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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
January 15, 2006
Pray
Patience, courage, perseverance, is what Catherine of Siena advises. (And Francis de Sales, and a few others.) I hadn’t actually been reading her -- it was what I heard from my confessor this morning. Readers will be aware that, in the last few years, I have gone from being a “weird” Anglican, to becoming a “weird” Roman Catholic (though I personally prefer the term “faithful”). But little of the basic doctrine has changed. No matter how vexing, or how exhilarating our outward circumstances, we must remember what is important -- and with patience, courage, perseverance, endeavour to make things right. In politics, as in every vocation.For the week remaining in our Canadian general election campaign, I should like to lead my readers in a moment of prayer -- for Canada, and for our politicians. Much is at stake; more than in most elections. To my mind, our task is to throw out a corrupt and malicious government, and replace it with an unsatisfactory alternative -- there being no satisfactory one. The world will, according to observation as well as credo, never offer fully satisfactory alternatives. But charity will never require us to put greater and lesser evils on a plane. It is very hard to be both a politician and a Christian, to be faithful both to party and God. I know this from having met a few Christian politicians. I know it better from experiencing my own reactions, when I get into a tumbledown political fight. The desire to cut corners, to misrepresent, to exploit ignorance and subvert reason, to play to the lowest motives in one’s audience while pretending to play to the highest -- these are not temptations only for others. Nor can they ever be restricted to one political party. Politics is ritualized combat (the alternative being unritualized), and it is very hard, on the battlefield of an election campaign, to distinguish sin from sinner. Which is paradoxically why it is so important to have a clear sense of the devil. For without the devil, our opponents become devils, and instead of fighting against their errors, we fight only to destroy. The greatest politicians seldom stoop so low. The greatest accomplishment in politics, as Lady Thatcher was eager to explain, is to persuade even your opponents of the rightness of the policies you espouse -- so that when they, in their turn, come to power, they will embrace what they once resisted. That is how a politician can change the world, and for the better, and in a way that may outlive him. Politicians are not meant to be thinkers, it is not their job. They are advocates, and tacticians -- salesmen of a sort. They sell ideas that have been, in almost every case, thought through and argued by other minds, away from the electoral fray. We should never look down on salesmen. Our attention should be on what they sell. “To a brave man, good and bad luck are like his right and left hand. He uses both.” I believe St Catherine also said that. A statesman advances his good cause not only through victory, but through defeat. At the end of the day, many victories were pyrrhic, and many defeats the means to a good end. In the best Parliamentary tradition, it was possible to fling the most extraordinary rhetorical starbursts across the chamber, and yet retain one’s equanimity and poise, one’s capacity for self-deprecation. Members opposite in the chamber could drink together at the session’s end, even congratulate each other on the strokes they got in. They could fight with a manly good humour. Part of the decline of Parliamentary government in this country is the loss of that -- the reduction of debate to an exchange of spittle. The humourless demonization of opponents in, for instance, the vicious attack ads we have seen on TV, reveals a terrible degeneration. So here is the supplication I propose: “Lord, have mercy on us sinners; and from your grace, fill us with the wisdom to seek you. In what remains of this election campaign, we ask your help, to salvage good, and confound evil. In the heat of this campaign, grant us all the peace to see beyond our immediate interests. Infuse us with your truth, and the courage to defend it; and infuse our opponents with the same. Wash us and wash them of the cynicism that pollutes all human judgement, and lead us forward to ends beyond ourselves.” David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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