Charity in a Time of Malice
By Charles Peek*
Martin Marty, once America’s foremost religious historian, tells of a very precise, even precious German scholar who once produced a rather large tome on the flora and fauna of Iceland. In it, you come upon a chapter entitled, “The snakes of Iceland.” Under that heading it reads, “There are no snakes in Iceland.”
The world is in fact full of categories that don’t exist, over which we lavish much more attention. We have a penchant for dividing up ideas, people, landscapes–just about whatever attaches itself to our prejudices–dividing them up into no-fly zones, thinking ourselves safe if the chasm between us and the next zone is great enough.
I spoke once to a civic group and asked them to note how seldom religious sects were founded on scriptural passages that were clear, such as the injunction to love our neighbors as ourselves, and how many were founded on the most obscurantist passages anyone could ever light on. Apparently, I touched a chord because I was never invited back!
When I was young, a matter those who know me will have to take on faith, it wasn’t uncommon to drive down a city street and there see a sign reading: Quiet–Hospital Zone. No matter how far down that street your drove, you would never see a sign saying you were leaving the hospital zone and could now whoop it up. Like the twilight zone, once you entered, you were never sure if or when you had left it.
When it comes to how society divides up our world, the situation is much more dangerous. Social zones or categories exist with a vengeance all their own until some activist challenges them. Many of us Comp/Rhetoric teachers helped mitigate or even end the once common practice in schools of placing students in tracks, a practice that left some students scarred for life and others, more fortunate, with the task of healing their wounds before they could move on; many parents had to go to bat for their children’s very visible abilities that, nonetheless, didn’t receive validation from the tests and tracking.
Other zones, other divides affect the nation as a whole: racial divides, unequal pay for equal work, religious boundaries…all have left their mark on the nation’s struggle to live up to its own ideals of liberty and justice for all.
I look at such zones, such divides, as terribly costly to our well-being as a people, and that look offer a challenge for our future. Beware, the challenge is for a life-time task, so, though it won’t matter much where we are in life, it will matter whether we are stuck where we are or are up to a challenge, whether our hearts and minds are large enough and open enough, a fit meditation as we come to yet another Thanksgiving season.
At the close of the Civil War, the most singular event in American History, America was then, too, a distinctly divided nation. The South had lost a battle for what it regarded its homeland, the system of chattel slavery that was the underpinning of its economy was in disarray, the God to whom they had prayed for victory had, they felt, given them instead defeat, and they were an occupied territory. It would not truly feel patriotic again, in the American sense, until its involvement in World War I, and even then, continued to feel keenly the scorn of the north. (I am leaving aside for the moment my distinct feeling that the nation may today look very much as if The South had won the war!)
The North, too, had experienced a challenge to its values in the threat of the dissolution of the union. It knew the sting of enemy attacks, seen most vividly in the burial grounds such as Gettysburg, that began to dominate the landscape. It would not be able to count the enormous cost of battle and battle production until mass production altered forever its own economic and political institutions.
Each side had sincerely believed it was right; there was no common ground on which to overcome their differences; each side numbered its fair share of heroes and wisdom figures, whom the other side regarded as villains and traitors.
Today, with the resuscitation of the lies of the Lost cause, this has become much harder to grant; nevertheless, there were honorable and learned women and men on both sides, champions and defenders of their own causes, who, though their cause was itself often unjust, were in other regards intelligent and honorable people.
My point is simply that all that learning, all that wisdom, all that bravery and integrity…among the highest qualities we can attribute to anyone, to any people…left the nation divided and in peril. And perhaps this should not surprise: Jesus was not crucified by the worst elements of his times but by the leading exemplars of ethics and culture. Our tragedy stems not from what is done by people at their worst but how badly things can go wrong even when we are led by people at their best. Even at our best, we often come up short-sighted or blind.
Then came Abraham Lincoln and his Second Inaugural Address.
One might think of Lincoln in this way: of all the American thinkers who were politicians possibly none was greater than Jefferson; of all our politicians who were thinkers perhaps none was greater than Lincoln.
Lincoln was the only person to serve as President who did not claim some allegiance to any organized religion, and he stands among our most astute theologians. The Second Inaugural Address is often called the greatest single piece of American discourse.** Here is what Lincoln dared to say of the two parties to the Civil War in that address:
“Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other . . . but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes . . . “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”
With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”
Lincoln rose above the divisions, even divisions in which he had been a participant, to find not just those ideas that would establish a party, an idea, a position but to seek those ideas that would bridge the differences, replace the hatred with common ground, draw the two opposed ideas into one common ideal.
It is ominous that many students of America find our current divisions comparable to nothing in our history so much as those of the Civil War. Pro-life and pro-choice lash out at each other with venom and sometimes violence. Pro-choice people do not hear the sometimes-sincere regard for the sacredness of life on the part of Pro-Lifers, and the Pro-Life party is blind to the very real ways in which Pro-Choice supported women’s and family health efforts have been the only thing to actually reduce the number of abortions.
Current political decisions widen the gap between rich and poor creating bitter animosities and further divisions. The series of conflicts in the Middle East has surfaced enormous differences of philosophy regarding our place in the world and how it is best protected and exercised.
Today, no side lacks for advocates and defenders and, with bigoted ruffians on the rise, it has become increasingly harder for us to grant any good will or good sense on the part of those who feel differently than we do. Neither side of any issue lacks for supporters who seem blind to some of their bedfellows’ worst behaviors. And for all those reasons, the nation seems bent on being increasingly divided.
What, then, is the role of an American citizen? What would it mean to be a true patriot? What does it mean as the French Prime Minister recently urged to distinguish patriotism from nationalism? Would it not be to rise to the example of Lincoln who became more than his affiliations?
Note, not less than: not fearful of committing to a course; but more than: wise and courageous enough to reach even beyond his own beliefs for reconciliation, to envision a higher ground on which all might stand. I think we do wrong to be satisfied simply to understand and defend something that now exists. We desperately need instead those who will help create the way of looking at things that does not yet exist but in the light of which much potential good that now exists will be seen from new perspectives.
Whatever our beliefs, we should by all means be true to them. But we should also be asking ourselves not simply how we can be staunch and true to our principles but how we can better live with malice toward none and charity toward all. Whatever our convictions, can we find those greater ideas that will make our current convictions seem, whether right or wrong for their times, eventually relics of history.
The challenge: forge the new link, design the new bridge, ignite the new spark of the imagination.
For good or ill, all of us contribute to the writing of a new chapter in the history of the world. Will we allow our generations to pass and find that all we have written is a chapter entitled The Snakes of Iceland? The world seems today to have driven into the hospital zone; can we not use our minds, our hearts, our lives to lead us out.
Happy Thanksgiving
Kearney, Nebraska
*Oh, by the way, if you wonder where we’ve been heading recently, some of the remarks here I resurrected from a talk I gave 15 years ago. With very little substantive change, they still seem relevant today and that is shocking. More to the point, however, is that, granted that bad behavior has made reaching across the aisle more problematic, the thrust of my appeal to find a way forward has, if anything, gained more urgency.
** Of course, his most famous address is the Gettysburg Address, delivered appropriately for Thanksgiving on November 19, 1863.
capeek 