What matters most

April, T.S. Eliot wrote, is the cruelest month, but here in the Upper Midwest, November gives April a run for its money. It’s not just the steel-gray skies or the leaves that, having blazed forth in brilliant red, orange and yellow in late September and October, now scuttle, dry and brown and scritch-scratching, down concrete driveways and sidewalks at the slightest gust of those relentless winds that still remember taking the Edmund Fitzgerald to her watery grave nearly 50 years ago.

It’s the combination of all of those things along with, for us Catholics, here in the month of the holy souls in Purgatory, the sight of gray tombstones in the cemeteries that seem to stand at every other crossroads in the Midwestern countryside.

But more than all that, it’s the first Tuesday in November, every two and especially four years, when we Midwesterners take our civic duty seriously and trudge through the leaves, collars turned up high against the wind, down to the county courthouse to cast our ballots for the imperfect men and women that we hope — increasingly against all hope — will dedicate their lives to the common good, at least for the term of their office.

I grew up in a close-knit family, in which aunts and uncles and cousins gathered every Sunday at Grandma and Grandpa’s house for dinner and euchre and the seemingly inevitable arguments over politics. My grandfather was a Democrat, as were his two oldest sons; my father, a Republican; another brother, something closer to a libertarian, but more truly a contrarian or iconoclast. Watergate and its aftermath were still a living reality, not something relegated to the part of 11th grade American History textbooks that remained unread at the end of the year because the teacher never managed to get past World War II. Every political argument, no matter where it started, seemed to come back to Watergate, and eventually my grandfather would bring each one to an end by declaring, “I voted for one Republican in my life” — Richard Nixon — “and look what they did to him!”

My mother hated those political arguments, and from the outside the raised voices and red faces must have seemed concerning, and occasionally even frightening. But week after week, the arguments would come to an end, Grandma would set out the dinner leftovers for a cold supper, Grandpa would pop up some popcorn in bacon fat, and, fortified for our journey, we would depart in the twilight — to come back and do it all again the next week.

Those formative years are a big part of the reason I studied political theory at Michigan State and The Catholic University of America, and an even bigger part of the reason why, 50 years later, I dread every Midwestern November. As heated as those arguments became, no one around my grandparents’ dinner table mistook what we were arguing about as more important than the reality that we were gathered there together.

Not so today. Across the political spectrum, friendships end, coworkers’ relationships are tested and family members become estranged because we have lost sight of the fact that, no matter how important this or that election may seem, Christ has called us to love our neighbor as ourselves.

Both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, and indeed our entire political regime, will someday pass, but the second greatest commandment will remain.

And so this November, beneath the steel-gray sky of the Upper Midwest, with the north wind swirling crumbling leaves around my ankles, having cast my ballot in accordance with the lessons I learned round Grandma and Grandpa’s dinner table 50 years ago, I will visit a cemetery and pray for my beloved dead. And I will pray, too, that they will intercede for the living, in this cruelest of all Novembers in my memory, that in the frenzy of today’s partisan politics, we will not lose sight of what matters most.

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