July Fourth always leaves me wrestling with my identity as a person born in this country. I have very little problem identifying with our past (even the bad parts) but the present has been a problem since, about 1980. That was the time I started to see through our Mythology. I remember one of the youth of our (Methodist) church running upstairs from the polling station, located in our Church’s basement, to announce that Ronald Reagan had won in our tiny little town of Rock Hill, NY. Our leader raised her hands heavenward and thanked Jesus.
I spent the next 8 years thinking Jesus had a funny sense of humor. I’ve continued to think that through the last 5 administrations – and even more so now.
When St Paul says, “there is neither Jew nor Greek” and elsewhere, “neither Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free” he is undoing all our identities. As Christians we are nothing by the world’s lights, “but Christ is all”.
Yet the secular authorities have a place, a purpose. And so it is that we pray for the king – even if the king, or queen, or czar, or dictator, or president hates the Church, persecutes the Church, tries to destroy the Church. The Churches of Russia commemorated their communist oppressors and prayed for them daily, that they would do their God-appointed jobs, perform their God-appointed functions, and leave the Church in peace. The Churches prayed for Obama and pray for Trump in exactly the same way.
The place where we are is all part of the mystery of Providence, like the family into which we are born. The whole of the universe has been designed to bring us to salvation. So, I am an American. To deny or wish otherwise is to belittle God’s design. We live in a hemisphere visited by God’s own Mother, and raising up saints to this very day in all the cultures that live in this half of the globe.
Yet, though individual laws passed or supported by various governments may tend more or less towards Christian morals there is no such thing as a Christian state or a Christian government. There may be a Christian sitting in the office, but no one following Christian morals can today (if ever) navigate the turbulent waters of statecraft without frequent recourse to the confessional.
And so it is that I sit here on the on the 482nd anniversary of the martyrdom of St Thomas More, and I wonder: how can I be the king’s faithful servant, but God’s first.
How is it possible to live in this world, to gain sanctity, to work out my salvation in fear and trembling, while still being an American in any way other than only by the accident of what’s on my birth certificate.
I don’t think it is possible at all.
To live Christian Moral choices into the office of any elected official, into any state appointment, into any official function may well be impossible for me (for me not for you) because I am timid, fearful, irresolute. Having made that confession, I do honestly wonder about the sagacity of those who make that choice, who march knowingly into the post office, the political party boss’s calendar, or the county clerk’s office and ask for a job. I don’t doubt their faith – that’s known to their confessor alone – but I admit I don’t believe for a minute a faithful Catholic could knowingly vote for either abortion laws or anti-poor laws or anti-marriage laws and still honestly say in her heart she is a Catholic. So either these persons are foolish, silly, deluded, or outright evil.
God helps fools, the silly, and does not fault the deluded (unless it is by their own choice). But the Evil, now, the wolves in sheep’s clothing… these we must avoid at all cost.
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| Nancy Pelosi & JFK. Catholics(?) |
And so, maybe, it’s possible that this very thing: this learning that we cannot be loyal Americans and faithful Christians is our reason for being here. Faithful Catholics and Orthodox were not loyal Soviets, but they were good citizens. They lived in the community God gave them, they became Saints in the the world in which God saw them born. We don’t have to be nostalgic for a mythic past or even pretend to be flag-wavers. We can be thankful for what God has given us, aware of what man has corrupted in God’s gifts, and wary of the Evil One’s prime temptation: to imagine that we did this, some how. To claim that the Church must thank anything secular for the blessings God has given us. Any good there is here must be known as God’s gifts, not the product of anything in the created order.
Any liberty we enjoy, is not by or because of America or the secular government, not by virtue of any national grace or unique identity; all good comes to us because God used America to give it to us. God is the author, America is only this chapter in the book. When it pleases him, this chapter will close (or is already closing) and something new will come along. It will be our duty then, to go, move, shift… and do a new thing joyfully.
Doxos 