After The Earthquake

Half a century ago, the central plaza of Cochabamba had changed only incrementally over almost four centuries of Spanish occupation and Bolivia’s eventual liberation. At the plaza’s four corners, drivers of jury-rigged American vehicles from the 40s vied for the right-of-way by honking their horns during the day and flashing headlights at night. Few homes on the outskirts of town had electricity and students studied under the streetlights of the plaza, wrapped in ponchos against the nighttime cold.

As a journalist after the University of Miami, I wrote extensively about race relations and housing discrimination in Miami. During my earliest years in seminary, I participated in civil rights efforts, anti-war demonstrations, and countless prayer services centered on Justice and Peace. But it was there, in “the Heart of the Continent,” that I truly celebrated what it is to be an American, when, one night, the U.S. Army Band performed in that colonial plaza. I can still remember precisely where I stood – at attention - during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” I can still feel the emotion. 

An emotion that floods me each time I watch a video of a military parent or sibling surprising spouses, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, parents as they return from service in Iraq or Afghanistan. An emotion that swells with news account of first responders putting their lives on the line. The overwhelming sense of gratitude when nurses and doctors and hospital cleaning staffs are honored for their courage in fighting Covid-19. The kids who open lemonade stands to raise funds to support a teacher battling cancer and the teacher who buys endless supplies and gives countless hours to help her students succeed. The coach who makes off-the-field victories greater than those on scoreboards. The teams of high schoolers who regularly shop for seniors confined to their homes by the coronavirus. 

These Americans carry me back to the emotions of half-a-century ago in Cochabamba’s colonnaded plaza.

Sadly, Americans are asking if they might ever feel this way again.

Like the tiniest crack in a “surround sound” earthquake-disaster movie, the first fissure will appear in the earliest minutes and hours of November Fourth. By sunset, the roar of ever-expanding, ever-deepening crevasses will shake small towns and big cities, creating fissures impossible to span. 

The terra firma of before-midnight-on-the-East-Coast-election-results is no more. It may never be again. Mail-in ballots that, in some states, cannot be counted until the polls have closed or can be accepted for days or more than a week after – as long as they were postmarked on time; repeated law suits that may run for weeks and months  through state and federal courts; attempts at manipulating how state electors are certified; and dualling cable networks proclaiming conflicting gospels will destroy Norman Rockwell-esque traditional Thanksgivings as old as the 1943 image.

Don’t blame COVID-19. That’s too easy a copout.

Santa Claus will come again. Midnight Masses and Candlelight Services will be observed but won’t be the once joyous multi-generational gatherings celebrated in Coke and Macy’s ads. They, too, may be condemned to the trash heap of political divides. 

But don’t blame COVID-19.  That’s just too facile.

One-hundred-and-sixty years after the election of Abraham Lincoln became the catalyst for the War Between the States and divided families – setting brother against brother, Election 2020 threatens to again divide the nation and families and communities.

The nation is on the edge of divides that go immeasurably beyond parties. And will perdure for generations. The ruptures are already visible: broken friendships, once happy Zoom reunions of friends that same have refused to join for months, email attacks, “de-friendings” and eloquently deafening silences

Among families and friends, the wounds may be too deep to ever heal.

Once best friends will go their separate ways – never to speak again. Someone special will be missing from baptisms and weddings, from funerals and memorial services.

And in coming weeks and years, no matter how the election is resolved, many Americans will mourn the “holes in our hearts” created by the vitriol of this election and the loss of those relationships.

As the ruptures widen and deepen, the coronavirus will claim more than 400,000 American lives before Inauguration Day 2021 – according to predictions by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington - and increasingly make yet more profound the mental health and economic crises sweeping the nation like a slow-moving tsunami. America’s wounds are reflected in the hundreds of thousands of families that were not at bedsides as grandparents, sons and daughters, husbands and wives struggled through their last breaths. America’s are the open wounds of grief not expressed by eulogies and graveside rituals. And, as surely as those wounds may never fully heal, the social and political fractures may endure through many of the years of this voting generation. In truth, some ruptures may never be undone.  

With the outcome of America’s bloodiest war in the balance and facing the possibility that public sentiment in the North, moved by heavy Union casualties and a lack of Union victories, would turn the electorate against him, President Lincoln wrote and signed “the Blind Memo,” folded it into and envelope, and asked his cabinet members to sign the envelope without reading the memo. Lincoln and his cabinet affirmed “it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union….” In the face of growing fissures, it becomes the responsibility – the moral, ethical, political obligation – of men and women of Faith and no faith to “save the Union.”

On February 22, 1861, a month before his inauguration, president-elect Lincoln addressed a gathering in Philadelphia’s Liberty Hall:

I have never had a feeling politically that did not
spring from the sentiments embodied in
the Declaration of Independence… 
It was not the mere matter of the separation of the Colonies
from the motherland; but the sentiments in
the Declaration of Independence which gave liberty,
not alone to the people of this country, but, I hope to the world, 
for all time. It was that which gave promise that in due time
the weight would be lifted from the shoulders of all men.
This is the sentiment embodied in that Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps in the six weeks between Election Day and electors casting their ballots, the Union will be saved by men and women who, like Lincoln, commit themselves to embodying the Declaration of Independence.

In the midst of the War Between the States, Lincoln expressed an earnest hope that finds its echo one-hundred-and-fifty-two years later:

May our children and our children’s children
to a thousand generations, continue to enjoy the benefits
conferred upon us by a united country,
and have cause yet to rejoice under those glorious institutions
bequeathed us by Washington and his compeers.

On March 4, 1865, delivering his second inaugural address, Lincoln reflected on the war that ravished the nation and the attitudes of the combatants:

“Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the others. It may seem strange that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance against the other… that any man should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged… The Almighty has his own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” …Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away… As was said three thousand years ago, so still must it be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Forty-three years ago, Maryknoll Sister Carla Piette, who three years later gave her life in an attempt to save a man from the violence that was tearing El Salvador asunder, anticipated the role of the person of Faith as America is ravaged by a war of ideologies and partisanship:

The Lord has guided me so far.
And in His guidance he has up and dropped me here… 
at this time and in this place I history.
To search for and find him.
Not somewhere else. 
But here.
And so HERE I WILL STAY, 
until I have found that broken Lord, in all His forms 
and all His various pieces,
until I have completely bound-up His wounds and
covered His whole Body, His people 
with the rich oil of gladness.
And when that has been done,
He will up and drop me again - 
Either into His Promised Kingdom or into the midst
of another jigsaw puzzle of
His broken body, His hurting people.

[An original, typed copy of this prayer – gifted to me by Sister Carla,
with whom I worked and taught in Chile – hangs in my office.]

Shortly before her martyr’s death forty years ago, Sister Carla offered words of hope to an America torn asunder in this election period:

The walk continues and the Lord of the Way
leads each day with no map and no clear weather, 
but rather fog and total trust.