“The Past We Step Into”

I am sure she will be quoted often these days, Amanda Gorman, our twenty-two year old Youth Poet Laureate. I am overjoyed that she is so young and undaunted and inspired and inspiring. I shudder to think about a world in which gifts like hers might have been missed—or missing. 

I believe we needed to hear all she had to say about our nation and our potential future. In fact, I’m still sitting this week in more glittering lights of clarity and glows of possibility than I had ever imagined. I, with our poet, want to free the light of a new dawn and be brave enough to see it and, more importantly, to be it. It’s such a heady thought, our wanting to shine that light on everything around us. 

Imagine, for example, we shine it on our endlessly challenging topic here, the Catholic Church, and see it with ever-growing and glowing clarity. 

And here’s where I go from lofty poetry to what I believe is quite illuminating prose. Actually, a “Letter to the Editor” in the January 17 New York Times commenting on a review by Andrew Sullivan of the book Conservatism by Edmund Fawcett is what helped elucidate for me, in a refreshingly concise form, how our conservative hierarchy seems to see the Church. Although Sullivan, Fawcett, and the letter writer were talking about political conservatism, the parallels were unmistakable.  

According to the original article, conservatism sees liberal democracy as an erosion of: 

• the authority of religion
• the coherence of a community
• a sense of collective belonging
• home
• meaning and security

Isn’t that just what the Catholic Church “powers-that-be” see, too?

The letter writer counters with this assertion: “That would be an appalling indictment of liberal democracy, if it were true.” She goes on: “What liberal democracy expends great energy attempting to erode is (placed in bullet format by me):

• the claimed supremacy of religion, in particular Christianity
• the insularity of a community
• a sense of collective intolerance
• exclusion
• truncated meaning
• false security”

Although simplified, of course, I still think the above is a clear, valid, and valuable summary of much that divides us, and, furthermore, expressed as such, provides a rich base for discussion of how these differing views came to be and what perspectives and insights they bring to our future.  We may be far, but we are not irrevocably, apart.  

In fact, on a larger scale Amanda Gorman expressed the problem and possibility beautifully: 

Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed

a nation that isn’t broken

but simply unfinished

…maybe that applies to our Church, too?

It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit,

it’s the past we step into

and how we repair it

Together?  

Together.