Lightly edited copy of an email I sent to my spiritual director today in advance of our session for March, archived here so I can go back later and see what I was thinking about when I posted it. Taken together, these emails give me a rough benchmark of my spiritual journey.
4:02 PM (6 hours ago)
Hi Sister —
Running late here, but I’m looking forward to our Zoom meeting tomorrow evening. I’ve done a fair amount of journaling in the past month, but much of it has been long and tendentious. So I’ll spare you, and keep it brief. As the new Trump regime keeps turning the federal government and US foreign policy upside down, I’ve been consumed with politics, and some of it has slopped over into my spiritual life. So I’m wrestling with questions it raises. When should I speak up against what I consider to be injustice? When should I sit back and bide my time? What am I called to do? Who’s listening?
Two links here. One is kind of non-political (unless you consider the Magnificat, as I do, to incorporate a very unambiguous call to social justice). It’s to a journal I finished the other day that found a common theme in the Magnificat and Jesus’ “sermon on the plain” in Luke. I hadn’t made the connection before, and I wrote:
[…] then Pastor hits me upside the head with the Magnificat. Very gently, of course, but I’d never made the connection with the Beatitudes before. She laid it out like this (beginning around 24:30):
In Matthew’s gospel he’s up on that mountain and in Luke’s gospel he comes down to that level place, and I wonder if standing in that level place, wanting to lift up the lowly and bring down the high, I wonder if he isn’t remembering his mother’s song. My soul proclaims —. Right? Bring down the mighty and lift up the lowly. It was a song that announced what the kingdom of God, God’s reign, was like. Very different from this world’s reign. God’s economy is vastly different from ours.
And if I weren’t such a nice, well-mannered, decorous Lutheran, I’d be shouting, “Amen! Preach, sister!”
So I did what might be considered a very Lutheran thing. I went home and looked it up. […] (https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2025/02/16/beatitudes/)
Turns out that Luther indeed wrote a commentary on the Magnificat, praising Mary for her humility as a “simple maiden, tending the cattle and doing the housework, and doubtless esteemed no more than any poor maidservant today, who does as she is told around the house.” Turns out he was a man of his time (but I do have to wonder what his wife Katie von Bora thought about that last remark; by all accounts, she managed the Luther household and managed it very well because she had a better head for business than her husband did). Can that thought be squared with the vision of Mary’s canticle? I think it can. But I digress.
The other link is nothing if not political. It’s to a journal I wrote about “Illinois Nazis”; the famous scene in “Blues Brothers” in which John Bekushhi and Dan Aekroyd drive a groupo of neo-Nzis off a bridge in a Chicago city park; and Gov, Pritzker’s State of the State address. He said in part, invoking the spirit if not the exact words of German pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous confession::
I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room [the Illinois House chamber] with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.
I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next?
All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it. […]
Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame. (https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2025/02/20/pritzker/)
After the uproar over the planned neo-Nazi march in 1978, Pritzker worked with a group of Holocaust survivors to secure funding for Skokie’s holocaust museum. Drawing on that experience, he added:
Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.
If that was a clarion call — and I think it was — it’s one I heard loud and clear, The question on my mind now is how I answer the call and where it fits into my spiritual journey.
— Pete
PS/ I promised to send you only two links, but here are two more. Consider them FYI (optional):
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTT1qUswYL0 The Blues Brothers (1980) – Nazis Take a Dive Scene
- https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/2025/02/15/lutheran-immigration/ Presiding bishop urges Lutherans to stand up for basic Christian ethics in the face of government hostility to churches, migrants
[Uplinked March 11, 2025]
Ordinary Time 