Dear friends:
I always try to send a cheery Christmas letter: a little bit funny, a little bit hopeful. But oh, this year I am not feeling funny. I am not feeling hopeful. I am feeling a little like a beached mudskipper. I don't quite know how to maneuver in my new environment.
I keep wishing I could move on, you guys. When Obama said we should give Trump a chance I knew he was right. I said, "Okay, I'll give him a chance." I pray for Trump regularly and I try not to resent the obligation to do so. But we're five weeks in and he has given us no indication that he is going to step up and act presidential. He is, instead, lunging up out of the muck, grabbing at the "presidential" standard in an egregious effort to pull it down into his (undrained) swamp. If he does it, it must be presidential. He's the president-elect, after all.
Holy cow, that's the saddest sentence I've ever put in a Christmas letter.
The world seems so unpredictable now, though: will today bring further destabilization of the US-China relationship? More bombers in the South China Sea? More human siege engines rolled into position, ready to take aim at the republic in the new year? Huh, I am sounding dramatic even to myself. But what else can we say, when the Environmental Protection Agency will be directed by someone who doesn't actually believe in environmental protection, and when climate science is about to be supplanted by climate fantasy as a basis for decision-making, and when a Friend of Russia with massive global business entanglements is the nominee for Secretary of State? What good things happen when >20 million people lose access to health care? I'm waiting for answers. I suspect I'll be waiting for a while.
I wake up in the middle of the night and think about it. I walk to work every morning and my footsteps beat a tattoo on the pavement: EIGHTy perCENT of WHITE evanGELicals VOTEd for DONald TRUMP. SIXty perCENT of white CATHolics / VOTEd for DONald TRUMP. Five weeks in and I still can't get my mind around it. It's weighing on me. It's like I've been saddled with an oversized howdah, and my uncertainty steers me this way and that, day in and day out.
(Huh, mudskippers do not usually wear howdahs. Pardon my mixed metaphor. I blame the existential despair.)
I've been frustrated for a long time by the conflation of GOOD CATHOLIC or SERIOUS CHRISTIAN with REPUBLICAN. This year, though-- this year is an object lesson in the perils of single-issue voting. I am increasingly impatient with partisanship masquerading as GOOD CATHOLIC-NESS or SERIOUS CHRISTIAN-NESS. The climate at my kids' Catholic high school is driving me nuts, I have to tell you.
Huh, people don't usually talk about money in their Christmas letters either, just like they don't talk about politics. Taboo, schmaboo. Let's talk about money. Education is far and away the biggest line item in our family budget. This year we will pay ~$15K to send two kids to Catholic high school. Education expenses are the reason I drive a 16-year-old car that sounds like it has automotive emphysema. They're the reason that we buy secondhand clothes and that nobody has a phone worth more than $25. Because the idea that my kids can spend most of their waking hours in a place that's consciously creating a Catholic culture -- that idea is worth a lot to me. And yet. And yet.
One of my boys gets called a Social Justice Warrior anytime he opens his mouth with a radical assertion like "It's problematic for police to shoot unarmed people in the back." One group of boys throws around "Jew" as an insult routinely: "Hey, Jewbag, I want to sit there."* This month there were persuasive speeches, plural, asserting that the scientific consensus on climate change is an elaborate hoax.**
Oh, friends, it sounds like I'm sending my kids to Alt-Right Academy. I just want to say, Hey, if Catholic social teaching is at odds with the preferences expressed in your usual news sources, you might want to consider some alternate news sources.
*I complained to the principal. He says he can't do anything unless my kid divulges a list of names and contexts. Can't. Do. Anything.***
**I'm drafting a letter about that. But I'm not going to send it until grades are in, because I am not optimistic about the response.
***I know, we don't put footnotes in Christmas letters either. What other conventions of the genre shall I defy?
I keep looking for solace, hanging out in the prophets and the plaintive psalms. But the divisions among people of faith are crushing me as much as the uncertainty I was telling you about earlier. It's like my howdah has a Volkswagen Beetle on top of it. I am looking for goodness, trying to savor my lovely quirky family. Maybe in a different sort of Christmas letter I would find a way to tell you about our dinner conversation tonight, where exclamation-point-y talk about the election morphed into the St. Andrew prayer for the Electoral College (seriously, electors, who do not usually appear in a Gladly Christmas letter either: do your job on Monday. Anybody but Trump. Anybody.) which slid into a discussion of imported plurals and a riff on Manamana: "phenomena, do dooo do do do." But we are none of us laughing much lately.
We often talk in December about praying for peace, but my prayers for peace this year have a fervency they have lacked in the past. We talk too about preparing for the birth of a baby in December, and I keep thinking about how birth means suffering. It's been almost exactly eight years since my youngest child was born, but I don't think you ever forget how hard it can be to see past the waves of suffering to the joy on the other side. I believe in a sovereign God and so I will choose to believe in good things on the other side of this December. But maybe it's like birth: you have to lean in, and breathe deep, and know that it will get worse before it gets better.
Love and peace and the few specks of hope that I can assemble tonight,
Jamie
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