If Memorial Day is the unofficial beginning of summer, then this year we could say Ash Wednesday was the unofficial start of the presidential primary season. As I drove home from the Ash Wednesday service on Feb. 14, the irony of the coincidence struck me.
Along with a small congregation of about 20 others, I said, “we confess … that we have sinned by our fault, by our own fault, by our own most grievous fault, in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left undone.”
The irony for me is that Ash Wednesday and Lent, along with Yom Kippur (Oct. 11-12) and Ramadan (March 10-April 9) are times set aside by each tradition for self-examination, and the presidential primary season is a time when candidates instead examine, judge and blame their opponents. It’s the other guy who is always to blame.
In my 30 years as a parish pastor, I was fortunate to spend time with the 12-step community. Whenever a family member would enter a recovery program, the family members would be urged to go to Al-Anon meetings because the assumption is that the world is not composed of good guys and bad guys but that we are all part of systems. We are all interconnected.
Where there are alcoholics, there are usually enablers. Where there are lying MAGAs who spread fake news, look for pretentious, self-righteous progressive elites who also contribute to the dysfunctional system.
Years ago, I sat in on a family counseling session in which the adolescent girl in the family was labeled as “the troublemaker.” The wise old counselor had the father do the standard exercise in which he would repeat what his daughter was saying till he got it right.
When the exercise ended, the counselor said to the father, “You got the words exactly right, but did you hear the music?”
If we listen to the songs MAGAs are singing, the words seem irrational, infantile and delusional, but if we listen to the music of the songs they sing, we might realize that there are some heartfelt emotions being expressed that we miss if we focus only on the lyrics.
If we are part of one big systemic family, are we willing to listen to the music and explore underneath the words to learn what is really causing pain to our fellow citizens?
It’s so easy to indict the former president on a lot more than 91 counts of ethical felonies. Compared to him, we are guilty of at most a few moral misdemeanors.
The religious tradition I’m rooted in urges, “Take the log out of your own eye before you attempt to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”
What I hear over and over in campaign speech soundtracks is, “I may have a speck in my eye but it’s my opponent who has the log, and it’s self-evident that my opponent is not only misguided but a dangerous enemy.”
What I’m contending is that we progressives in this area tend to be educated — 52.4% having college degrees — which equips us to be good with words, which enables us to rationalize, to explain away any guilt or responsibility for anything. We are so good with words that we are able to convince ourselves we see reality with 20/20 vision.
“A frantic stream of words flows from us in an attempt to straighten others out,” wrote Richard Foster, “to see things our way.”
But on Ash Wednesday I found myself unable to squirm out of the ethical bind I was in. As I read the long litany of sins, I found several that had my name attached to them — not loving our neighbors as ourselves, false judgments, uncharitable thoughts toward others, prejudice, our contempt for those who differ from us politically, unfaithfulness, pride, envy, hypocrisy, and self-indulgent appetites and ways.
I think the Ash Wednesday litany clarifies what Michelle Obama meant when she said, “When they go low, we go high.”
When she said, we go high, she was holding herself to a higher ethical standard than a lowest moral common denominator which claims, “I’m a good person. I don’t rob or kill. I pay my taxes and I vote.”
Ash Wednesday is about acknowledging the existence of logs in our own eyes even if we can’t see them, beginning to search for them, assuming that they are there even when our ideological lens can’t focus in that way.
When Biden debates Trump, which I assume is the way it will play out, I’d love to hear President Biden confess, “You know, I screwed up regarding our withdrawal from Afghanistan.”
I’m sure Donald Trump would mock his statement as a sign of weakness, but I would say a quiet “amen” because it would be a sign that Lunchbox Joe was in the process of taking the log out his own eye.