For the past five months, I had the honor of serving the President of the United States as a White House intern in the Office of Legislative Affairs. Every morning as I walked into the gates of the White House, I knew I was entering sacred ground: the halls where Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan walked. This glorious and mysterious house has—for better or worse—stood as a buttress of hope for the American people since the earliest years of the Republic.
According to the late Tony Snow—former President George W. Bush’s press secretary from 2006 until 2007—the White House “with all its pressures, intrigues, triumphs, betrayals, joys and disappointments, is the most special place you ever will work.” The White House, he said, is the place where Americans’ “highest hopes and dreams reside.”
Perhaps Mr. Snow is correct in both of his claims, but as I walked through that venerable home day after day, my thoughts evolved quite differently. It became quite clear to me that working in the White House—as much of an honor as it was—could not and cannot become the ultimate goal of my working life. Furthermore, those halls of power—as magnificent and grand as they are—cannot be where my “highest hopes and dreams reside.”
Though I was humbled by the honor of working in the White House, my experience there revealed to me that my highest vocational aspirations should not reside in obtaining a position of power or in close proximity to power, but—rather—in a mission that is upright, fruitful and lasting. Upon prayer and reflection, I believe my personal mission is to bring the beauty of Christ into a broken world.
Dostoyevsky once famously wrote that beauty alone “will save the world” (The Idiot, Part III, Chapter 5). Clearly, beauty can be found in the edifice of the White House, in its collection of artwork that speaks a compelling narrative of the American story, in the Presidents, staffs and personalities that undergird the lore of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
However, as Augustine reminds us in Confessions, beauty too can exist in brokenness. And as citizens of the United States know, the White House, too, has a long history of brokenness. But American beauty, as much as it is embodied in the People’s House, certainly resides most profoundly in the American people themselves.
Sadly, the voice of these people is being muted. It is being replaced by a nasty super-cult of personality that is being propagated by cable news networks, talk radio commentators and internet bloggers who are obsessed with media bites, horserace politics and “inside-the Beltway” news.
Father Adolfo Nicolas, SJ—the Superior General of the Society of Jesus—has termed this crisis as the “globalization of superficiality.” He writes:
When one can access so much information so quickly and so painlessly; when one can express and publish to the world one’s reactions so immediately and so unthinkingly in one’s blogs or micro-blogs; when the latest opinion column from the New York Times or El Pais, or the newest viral video can be spread so quickly to people half a world away, shaping their perceptions and feelings, then the laborious, painstaking work of serious, critical thinking often gets short-circuited.
Father Nicolas’s critique serves as a stunning reminder to those of us who seek to address the most critical moral issues of our times: neither the heights of our ambitions nor the passion of our hearts can circumvent the logic of our minds. Our ambitions and our passion must be rooted in wisdom, less they become mere utility, emotivism or sentimentality.
A good starting point for Catholic activists might be more time in prayer and study and less time in blogosphere “dialogue.” We should recall that the world dialogue is Greek in its origins. Dialogos refers to a conversation with between two or more persons (dia) rooted inreason, wisdom or truth (logos). If we do not have the appropriate amount of prayer, study and reflection to discern appropriate characteristics of the truth of our arguments, we have no authentic dialogue to engage in.
Prayer and study is good in theory. But how can we pray? With whom or for what can we pray? I would humbly offer two companions: Pope Benedict and the bishops of the United States. In particular, I would suggest Benedict’s third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ document, Faithful Citizenship. If Benedict’s Caritas in Veritate offers coherence in a universal vision for the common good, the bishops of the United States’ Faithful Citizenship complements such universal coherence with a dynamic and authentically American response to this global conversation.
Benedict, in particular, seems to diagnose well the complexities of world issues and heralds a prophetic response to the brokenness that ails us. He proposes that a world rooted in caritas (“loving kindness”) and veritate (“truth”) exists within the realm of human possibility. All human endeavors, Benedict writes, must be fueled by authentic caritas “in a manner corresponding to his vocation and according to the degree of influence he wields in [his community].” Caritas, however, must be present in every “encounter [with one’s] neighbor directly.” The common good, therefore, is a project of the “whole human family.” This re-imagined vision of the world and our vocation within it challenges us to rise above the rancor of unreasoned ideology. If Benedict is right, there is a different horizon to be explored.
Mass media might be obsessed with power and personality, but our God cares about love and truth. We can be confident that all our pursuits to re-imagine and to reinvent the world in God’s image will be fruitful if we too become fixated upon love and truth. If after considerable time of prayer, study and reflection, we are sure that we share God’s true vision for the world, we can be comforted by the prophecy of Saint Teresa of Avila that truth will suffer, but will never die.
All eyes will turn to the race for the White House this election year. While media pundits will be obsessed with the news bites, campaign slogans and the latest poll numbers, perhaps others of us can spend more quietly time discerning what is best for our country. And all of us—whether pundits, bloggers, NASCAR dads or soccer moms—can share in the prayer of John Adams, which he wrote in a letter to his wife Abigail, upon his first night at the White House: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.”
