What if she meant it, Guadalupe? Not just for Juan Diego but for anyone at any time. Like people freaking out over this year’s presidential election: “Listen and let it penetrate your heart, my dear little son. Do not be troubled or weighed down with grief. Do not fear any illness or vexation, anxiety, or pain.”
Our Lady of Guadalupe standing there in her blue robes with the many stars in the land of colonizing Spaniards and pitiless Aztecs speaking to Juan Diego in the hills of Tepeyac but maybe speaking to any politically enraged American today. “Do not fear any illness or vexation or anxiety or pain. Am I not here who am your Mother? Are you not under my shadow and protection?... Do you need anything else?”
What if you could take those words to the bank? What if she was saying this not just for an Indian peasant scared for his uncle’s life but for people intensely scared of Donald Trump being elected: Do not be troubled. No, really,don’t be.
Or Teresa of Ávila. What if she knew what she was talking about: “Let nothing disturb you; Nothing frighten you. All things are passing.” What if the words of the 16th-century Spanish mystic were a potent bit of advice for anyone terrified of any geopolitical concern, let alone a Trump victory. “Let nothing disturb you.” What if this advice (from a doctor of the church) was defiantly sound, for everything. “Patience obtains all things. Nothing is wanting to him who possesses God. God alone suffices.” Let not Donald disturb you.
(At this point I should probably say, for the sake of fairness, something like “let not even Kamala Harris frighten you!” But who am I kidding. The world in which I live and move right now, in New York City and working in media, has its angst and fear focused on Trump. So, I will probably echo my current moderate liberal bubble more than other bubbles out there.)
An almost breathtaking level of rage and scorn and fear and doom and portents of utter misery has gathered around each of the candidates. It was exemplified at the former president’s recent turn slinging fries at a Buck’s County, Ga, McDonald’s where outside the restaurant pro-Trump and pro-Harris acolytes spat hate and rage at one another.
There are legitimate policy disagreements and electoral fears, and then there is the catastrophizing, apocalyptic nature of today’s partisan disagreements and fears. And the question at the heart of it for any Christian is, do the mystical contours of our faith apply even here? Not merely the election but the fate of everything that comes after: the price of food and the availability of housing and the war in the Holy Land and the immigrants at the door and the vulnerable in the womb and the riots over election results and the vengeance against political enemies and on and on.
Even if that catastrophizing is legitimate—in regards to Trump, for instance—and enemies are avenged and millions are deported and democracy is threatened and tyrants are appeased and the military is turned our own citizens and on and on: Do dreamy exhortations like Julian of Norwich’s that “all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well” apply even there? Or are such mystical words just too…mystical, untethered from reality, best left for the mauve hallways of leafy retreat houses and not for meaty intransigent political difficulties?
Do the words of Scripture translate even to such a rancorous election? “We know that all things work to the good for those who love God,” writes the apostle Paul. Does this fit? We are tempted to think: All things work to the good, sure, but not in the autumn of 2024.
During the Montgomery bus boycott in 1954, Martin Luther King Jr. received dozens of threatening phone calls, including one at midnight which almost drove him over the edge. “N—, we’re tired of your mess,” the voice on the phone said. “If you’re not out of town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.”
King said that in that moment, possibly the most terrifying of his life, he had to “call on something in that Person daddy used to tell you about. That Power that can make a way out of no way.” He said it was a moment when religion “had to become real to me. I had to know God for myself.” King said he heard “the voice of Jesus saying he would never leave me alone, never, never leave me alone.”
Is this election our own call at midnight—a time for religion to become real for us? Even if Donald Trump’s election were to be “the end of democracy,” would not the Lord still be in his heaven? Does Christ abandon us if democracy abandons us? Even if Kamala’s victory would continue to pull down the legal defense of the unborn, can anything pull down the power of the most high God? He who can bring good out of anything that happens, anywhere, at any time. And has done so, over and over and over again. As Gloria Purvis puts it, “No matter who’s in the White House, the governor’s house, the mayor’s house, Jesus is always on the throne.”
It is not about them; it is about us.
Mr. Trump (or Ms. Harris or any elected official) whose pending election we are agonizing over: It is not what they are doing that we are really agonizing over. It is what we are not doing. It is not what they are lacking that is to blame. It is ultimately what we are lacking. We do not invite God into this perceived electoral madness. We do not root our hope in something stronger than the coming tragedy we fear. We lack the embedded spirit of the divine. And the empty space within, where the divine ought to be, can become a dangerous neighborhood where dark spirits prowl to make our lives hell.
It is about us. It is always about us.
Stop worrying then, says Christ, over questions like, what are we to eat, or what are we to drink, or what are we to wear, or who will be our next president. Has worrying ever gotten you anywhere? Behold the lilies of the field, the stars on the blue mantle, behold the saints and mystics of the church who gave everything to God. Does not your heavenly father take care of all these things? “There are very few people who realize what God would make of them if they abandoned themselves entirely to his hands, and let themselves be formed by his grace,” said St. Ignatius. Do we abandon ourselves to fear of Nov. 5 or to the care of the Lord?
Something in us is not free, is not detached. Something in us does not believe in the resurrection, does not believe in the saints, the angels, the mystics, the power of holy Communion, the transfiguration of Christ, the angels appearing to the shepherds. Something in us still does not believe that God himself became incarnate and reclaimed the world for his own. Deep anxiety, existential angst, crushing fear over the outcome of an election or the outcome of pretty much anything means we are off the spiritual beam in some way.
This is not to say all anger and fear is a failure of trust in God. There is a holy kind of mourning and disturbance, the anger of the prophets at shuddering injustice. This is Amos crying out, “For three sins of Israel, even for four, I will not relent. They sell the innocent for silver, and the needy for a pair of sandals.” A righteous and holy kind of anger.
There is even a sort of normal, work-a-day partisan fear about the bad consequences that would follow from your candidate losing. This is simply a kind of prudence about what might come down from the opposing side. A healthy fear and disruption can lead people to knock on doors and pamphleteer and make their case to neighbors and all the things people do who want to win elections and God bless, I’ve done it myself. On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, I was handing out leaflets at a polling station for a third party candidate, until it all got shut down.
But there is also a deeper, toxic disturbance that shakes us to our core, that rips us up from all sense of God’s presence. A disturbance where we give someone or something else undue power over us. Where we try to fatally control things we cannot change. And if the depth of our core is shaken (and it will happen, no one is beyond it), what is that but a chance to take a breath, take stock, go back and get right with God. One candidate will be elected and one will not, and the only path to any kind of human sanity is to accept the outcome and move forward.
The upside of detachment
And here is the marvelous trick. The grand bet is that once we get right with God (or take a half step there), we can get more right with the very political causes we take on, whether electoral or otherwise. When we make Jesus “the Lord of our lives,” when we pray first, meditate upon Teresa’s words, light a candle before Guadalupe, kneel in the garden with Christ, we gain a quiet calm and a relaxed power and concentrated but detached strength. Detached meaning we work without clinging to expectations for the political outcomes that we previously insisted God bend in our direction. A strength to work to rebuild democracy where it is threatened, to defend the most vulnerable if they are under attack, to patiently bring the truth to lies and vitriol whenever it rises.
In The Brothers Karamazov, the young acolyte Alyosha is described as one willing to do great deeds on behalf of a cause, even to the point of sacrificing his life. But fervent young men like him, writes Dostoyevsky, “are not willing to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of their ebulliently youthful life to hard, difficult studies, to learning, in order to increase tenfold their strength to serve the very truth and the very deed that they love and set out to accomplish.”
It is somewhat the same here. Sessions of devout prayer away from the battle can give one “tenfold strength” to serve the very battle we ache to undertake immediately. “Going to God” in this season can be merely a “going to” politics by a back channel; being “detached” means we calmly fight for the very results we desire but no longer demand from God. If Mr. Trump wins, or Ms. Harris, we let go of what we cannot control and deal with things as they are and the power and relief of that letting go is beyond measure.
Maybe this is all too easy for me to say. The candidate whose followers wave signs that say, “Deport them all” is not going to deport me. The candidate whose administration has funded Israel’s flattening of Palestine is not out to crush me. Who am I to talk about spiritual detachment in this time of crisis for those abiding on the edges of society?
In fact, who am I not to talk about it? Who am I or any Christian not to call us—migrants and homeless and working poor and working rich and myself and anyone—to abandon ourselves to the divine? To put on the full armor of God as our finest response to the pending election? To clothe ourselves with the peace only Christ can give, as the first defense and last offense against any human enemy of any stripe? Who are we not to call on the Power above all power, before whom all things tremble. Is not our God here? Do we need anything else?
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