Family and friends, the 2024 election and Thanksgiving

Beyond my usual list of things to be grateful for — mercy, family, reasonable health, employment, the elders still among us and the children all around — I am particularly thankful that none of our family members will be segregating themselves by ideologies, or indulging their pique over recent elections, by absenting themselves from the table until all the other people recant their votes.

Politically, our family is all over the place; some voted for Kamala Harris for president; some voted for Donald Trump. Votes were cast from this family for Jill Stein, Claudia De la Cruz and (not for the first time) a pal’s mother, her name written in on a ballot.

Having listened to friends whose families have splintered, or friendships have become strained over politics, I acknowledge that our gang’s willingness to be peaceable (and glad to gather in this busy season) is yet another thing for which I give thanks.

It’s something I’ve wondered about these past weeks: How does the family manage to discuss politics each election cycle, express their very different viewpoints, yet remain together?

First, I’ve come to realize that it’s a diplomatic and conscious thing. We don’t avoid the combustible subjects. If a headline or subject happens to come up organically in discussion, people offer their thoughts, sometimes with a slap on the table, for emphasis.

But there is also usually offered a kind of shrug to go with the opinions, one that is not dismissive but rather humble; it’s a shrug admitting that all of us are impressionable, influenced by our own histories, our social sets, our echo chambers and individual temperaments. Most importantly, it allows that each of us is actually entitled to our thoughts, and that within them we are very likely getting at least one thing wrong, so we’re all in this together.

It’s an important thing, that election season shrug; it gives the family enough air to keep breathing and to recall that throughout the year we love and value each other; we know the “good” of each other — the steadfast trustworthiness that we honor and prize all year long and have no desire to surrender to passing spells of hectoring hyperbole propelled by the noisiest of ideologues.

The shrug also helps us to remember that good people may disagree and still be good people, and that most of us are doing the best we can, by such light as we are given. And that God is not done with any of us, yet, not even the politicians we hate and he (confoundingly!) still loves.

None of us can predict or understand what God permits in any given season, or why. Thus, we are tied up in boundless mystery — far beyond our preferred illusions of catastrophe or world peace. We know that, whatever any election’s outcome, we will necessarily become like Mary in the upper room, watching and waiting to see what happens next.

Lately, in my lectio divina I have been lingering over Matthew 18:10, where Jesus reminds us, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.”

It’s had me pondering the question, “who, exactly, are the little ones?” In light of the church’s yet-to-be-formally-and-fully-atoned-for abuses, it is easy to define them as children, or the most trusting and vulnerable of adults. They include also the poor, the homeless, the lonely and marginalized.

Amid them, too, are the rejected — especially those who become even littler, even more in need of their God-beholding angels, when they’ve been cast aside by their very blood for becoming over-enthralled by the dubious theatricals of contemporary politics.

Further in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus warns that if we are unwilling to show mercy to others, “Also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother from your heart.”

Mercy is a delicate thing. It mustn’t be taken for granted, nor immovably or maliciously withheld, lest we make ourselves newly accountable (yes, vulnerable) to God’s justice.

But offering mercy also makes us a trifle vulnerable, too, doesn’t it? To say, “I’m not holding it against you,” after familial contretemps, means (in part) that one is committing to a way of more respectful acceptance and peace.

And the way of acceptance and peace, it increasingly seems to me, requires understanding that in these unsettled times, so fraught with old problems and new questions, we are each of us, in our own ways, “the little ones” who must not be despised.

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