Speak clearly now

and know when it's time for all or nothing

I’ve been working on a couple of major posts the last couple of weeks. One of them I’ve decided not to publish. The other, I am still working on. If you’ve been reading my columns you know I like roadmaps. The article I am still working on is a roadmap that is less theological and theoretical and more in the weeds, along the lines of “now what do we do?”

As a sneak preview, it’s a good time for us to recall Augustine’s City of God. We Christians are not entirely at home in this world, for this world is not our home. We are pilgrims advancing toward our definitive homeland, which we earnestly pray is heaven, even as we pray for the grace to act in accord with lights informed by grace so that we see and do in ways we ought the things we must so as to reach safe harbor and glory forever.

That means that whatever our political persuasion, we are not entirely comfortable with what either of the two major parties proposes, since the proposals are often flip sides of the same coin or mirror images of each other, the acquisition and expenditure of power to attain goals that favor those who favor us. The Christian vision is larger than that; the Christian vision is not partisan.

As a practical consequence, this means that partisans — those who live solely in the city of man — see us in uncertain terms. Partisans see the world in terms of absolutes: you are in, or you are out; you agree, or you are an enemy, at best a “frenemy.” Partisans readily infer our concurrence in part to be concurrence in the entirety because of their tendency to see the world in absolutes. Then accuse us of duplicity, insincerity, or deceit when they learn that their inference is incorrect.

We have to admit that as a practical matter, sometimes they are right. As people who are peacemakers, and as humans tempted to go along in order to get along, Christians often blur over the points of contention in order to emphasize the points we hold in common with others. We need, I suggest, to be clearer on both sets of points.

Here I refer to a couple of turns of phrases used by Italian Americans that I didn’t understand until I lived in Spain. “You’re right, but you’re wrong;” “yes, but no” are phrases that indicate there is some agreement and some judgement as to where the other party is mistaken.

Those phrases used to grate my ears a bit. In a less latinate English we might say, “I agree in part.” Still, as a Latin man, if not a Latin American, I think there is much to be gained by the reacquisition of Mediterranean wisdom, especially as it comes to us both through the Bible and through the classics of Greece and Rome. That wisdom includes clarity of speech instead of hedging the bet. Hedging is for the marketplace, not for the forum.

Clarity of speech entails the risk of loss. People might not like what we say. We might lose friendships, or standing, or status, or all of the above. We might even lose our lives. When we have worked hard to attain standing, we come to believe that its maintenance is our highest and greatest good, and that this is what God wants.

Sometimes it is: but not always. The risk to us in attaining standing is that we become establishmentarians. When we do, our Christian commitments take second place, used for our convenience rather than served, come what may, for our good and salvation and for the benefit of those around us. Then we are astounded that others reject what we propose when they see in us precisely what we have blinded ourselves from seeing.

Here the words of St. Paul are germane. Do we, like him count as loss whatever we have gained, for Christ’s sake; do we “count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord?” (Phil 3: 7-8). Until we do, the Christian enterprise will continue to flounder and we will continue to flop about in the morass of our own self-inflicted mediocrity. Christ calls us to excellence, he gives us the means to attain it, and he expects us to try, which means to risk.

The place for us to be all or nothing is in our commitment to our faith and to the salvation of all souls, come what may. We may lose our standing and our lives. Then again, we may not, and we may even augment our hard-won prestige for the integrity with which we live our commitments. In either case, when we win our souls by ratifying what Christ has won for us, we win it all, regardless of the cost to us in the temporal order, and we win many others besides, whether we know it in this life or not.