Standing in the long line at 7:30 in the morning at my polling place today-- a place where, in fifteen years, I have never had to wait at all, where nobody much bothered to vote -- was an amazing experience. There were people I knew and people I'd just seen in the neighborhood-- a poor, mostly immigrant area. I said hi to the Guatemalan grandmother, the Sikh bus driver, the white skateboard kid, the young black woman with her German boyfriend, the Latino gay couple, the Russian guy, the Nisei photographer, the Catholics and atheists and evangelicals. We were all looking at one another, looking at the line, and smiling.
It's dangerous to conflate Scripture and politics, but I have to say that something about this lived experience of democracy felt fundamentally Gospel to me today. Here we were, from every tribe and language and people and nation; here we were, with the lowly raised up and the powerful pulled from their thrones. Here we were, rejoicing.
As we say, God bless America.
Today, the Sunday before the election, we celebrated All Saints' Day at church. Because my tradition considers the "saints" to include all of God's holy people in every time and place, we honor not just the orthodox and canonical saints, but all the faithful who went before us...stumbling, falling, and rising. We praise God for the bravest martyrs and those who carried on despite doubts; the ones who had their own moments of weakness and fear; the ones who suffered without knowing how the story would end.
And this is what we honor, too, in our civic lives: the ancestors who, however imperfect, fought for justice. The flawed and complicated human beings who gave their lives for the rights of others. The imperfect, the complicated, the incomplete who have offered themselves, body and soul, to our Union.
My prayer for our people is that we truly understand --past ideology, past doctrine-- that we depend on one another for our wholeness. That we believe loving God means loving our neighbors-- including the neighbors who will vote differently from us this Tuesday. And that we can move together into the post-election period together understanding what is required of us, now and in the years to come: mercy, not sacrifice.
Add to Del.icio.us
Add to Technorati
Add to Digg
Add to Newsvine
Add to Facebook
Add to StumbleUpon
Subscribe