A Contemplative’s Map Through Polarization
There’s a particular pain that has settled into the bones of many believers. It’s the sorrow of standing at the edge of every political tribe and finding that none of them have room for the whole of who you are. You read one platform and find compassion for the poor alongside indifference to the unborn. You read the other and find concern for traditional virtues alongside contempt for the stranger at the gate. You watch the partisans of each side shout past one another, and something inside you grows tired. Tired the way the soul gets tired when it cannot find a place to rest.
If this is you, take heart. You are not alone, and you are not lost. You are standing where the contemplatives have always stood. You are one of the ones learning to belong to a deeper country.
The Contemplatives in Their Own Fractured Age
It helps to remember that the great contemplatives of the Christian tradition wrote from the middle of fire.
Consider the fourteenth century. The Black Death emptied half the villages of Europe. Peasant uprisings drenched the fields with blood. Two rival popes excommunicated one another, and the Church itself was torn down the middle. This is the age that gave us Walter Hilton’s Scale of Perfection. The age of Julian of Norwich, whose visions came while plague carts rolled past the anchorhold window. The age of the anonymous English contemplative who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing, urging souls to enter a stillness deeper than the noise of the world.
These contemplatives lived inside the storm. They watched their own institutions fracture and their own leaders fail. The Avignon papacy. The Lollard fires. The peasant revolts that swept through Kent and Essex with axes and burning torches. The contemplatives saw it all, and yet they discovered what the partisans of their own moment could not see: the deepest allegiance of the soul had already been given somewhere else.
Hilton spoke of the inner Jerusalem, the city built of love, where the soul learns to dwell while the outer city quarrels. Julian, in the middle of carnage that would today drive most of us into despair, dared to write: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” The pain was named. A deeper current was being named beneath it.
The Country We Already Belong To
The contemplatives knew what many of us have forgotten. Our primary citizenship was settled at the waters of baptism. Long before any party platform claimed our loyalty, the Holy One whispered our true name over us. We belong to a kingdom that no election can deliver and no defeat can take away.
This is the foundation of every honest political engagement. Without it, we become indistinguishable from the partisans we critique. With it, we can enter the work of justice without losing our souls.
The political tribes both want something from us they have no right to demand. They want our ultimate allegiance. They want to be the place where our hopes are vindicated and our fears resolved. They offer a kind of belonging in exchange, a sense of being on the right side of history, surrounded by people who think like us. The cost of that belonging is the surrender of our capacity to see the image of God in the people on the other side.
The contemplatives refuse the trade. They keep their deepest yes for the One who cannot fit inside any human ideology. From that anchored place, they engage. They feed the hungry without needing to demonise the powerful. They speak truth to the powerful without despising the poor who voted them in. They hold their convictions with passion and their opponents with tenderness.
The Strange Practice of Praying for Enemies
Of all the disciplines the contemplative path teaches, none is more difficult or more transformative than the practice of praying for those we have been told are the enemy.
The commandment is plain. We are to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. We have largely treated this as poetry. The contemplatives treated it as a practice.
What happens when you actually do it? When you sit each morning and name, by name, the politician whose face makes you angry, the commentator whose voice grates against your soul, the family member whose social media posts have ended your last three dinner conversations? When you ask the Holy One to bless them, to draw them deeper into goodness, to meet them in their fear and their hunger?
Something strange begins to happen. You discover, slowly, that they are human beings beneath the caricature. Struggling. Often afraid. Often shaped by losses you cannot see. The caricature softens. You begin to encounter the actual person beneath the avatar. The Spirit, who has been hovering all along over the chaos of your anger, begins to do the deep work of dismantling what was never the gospel in the first place.
This practice will sharpen your moral clarity. You may oppose them with more precision, with more energy, once you have stopped seeing them as monsters. You oppose them as one human soul to another, both held in the same grace, both standing under the same mercy, both bearing the same image of the One who refuses to be claimed by any party.
Seeing the Icon Beneath the Banner
The Eastern Christian tradition has a beautiful word for the human being: icon. We are images, windows, living portraits of the One who made us. Every person we meet is an icon, however cracked, however obscured by sin or suffering, however draped in slogans we find odious.
When you walk down the street and see the political sign in the front yard that makes you wince, look past the sign. There is an icon in that house. Someone afraid for their children. Someone trying to make sense of a world that feels out of control. Someone who has cobbled together their politics from a story that, however broken, made some sense of their pain. Someone whose hopes and griefs are not so different from yours, however different the conclusions they have drawn.
You do not have to agree with the story. You do not have to vote with them. You do not have to silence your prophetic voice. What you must not do is forget the icon. The moment you reduce a human being to a banner, you have stepped out of the kingdom you were baptised into and joined the very tribalism tearing the world apart.
The Long Patience of the Saints
There’s a phrase in the book of Revelation: “the patience of the saints.” It comes in a passage about empires falling and beasts rising. The text reminds the early Christians that their hope cannot be measured by any single political moment, even as the world burns around them.
The saints learned to hold the long view. They prayed in dungeons, fed bread to lepers, wrote treatises by candlelight while their cities burned. They knew that the kingdom of God comes like leaven, like mustard seed, like the slow breaking of dawn. It cannot be hurried by the right vote. It cannot be defeated by the wrong one.
If you are politically homeless today, take heart. You are in good company. The contemplatives have been there before you. They have left a path through the underbrush of every fevered age, and the path leads always to the same place: the heart of the One whose throne is shaped like a cross. That throne does not move with the polls. It does not bend to the headlines. It holds, and holds, and holds, while empires rise and fall around it.
Vote, by all means. Speak. Advocate. Resist injustice with all the courage you can muster. And come home each evening to the deeper country. Pray for the people you cannot understand. See the icon beneath the banner. Sit in the stillness where the Holy One has been waiting all along. Remember that long after this election cycle is dust, the kingdom of God will still be coming, and you will still belong to it.
Bibliography
Brueggemann, Walter. The Prophetic Imagination. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978.
The Cloud of Unknowing. Edited by James Walsh. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist, 1981.
Hauerwas, Stanley, and William H. Willimon. Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony. Nashville: Abingdon, 1989.
Hilton, Walter. The Scale of Perfection. Translated by John P. H. Clark and Rosemary Dorward. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist, 1991.
Julian of Norwich. Showings. Translated by Edmund Colledge and James Walsh. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist, 1978.
Merton, Thomas. Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966.
Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1961.
Nouwen, Henri J. M. The Way of the Heart: Desert Spirituality and Contemporary Ministry. New York: Seabury, 1981.
