‘D o something.” That was one of the refrains of the recent Democratic convention. It was a brilliant emotional play for votes — many of the speakers clearly got a memo to promise to alleviate the anxiety of the age and our lives. It likely had a resonance that no policy proposal would.
Michelle Obama excelled on this front. You don’t have to agree with her politics to acknowledge that she tapped into something real in the culture. It didn’t start with Covid, but the pandemic certainly didn’t make things any better: People are lonely and scared and anxious. And she spoke to that.
Earlier this summer, Catholics filled Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis to talk about hunger. Hunger for something more than politics can ever provide. Hunger for something eternal. During that event, at the National Eucharistic Congress, Monsignor James Shea said: “God has made us so that we are incomplete unless we are feeding on Him. Human beings are famished for God. . . . We have to feed on God or something else — and whatever that something else is, it will leave us hungry.” That’s a better recipe than picking political sides. At the University of Mary in North Dakota, where Monsignor Shea is president, I am forever encouraged. There, students and faculty aren’t wedded to and rattled by ideologies as people in the Northeast tend to be — which is surely a step toward hope.
On the first day of the Democratic convention, a mobile Planned Parenthood clinic offered abortion pills to attendees. Unnecessary death does not alleviate anxiety. It heightens it. It worsens it. My late friend Vicki Thorn did ministerial work with women who had had abortions and had got to the point of seeking healing. Abortion had changed them. Not just emotionally but biologically. Life is not something you can easily walk away from.
Talking about his record as governor of Minnesota, Democratic vice-presidential nominee Tim Walz said: “We also protected reproductive freedom because, in Minnesota, we respect our neighbors and the personal choices they make. And even if we wouldn’t make the same choices for ourselves, we’ve got a Golden Rule — mind your own damn business”
That didn’t seem as emotionally smart as the former first lady’s appeal, but perhaps it was an attempt to reach marginal Trump voters who never cared about abortion as a human-rights issue anyway. (They might be legion since the Republican Party changed its platform and no longer seeks to end abortion on the federal level.)
There was a fair amount of talk of God and prayer during the Democratic convention. Even more than the superficial kind typical to political events. And, yet there was an insistence that the party was going to somehow deliver a thing whose source is supernatural rather than political.
When I was in college, John Paul II published a book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope. It was about a different kind of hope from what a political convention can pretend to provide. And he focused on joy as something eternal:
The essential joy of creation is, in turn, completed by the joy of salvation, by the joy of redemption. The Gospel, above all, is a great joy for the salvation of man. The Creator of man is also his Redeemer. Salvation not only confronts evil in each of its existing forms in this world but proclaims victory over evil.
Therefore the cause of our joy is to give us the strength to defeat evil and to embrace the divine filiation which constitutes the essence of the Good News. God gives this power to humankind through Christ. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”
People are agonized by so much that they see in the news. The Gospel, for those who believe, offers an invitation to peace: “I have conquered the world.”
At least at one point during the convention, there was mention of Kamala Harris’s truth. As if it were something unique. This is one of the chief causes of the anxieties of our time: the denial of universal truth, which is not individualistic even though we all are our on our own paths. Joy requires understanding that there is evil and that it’s not merely one’s imagined truth.
There were heart-wrenching stories shared during one of the nights of the Democratic convention from women who didn’t get compassionate health-care treatment when they suffered miscarriages. This is an infuriating reality of a slippery slope of political and media malpractice since the end of Roe v. Wade. Abortion and miscarriage are not the same. Couples who struggle to have children deserve all the compassion in the world. The media have paid some attention lately to the pain of infertility. But desperate teens and women should not be pressured into abortion. And no public policy should ever work to make the experience of miscarriage worse than it already is.
John Paul II also wrote: “The work of redemption is to elevate the work of creation to a new level. Creation is permeated with a redemptive sanctification, even a divinization. It comes as if drawn to the sphere of the divinity and of the intimate life of God.”
That’s the thing. We are created beings. And we are made for more than what a single Tuesday in November can ever deliver.
This presidential election, no matter the winner, won’t be the end of us. The daily choices we make in our human encounters matter far more.
Don’t look to politics for hope and joy. It’s smart messaging, but it will always disappoint.
This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.