When shadows appear on the ceilings and walls

 

"To all the ancient ones from their houses, the Old Ones from above and below. In this time the Gods of the Earth touch our feet, bare upon the ground. Spirits of the Air whisper in our hair and chill our bodies, and from the dark portions watch and wait the Faery Folk that they may join the circle and leave their track upon the ground. It is the time of the waning year. Winter is upon us. The corn is golden in the winnow heaps. Rains will soon wash sleep into the life-bringing Earth. We are not without fear, we are not without sorrow...Before us are all the signs of Death: the ear of corn is no more green and life is not in it. The Earth is cold and no more will grasses spring jubilant. The Sun but glances upon his sister, the earth..... It is so....Even now....But here also are the signs of life, the eternal promise given to our people. In the death of the corn there is the seed--which is both food for the season of Death and the Beacon which will signal green-growing time and life returning.In the cold of the Earth there is but sleep wherein She will awaken refreshed and renewed, her journey into the Dark Lands ended. And where the Sun journeys he gains new vigor and potency; that in the spring, his blessings shall come ever young!"

-  Two Samhain Rituals, Compost Coveners, 1980  

They huddled here in harmony

 

Here's another seasonal poem by Robert Graves:

Ghost Music

Robert Graves - 1895-1985

 

Gloomy and bare the organ-loft,

Bent-backed and blind the organist.

From rafters looming shadowy,

From the pipes’ tuneful company,

Drifted together drowsily,

Innumerable, formless, dim,

The ghosts of long-dead melodies,

Of anthems, stately, thunderous,

Of Kyries shrill and tremulous:

In melancholy drowsy-sweet

They huddled there in harmony.

Like bats at noontide rafter-hung.

Halloween 1911    by Stewart MacGeorge

Mornings are Dark

 

October           by Hilaire Belloc

Look, how those steep woods on the mountain's face
Burn, burn against the sunset; now the cold
Invades our very noon: the year's grown old,
Mornings are dark, and evenings come apace.
The vines below have lost their purple grace,
And in Forreze the white wrack backward rolled,
Hangs to the hills tempestuous, fold on fold,
And moaning gusts make desolate all the place.

Mine host the month, at thy good hostelry,
Tired limbs I'll stretch and steaming beast I'll tether;
Pile on great logs with Gascon hand and free,
And pour the Gascon stuff that laughs at weather;
Swell your tough lungs, north wind, no whit care we,
Singing old songs and drinking wine together.

Elders have stopped reading the news

 

Igor Oleynikov       A Strange Night

I read this poem last night; it was posted on another blog. It hit me hard.

Elegy for the Mourning of my Death

by Risa Denenberg

Elders have stopped reading the news. We dream
            of serious play down on our knees—
cat’s eyes, jacks, the kiss that’s for keeps.
           
We know spring will come again and again, but not for us. 
            We fill pauses with baskets of laundry
and potsful of soup. We can’t reassemble the bones

of our dead or carry chrysanthemums to the cremated.
            We read the old cryptic texts on how
to greet aging. Should we speak or wire our mouths shut?

We prepare for endings, try to be thankful. 
           We nap in the afternoon.
We’ve already witnessed the future, while time lags behind. 

The whole lot must be coursework
            for something else—
the way the body is water, yet manages not to seem so.

The way an egg could feed a child
           or beget a chicken.
It barely matters now. Still, on that morning,

I hope to wake in my own bed, softly
            wrapped in the praxis
of long having known this day would come.

Then, let my fresh carbon mingle with the coal of my ancestors.

 

 

Under a Cold October Sky

 

Halloween Walk        Leigh Ann Lilly

Here's a great seasonal poem by David Haven:

Under the cold October Sky

By David Haven

Under the cold October sky
as the veil of Samhain grows thin
the seasons of planting and harvest are gone
and fall’s in the air again.
When summer has passed into Autumn chill
and the days ever shorter go by
spirits arise and they roam the earth
under the cold night sky.

All through the long and the lonely night
like restless waves on the sand
the moon in the sky with the clouds drifting by
make shadows pass over the land.
Outside of the window see them moving
from leaves swaying in the breeze.
Some of them seem to reach out and grab
like the bare crooked branches of trees.
Some shadows are cast by a firelight
and they flicker and dance on the ground
But some shadows are from dead things
that rise from their graves
when they get up and walk around!

Down a dark and lonely road
a graveyard stands alone
with fallen leaves all scattered around
among the grey tombstones.
Where weeds and brambles freely grow
without a soul to care
with unbroken solitude
for the living rarely enter there.

All through the heat of summer days
the wind there blows a chill
although the sun is pressing down
and all is quiet and still.
Sunlight and shadows dance and play
in movements through the trees
and the voices of the dead speak

soft

as a whisper on a breeze.

But summer days have fled away.
The fields are bare and cold.
And eventide comes quicker
as the year is growing old.
As night descends on hearth and home
and evening shadows grow
from the cold and dark folks gather
around the fireside glow.
When those to their houses for refuge have gone
and the windows and doors have been fastened tight.
When shadows appear on the ceilings and walls
from the flickering candle lights.

Locked windows and doors may keep thieves away
Intruders that murder and steal.
And the wind and the rain or the sleet and the snow
are kept out at the window seal.
As the veil that separates the world
of the living and dead grows thin
no window or door although fastened tight
keep the dead from entering in!

You Cannot Conquer Time

 

You cannot conquer Time

 

The other day, in my Modernity in Literature class, I taught them about the poem “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden.

As I was working through it with them, it occurred to me that the central theme of all the literature I had chosen to teach for this course is TIME.

I won’t go into all of the texts now, but trust me: it is.

In Auden’s poem, written in 1937, he has a narrator, and two speakers:  the lovers, and the clocks.

The lovers are lyrical and delirious and full of hyperbole in the first half of the poem, and then the clocks take up their song, which basically is that “You cannot conquer Time.”

The lines that hit me this year :  The clocks sing:

“Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.”

It’s like a prophecy of COVID.

 

The other day I received news that Ted Torrance, one of my old teachers from Bishop Shanahan, had died at age 88, not from COVID, but still.   He was the history teacher and also our moderator for our folk music group, The Hillside Singers.  We gave concerts at Shanahan, but also at some other nearby Catholic high schools.  We were good!   One of our classmates, Jerry Klein, a “techy guy” even back then,recorded two of our concerts and in recent years, burned them into a CD and then to an MP3,

I downloaded them again and have been listening to them. 

We weren’t all that good, but we were full of life.  Some of us droned and were flat. But our harmonies were pretty good.

“A race around the stars,

A journey through the universe ablaze

With Changes.”

Lines from Phil Ochs, who died of a broken heart, and suicide, in 1976.

 

What did we know, we eighteen year olds, of the vagaries of Time?

Christian Schloe       Night with a View

Counting the days

 I keep doing this, but I really don't know why.  It doesn't make me less worried about the election.

Here are some wonderful woodcuts by artist Ian MacCulloch.  They lift my spirits.

O Lift Me Over the Threshold

 

Here's a poem by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge:

The Witch    by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge

 

I  have walked a great while over the snow
And I am not tall nor strong.
My clothes are wet, and my teeth are set
And the way was hard and long.
I have wandered over the fruitful earth
But I never came here before.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

The cutting wind is a cruel foe.
I dare not stand in the blast.
My hands are stone, and my voice a groan
And the worst of death is past.
I am but a little maiden still
My little white feet are sore.
Oh, lift me over the threshold, and let me in at the door!

Her voice was the voice that women have
Who plead for their heart's desire.
She came - she came - and the quivering flame
Sunk and died in the fire.
It never was lit again on my hearth
Since I hurried across the floor
To lift her over the threshold, and let her in at the door.

 

 

Pumpkin Time

 

"Perhaps the most famous icon of the holiday is the jack-o-lantern.  Various authorities attribute it to either Scottish or Irish origin.  However, it seems clear that it was used as a lantern by people who traveled the road this night, the scary face to frighten away spirits or faeries who might otherwise lead one astray.  Set on porches and in windows, they cast the same spell of protection over the household.  (The American pumpkin seems to have forever superseded the European gourd as the jack-o-lantern of choice.)  Bobbing for apples may well represent the remnants of a Pagan 'baptism' rite called a 'seining', according to some writers.  The water-filled tub is a latter-day Cauldron of Regeneration, into which the novice's head is immersed.  The fact that the participant in this folk game was usually blindfolded with hands tied behind the back also puts one in mind of a traditional Craft initiation ceremony."

-   Mike Nichols, All Hallow's Eve

James Wyeth     Pumpkins at Sea

Andrea Kowch      In the Hollow

What I Love is Near at Hand

 

Here's a poem by Theodore Roethke:

 

"I have come to a still, but not a deep center, 
A point outside the glittering current; 
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river, 
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains, 
My mind moves in more than one place, 
In a country half-land, half-water. 
I am renewed by death, thought of my death, 
The dry scent of a dying garden in September, 
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire. 
What I love is near at hand, 
Always, in earth and air."

-  Theodore Roethke, The Far Field    

 

In the name of the daybreak

 

here's a poem/ prayer by Diane Ackerman:

In the name of the daybreak

and the eyelids of morning

and the wayfaring moon

and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor

my soul with hatred,

but offer myself humbly

as a guardian of nature,

as a healer of misery,

as a messenger of wonder,

as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors

and the day that embraces it

and the cloud veils drawn over it

and the uttermost night

and the male and the female

and the plants bursting with seed

and the crowning seasons

of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life

—wherever and in whatever form

it may dwell—on Earth my home,

and in the mansions of the stars.

 

Diane Ackerman

 

This about sums it up:

That handsome FBI agent from Twin Peaks...

Here's a poem by Elizabeth Jennings:

 

Ghosts 

Those houses haunt in which we leave
Something undone. It is not those
Great words or silence of love
That spread their echoes through a place
And fill the locked-up, unbreathed gloom.
Ghosts do not haunt with any face
That we have known; they only come
With arrogance to thrust at us
Our own omissions in a room.
The words we would not speak they use,
The deeds we dared not act they flaunt,
Our nervous silences they bruise;
It is our helplessness they choose
And our refusals that they haunt.

 
 

October Roses

 Thirty-six degrees this morning.  Frost on the far meadow.  I think the courtyard is still protected, but the killing frost isn't far away.

I love this photo of  roses by Julie Zickefoose, from her garden:

I love this poem by Clare Pollard:

OCTOBER ROSES

Roses this October
burnt red like plague posies —
rash for the world’s fever,
a curse on our houses.

But then you were born in
the season’s strange mildness.
My heart rose as you rose
in my arms, small witness.

With your nails as tiny
as droplets of spittle,
and your fragile mouth that
is like a dropped petal.

In far away lands there
are poor babies crying,
with milk-coloured eyes
that the black flies are circling,

and tree-tops are falling,
the birds falling with them.
The season is bleak but
new life can still blossom.

The October roses
burn, burn in the darkness.
Beautiful despite, no,
because of their lateness.

© Clare Pollard
Publisher: First published on PIW, 2008

 

Just look at them closely in Autumn

 

Wonderful poem by Eugenio Montejo

Gretel in Darkness

Close to Halloween

A poem by Louise Gluck:

 "Gretel in Darkness"

This is the world we wanted.

All who would have seen us dead

are dead. I hear the witch's cry

break in the moonlight through a sheet

of sugar: God rewards.

Her tongue shrivels into gas . . .

Now, far from women's arms

and memory of women, in our father's hut

we sleep, are never hungry.

Why do I not forget?

My father bars the door, bars harm

from this house, and it is years.

No one remembers. Even you, my brother,

summer afternoons you look at me as though

you meant to leave,

as though it never happened.

But I killed for you. I see armed firs,

the spires of that gleaming kiln--

Nights I turn to you to hold me

but you are not there.

Am I alone? Spies

hiss in the stillness, Hansel,

we are there still and it is real, real,

that black forest and the fire in earnest.

I thought my dreams would be enough for a while

 

Coming up on the thirty-second week of Quarantine:

One Hundred Days until Inauguration Day 2021

Of course I am hoping for the election of Joe Biden as President.  If it’s Trump, I don’t know what I will do.

The garden is waning now… I am beginning to cut down/back the plants that have become brown and unsightly.

We haven’t had a hard frost yet, so many plant are still beautiful.  The Lantanas, in their final glory.

The Dahlias have just now come into their own.

Also the Asters…. The bountiful pink blossoms of the New York Aster, and the just beginning to bloom blue flowers of the Aromatic Aster…  so beautiful

Even so, I am battling depression. Not sure why.   I have had vivid dreams of packing up and moving, but not from here…. Dreams of places in the past….  And people from the past, and so vivid. Have been dreaming and thinking of them in my waking life, too.

Is that what all old people do?  Not a lot to look forward to, but lots and lots to look back upon.

The Old Year

The Old Year’s gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbour’s face,
In this he’s known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they’re here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall–
A guest to every heart’s desire,
And now he’s nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
Are things identified;
But time once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year’s Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.

By John Clare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That song from Peter Paul and Mary

 

The good times we had

 

Times have changed
All the good times that we had are gone now;
Passed this way
Only mem'ries will remain, tomorrow

I thought my dreams would be enough for a while
And all the plans that we made
Hey, we had love, that was all that we had;
Even that don't seem the same

 

Peace of mind
Where's the happiness we should be havin'?
We can't find any answers in the good times we had

I thought my dreams would be enough for a while
And all the plans that we made
Hey, we had love, that was all that we had;
Even that don't seem the same

Peace of mind
Where's the happiness we should be havin'?
We can't find any answers in the good times we had

 

 

And this one, from Ian and Sylvia:

 

These friends of mine, we shared some good times together
days of sunshine....days of rain.

Many jobs and many towns we worked and never
Cared if we saw the same towns again.

Then one day we weren't as young as before
Our mistakes weren't quite so easy to undo.

But by all those road we traveled down,
I'm a better man for just the known of you.

These friends of mine we never cared about tomorrow
It was too early in the game.

We'd stay a while unil the day we'd get to wondering
If the far side of the hill looked the same.

And they's settle down somewhere along the way
Yes and somewhere just like some men do

But by all those roads my friend we've traveled down
I'm a better man for just the knowing of you

 

 

The things I remember!   I sit in my easy chair, listening to music and watching the house finches fight at the window feeder, and I remember distinct scenes I hadn’t thought of for years…

Catholics and Single-Issue Voting

 

The Congress is holding hearings regarding the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.

I think they will confirm her.  Whether she holds to her promise not to let her own private beliefs sway her decision-making - well, I can't imagine.

I am a Catholic, but not a single-issue voter.  I am against abortion, but I won't vote for Donald Trump.

My relatives, high school classmates, former students, and friends who are single-issue voters keep raving at me about this, but there it is.

Anyway, here is an article I like:

Bishop Seitz: Single-issue voting has corrupted Christian political witness

 

Bishop Mark Seitz     September 30,2020

 

One day last year, I found myself waiting motionless, jammed in a confined space between concrete barriers, razor wire and armed border guards. I stood tensely under the burning desert summer sun in a dusty no man’s land on the international border between the United States and Mexico. I was holding the hand of a young, dark-skinned girl with brown hair, and my anxiety grew as we looked toward the United States, just feet away, and at the guards barring our entry.

Back in her home country, the girl’s aunts and uncles had been assassinated. If she had not traveled with her family 2,000 miles to the U.S. border, she might have shared the same fate. But after a long and perilous journey and having survived kidnapping attempts, there she was, waiting to legally petition for asylum at a time when hard-line immigration policies like family separation and forced returns to Mexico have made such an act dangerous.

I tried putting myself in that child’s shoes. I felt fear and vertigo. I felt the overwhelming weight of bureaucratic indifference and abstract government policy positioned against the vulnerability of a child. For a brief instant I felt what it must be like to be on the outside-looking-in of an exclusionary system of power. I felt fragile.

That experience of fragility deeply shaped my understanding of the social commitment of Christians.

That experience of fragility deeply shaped my understanding of the social commitment of Christians. I realized that our political commitment as Christians is less about seeking self-interest, accessing privilege and influencing power, and more about standing in solidarity with those forced to the margins of the systems we create.

The presidential election is fast approaching. Elections are a critical way we take an active role shaping the common good. We naturally project our hopes and desires for a resolution to the pains now afflicting our country onto that important moment when we cast our ballot.

A deep faith rooted in love is moved by the fragility of others and unsettled by systems that cheapen human dignity. For Christians, the ecstatic experience of being taken out of ourselves and into the drama of the reign of God opens us up to the horizon of the common good. As Benedict XVI said, “the more we strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbors, the more effectively we love them.” We get involved in building the common good because, as St. Óscar Romero said in his last words before being killed, “every effort to better a society, especially one that is so enmeshed in injustice and in sin, is an effort that God blesses, that God desires, that God demands of us.”

The experience of the nearness of Jesus and the love of God, our common Father, creates in us a new mindset: We are dependent, we need one another and we really are responsible for one another. This is what the virtue of solidarity is all about, the recognition that our destinies are woven together or they are not woven at all. Human fragility is not to be denied or demonized or hidden away, but met with love and compassion and solidarity. As Sister Thea Bowman put it so beautifully, “God’s glory is revealed because we love one another across the barriers and boundaries of race, culture and class.”

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Our vote is but one expression of this all-encompassing commitment to the common good and the project of building up solidarity.

Solidarity in Suffering

In the last several months, the wind has been knocked out of us by a major pandemic that has left many, especially the poor and people of color, with no lifeboat. We have also seen how the promise of equality contained in our founding documents has been deferred again and again because we cannot confess with one voice—as church or country—what should be self-evident, that Black lives matter. The individualism rampant in our social, political and economic life is rending the body politic and the body of Christ. But there is a lesson in all of this. As Pope Francis recently put it, “having failed to show solidarity in wealth and in the sharing of resources, we have learned to experience solidarity in suffering.” The Lord is teaching us solidarity by schooling us in fragility.

The individualism rampant in our social, political and economic life is rending the body politic and the body of Christ.

As pastor of a portion of the people of God located on the U.S.-Mexico border, a majority of whom are Latino, I see the deep interrelatedness of the issues affecting our people and endangering our sacred environment. Our communities are buckling under history, under racism and under Covid-19. The lack of opportunities and social supports available to our children do not match the height of their aspirations and dignity, and they are at risk of falling even further behind under the weight of the pandemic. This generation of our children was also sadly witness to the largest mass killing of Latinos in modern history, which took the lives of 23 of our neighbors last year in an act of racial terror in El Paso. In all of this suffering it is made abundantly clear that, in the words of the pope, “none of us is saved alone.”

What are the possibilities before us at the ballot box for a credible project of solidarity in this historical moment? We require leadership with character and experience, capable of expressing a moral vision to resist the harsh individualism and lack of solidarity fueling the multiple crises we face. We are desperately in need of genuine leadership and vision to overcome ingrained attitudes of being “masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters” and to re-learn to “speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world.”

In an aggressively secular and hyper-competitive world, we should be grateful for the public respect for Pope Francis shown by the Democratic nominee, former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the values of the working-class ethos that Mr. Biden aims to project. We should recognize, too, the step forward represented by the selection of Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. Our daughters and sons need to see women reflected in our nation’s highest leadership. As a bishop on the border, I am also encouraged by the Biden campaign’s promises to address climate change, create a path to citizenship for the undocumented, restore protections for asylum seekers and never repeat the criminal practice of separating families at the border.

The Moral Challenge of Abortion

We must also acknowledge the stumbling block created for religious voters by the Democratic Party’s ever-stronger commitment to promoting abortion without any sensible restrictions, including Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris’s support for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which threatens to break the last surviving bipartisan compromise in a decades-long stalemate over Roe v. Wade. Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris have also committed to re-igniting debates over constitutionally protected matters of religious liberty that broad majorities on the Supreme Court have attempted to put to rest, provoking real fears on the part of the church’s charitable institutions of another chapter in the culture wars.

The deepening dogmatism of the Democratic Party on abortion is an inescapable moral challenge. But Catholics also need to recognize that we are living out the collateral effects of a misbegotten decades-long settlement between certain groups of political and religious leaders on the right. For far too long, in pursuit of “single-issue” strategies to end abortion, many Christians have scandalously turned a blind eye to real breakdowns in solidarity and dehumanizing policies, including crackdowns on worker rights and voting rights, the slashing of social support for the poor and sick, racism and the exploitation of immigrants and the environment.

All of this has backfired and contributed to the issue’s intractability, widened the polarization in our society, harmed the credibility of the commitment of Christians to the common good and compromised the integrity of our Gospel witness.

Pope Francis has repeatedly challenged American Catholics to reframe our approach to abortion. The Holy Father is clear:

Our defense of the innocent unborn, for example, needs to be clear, firm and passionate, for at stake is the dignity of a human life, which is always sacred and demands love for each person, regardless of his or her stage of development. Equally sacred, however, are the lives of the poor, those already born, the destitute, the abandoned and the underprivileged, the vulnerable infirm and elderly exposed to covert euthanasia, the victims of human trafficking, new forms of slavery and every form of rejection.

We must repudiate any compromise of the moral integrity of the church’s witness through partisan alignment with single-issue political strategies disconnected from an integral ethic of human life. The moral and ontological pre-eminence of human life is gravely undermined by narrow political stratagems corrosive of the common good. Our concern and advocacy for life must embrace all of the marginalized and excluded, or it will ring hollow.

At the same time, we should also recognize that the individualistic reduction of abortion to a question of so-called “reproductive rights” brackets this fundamental social issue from any common moral analysis, as if the question of abortion carried no moral weight at all. It also displaces our attention from society’s duty to support the real economic and social needs of women, expectant mothers and families, where we are sorely lacking.

President Donald Trump has voiced his support for unborn life and taken steps toward defending life, like the reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy. Likewise, he has taken positive steps to protect religious liberties. But the president has also tainted the pro-life cause with the individualism and cult of wealth, greed and celebrity that very quickly erode solidarity and cheapen life. And he has undermined the foundational importance of religious liberty with actions like travel bans targeting Muslims. Supported by a pagan aesthetic of self-assertion and buoyed by a destructive politics of fear and xenophobia, his administration has encouraged the worst expressions of nativism. And this is dangerously taxing the durability of our democratic institutions.

It is painfully ironic that one party claims to stand with undocumented families and unaccompanied children but not the unborn, and the other claims to stand with the unborn but not the undocumented. But the church will always define herself as that community which stands with whoever is considered unworthy of belonging.

But the church will always define herself as that community which stands with whoever is considered unworthy of belonging.

Over the past several years and decades, politicians on both sides, including both current presidential candidates, have contributed to the weakening of solidarity and the erosion of the common good in ways that should make us ask hard questions of both candidates now. The bishops of the United States and many moral leaders have long raised their voices against the abandonment of all restraints on an economy driven by greed, the weakening of protections for the poor and working class, the lack of access to affordable health care, laws that have led to the over-incarceration of people of color and militarized our local police departments, the unjust Iraq War, the extrajudicial killings of innocents by drones, trade deals that treat labor and the environment as collateral damage, and unacceptable delays on immigration reform. In short, we require moral leadership that will credibly address our country’s longstanding abasement by what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. termed “the triple evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism.”

I share the pain, frustration and confusion facing Catholic voters this year at what feels like an impossible binary choice. Catholics who wish to take the demands of our faith and social teaching seriously have long had reason to feel politically homeless at election time. Neither party and neither presidential candidate reflects in a consistent way the ethic of love and life expressed by Jesus in the Gospels. Both parties have been influenced by both the individualism long lurking in American life and by Dr. King’s triple evils.

Voting requires a well-formed conscience and an exercise of prudence after prayerful discernment on the part of each voter of all the issues at stake. Our commitment is not to the abstractions of party platforms but to the particularity of the human suffering in our midst and the concrete possibilities for a project of solidarity and human emancipation before us. God never asks of us the impossible but only to achieve the justice possible in the imperfect world of the here and now. We must sincerely weigh all of the complex issues facing our nation and prayerfully reflect on the sacredness and equal dignity of all human life as well our duty to steward God’s creation.

Catholics may still arrive at different conclusions as to for whom to vote. But however we vote, God will judge us by the authenticity of our commitment to continuing to stand with all those forced to the margins of our society, even after Election Day. Our vote for candidates at every level of government, from local school boards to the highest levels of national government, is just one expression of that commitment.

It is helpful to remember that the great democratic achievements in our country—the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, civil rights, labor rights, the antiwar movement, the pro-life movement—belong first not to presidents or politicians but to you and me and others driven by moral vision and inspired by faith. Better political leadership at the top will come from critique and action rooted in human experience below. In the words of Pope Francis, “the future of humanity does not lie solely in the hands of great leaders, the great powers and the elites. It is fundamentally in the hands of peoples and in their ability to organize.”