Putting Our Humanity Above Politics

Mexico City — I surrender. I surrender. I surrender. It’s that simple. It’s also one of the most complicated things in the world. We Americans don’t tend to think about surrender as a good thing, but, sometimes, surrender can be about the realization that what we keep doing isn’t working.

I say this in the context of the most recent U.S. elections. One of the first conversations I had in Mexico City, where I am for a Tepeyac Leadership Initiative conference, was about the new mayor of New York. I know that the results of this year’s elections have caused a lot of angst to a lot of people, but allow me to suggest one small but important way in which these results don’t really matter.

Why might politics not matter as much as we think? Because you and I exercise great power in what we choose to do every day. I write about this often, but I’m thinking about it this week in particular as I find myself in the city where Catholics believe Mary appeared as a pregnant woman, as Our Lady of Guadalupe, in 1531. I hear conservatives making dark jokes about communists in New York, but I also see this election — and much else about our politics — as a tremendous opportunity. An opportunity to surrender many of the ways in which we’ve tried to make positive change around us and to find others.

This month marks the 100th birthday of Bill Buckley, who understood — even though he wrote about politics and founded a political magazine — that there is so much more to life. Last week, National Review Institute awarded Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his wife Casey the William F. Buckley Jr. Prize for leadership in Political Thought. One of the things that both the governor and the first lady of Florida talked about is how they have managed to work with civil society to reduce the number of children in the state’s foster care system. That matters. They’ve connected churches directly to the community and its needs. Through the CarePortal platform, anybody can find small and big ways to help children and families in one’s own neighborhood. We must often organize ourselves politically, of course, but when we put the same level of energy into helping each other, we can make all the difference. That is what I mean when I talk about surrender: surrendering politics to make sure that we are doing the most important acts of virtue and charity and courage that can help transform lives in often unexpected ways.

Consider the issue of abortion. In some ways, the overturn of Roe v. Wade so far has felt like a mixed blessing for pro-lifers because there is so much confusion about basic law. There is so much confusion about what the next step is. Pope Francis talked about the danger of our being in ideological silos. When it comes to abortion, people feel like they need to be in one camp or the other. So many Americans say they’re pro-choice because they want women in desperate situations to know that they’re loved and that they have options. It’s sometimes as simple as that. And yet, of course, it’s so complicated. For the sake of women and children and families and, honestly, every human relationship, can we find a way to not let politics take the lead? When we talk about human life, we must all recognize how expensive and how difficult and how challenging and how beautiful it is. So, our first question should be: How do we make the conversation around this issue more humane?

Think about it in a Christian context. Placing one’s trust in Jesus is one of the simplest acts of faith one can perform. John Paul II made it famous, popularizing a Polish devotion to the Divine Mercy of Jesus, which is what the sacrament of confession is all about. People often think of confession as some kind of shame or judgment. In fact, it is liberation. Through it we are forgiven. We are made new. That’s what religion is all about.

Human life is in some ways too important to be left to politics. Buckley talked about how we don’t need to reinvent the beatitudes but rather to find a way to communicate them given our present circumstances. So, how do we make sure that our politics is more humane? Pope Francis talked about the need for tenderness. You don’t have to be a Catholic or a Christian or a religious believer at all to understand that our country, our world, needs so much more tenderness. Let’s give it a try again, realizing that we’re not the ones the world has been waiting for. We are blessedly here with the opportunity to be good stewards of our patrimony and of the gifts that we have been given. We have so much work to do. It requires humility and, yes, the kind of surrender that only makes sense in light of eternity. And so I’ll pray for you here, in Mexico City, at this place where the mother of Jesus reminded us that every human life matters.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.