Political Idolatry

Go read the whole thing, but the best advice she gives comes at the end.  Excerpts:

...we seem not to believe that God’s hand may be working within our world at all, and so it is up to us. We “pray” as a means of telling God what we want done, but we don’t trust him very much, hence the hysteria. Both left and right are nearly fainting with fear: “What if the other side wins? The other side is evil!”

Look at the crucifix. Is there any greater reassurance that nothing happens—not even the worst things we may imagine—without it working ultimately to God’s purpose?


Let us ponder these words from the Imitation of Christ, which is the second reading in today’s Office of Readings:

How can anyone be aroused by empty talk if his heart is subject in the truth to God? The whole world cannot swell with pride the man who is subject to truth; nor will he be swayed by the flattery of all his admirers, if he has established all his trust in God. For those who do all the talking amount to nothing; they fail with their din of words, but the truth of the Lord endures for ever.

We are making ourselves ill with the damnable illusions that we alone, and that tulmult is something new; so fearful are we that our time, our place, our nation, our worldly world quivers upon a precipice, that we will soon initiate our own tumbling unless we let go of these passing mirages and take hold of the Truth which lasts.

We have nothing left to throw into the white-hot crucible but our hyper-emotive selves. And we are not worth idolizing.