Sequel

The first Halloween this year was innocuous: children in crepe costumes and plastic masks pretending to be evil, and easily bought off with treats. The second, Tuesday's, feels very different. There were smiling faces on the masks have turned into smirks and cackling--'We'll make them squeal'--is audible on every side: the time of tricks has come.

Of course, I'm partisan, and speaking out of vexation. I feel much of the country has looked me in the eye and said, 'We reject you and all you believe.' They may, of course, have just been frustrated and fearful. In any case, I feel I've come face to face with a certain combative mind-set and attitude animating and directing a large number of my fellow citizens, and I'm struggling to know how to respond.

My daily routine is not different, however, and my colleagues and students the same. The results of the election just have to do with realignments of power in Washington and state capitals but these can change the rules of engagement and the pitch of the playing fields of future interactions. The more abstract encounter of the election may make its presence palpably obvious in the way things play out in close-to-home and concrete situations.

The guiding principles of God-in-love in relation to the Beloved Other are friendship, hospitality and exploration; my assertion is that deeds of same have a enduring validity beyond our lives, and independent of our success. Perhaps one consolation at this time is that daring and doing these things is possible anywhere, in any situation. (I just bought Primo Levi's Surviving Auschwitz. Maybe he'll convince me I'm wrong.) I benefit if I pursue this course of, shall I call it, private piety, a dynamic and life-giving way of life, and others do too.

But that word 'private' mustn't be thought to exclude shared vision and institutional benefit. Acts of hospitality such as the creation of water supplies like the Quabbin here in Massachusetts are the result of the initial vision, investment and on-going oversight of many, many to this day. The benefits are multifarious and enjoyed by all, residents and city governments and private enterprises. To have  contributed or to still do so to such a project can be considered participation in the great swirl of well-doing that circulates between God-in-love and the Beloved. Of course, none of our motives ever unmixed ever but the component in our desiring or daring directed to encounter with some 2nd person (perhaps a whole public) has a transcendent lastingness, I believe.

I see the proper aspiration of politics as the conception of projects of friendship, hospitality and exploration to benefit many and the mobilization of many to realize them. Conflict is inevitable but not essential. We, participants in the Beloved, are being continually wooed toward this way of life--however we choose to respond.

Perhaps this is the deeper consolation I seek following the recent election; indeed, it's actually encouragement. The practices of friendship, hospitality and exploration are inextinguishable, always possible at least on the individual, and often on the communal scale, and forever the object of the relentless and indefatigable pressure of the presence of God-in-love. The ways we respond are wanted for something in the world to come. Disappointment and discouragement, real and reasonable reactions as they are, occur within this context.

I remember that no Halloween more intense than that of 2001. The evil which the holiday frivolously mimes was ironically, we realized, no joke. From then till now, illustrations of what we, are capable of doing or perversely resist doing have accumulated and weigh down our spirit. Are we capable, we sometimes wonder, are we even worthy of continued existence, much less progress to something better (which we can hardly conceive, much less believe)? Perhaps a change in circumstances will turn our mood around and we'll enjoy the sense of possibility we felt following the fall of the Berlin Wall--or perhaps not.

The passion of God-in-love means it's not all up to us, so whether we're singing the blues or zip-a-dee-doo-dah, we always have grounds for taking heart, especially if we desire and dare.