on….not that we don’t need vocational training at some point along the way….but my lament is that we have wandered far in our educational formation from the voices of our prophets, the voices that wake us up to the realization that we are here to serve the beauty that is this world set right….and there are prophets in every discipline….we have wandered afar from their voices, and it is showing up in the way we live together in our society.
We just honored one such student of the prophets…one who listened to the voices of the wise….we honored one such follower this week on the Mall of Washington D.C. We honored Martin Luther King, Jr. for living into the collective imagination and thereby changing our world for the better….a man of learning, a man of heart….Nelson Mandela, a man of heart….Mahatma Gandhi, a man of heart…Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, leymah Gbowee, Tawakkul Karman, the recent Nobel Peace Prize winners, women of heart….Where are the ones among us in this country, ironically founded by learned people of heart….where are they now?….because we languish without them, the worst possibly yet to come in these United States….we languish in their absence…Let us prophesy to these dry bones…that they once again might live and live with brimful hearts.
What you are speaking about is the death of liberal intelligence. Liberal has the same root as the word liberty, meaning to live in freedom and not as a slave. One who cannot think broadly or who cannot make connections or cannot accept complexity is destined to be a slave. A slave to their own passions and ego. A slave to demagoguery, to ideology, to calcified social conventions and traditions. A slave to fear, hatred, and anger. A slave to bureaucratic routine, to the status quo, to spin and other insidious forms of deception.
The powers and principalities are legion and they assault us in our deepest integrity. A liberal education in the sciences, arts, and humanities gives us the intellectual tools to keep the powers and principalities at bay. A liberal education gives us the gift and the burden of critical thinking, truly a double-edged sword for those who know how to wield it. A liberal education helps us to live humanly in the midst of death.
The Church, like the thinker, audaciously rebukes these powers of death when we renounce in baptism the evil powers that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. Yet too often the Church accommodates itself to the principalities and powers and becomes their acolyte. We lose sight of our mission, we surrender our authority in fear and trembling, we ossify like the bones in Ezekiel. Will these bones live again? We trust in the Easter promise that they will. We trust in the promise of the Eucharist that they will. Every time we cast our lot on the side of dignity we break the chains of slavery and death and open the way to freedom and life. Let us join liberal intelligence with sacramental theology and develop a renewed Christian humanism for the world’s sake.
It is dignity that we have lost when we are shamed by the actions of others rather than our own. In families in Alabama I think PTSD that has become an epidemic among those who have not learned to rejoice in our common humanity because they fear the split among their parents, their neighbors, their friends. I know far too many people in my life who wish that I would stop speaking even before I open my mouth.
Can you spell “TERM LIMITS”?
The president gets eight years at most to accomplish his/her objectives. Why should senators, representatives, constables, or dogcatchers have more?
Presently the major job of every elected official is to be re-elected; the campaign begins the day after s/he takes office. This isn’t what “the founding fathers” envisioned.
mmg/