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The Catholic Church is now expending huge amounts of effort and time changing words in the liturgy back to the “original Latin” (which Jesus never spoke and was actually the language of his oppressors), while the world is facing unparalleled disasters at every level. The sanctuary is the only world where the clergy still have a bit of control, it seems. So again the meticulous navigating of our small river surpasses ever diving into the Big River. It makes me wonder if Jesus' first definition of church as “two or three gathered in my name” is not still the best way to avoid these sorts of illusions (Matthew 18:20). So many people I know who are doing truly helpful and healing ministry find their primary support from a couple of enlightened friends—and only secondarily, if at all, from the larger organization. Larger institutions might well provide the skeleton, but the muscle, meat, and miracles invariably happen at the local level.
AARP Falling Upward
Richard Rohr
Bannon was still worried, though he saw some positives in the Trump-Pence strategy. They were using Pence well, Bannon believed, running him essentially on a circuit of states—at least 23 appearances in Pennsylvania; 25 in Ohio; 22 in North Carolina; 15 in Iowa; 13 in Florida; eight in Michigan; seven in Wisconsin. The theme was for Pence to campaign as if he were running for governor of those states, focusing on local issues and what a President Trump in Washington could do for the state. “And every now and then we’d pull him [Pence] out to Jesus-land,” Bannon said. Trump, he said, was essentially running as county supervisor in 41 large population centers. Bannon was amazed that the Clinton campaign did not use President Obama strategically. Obama had won Iowa in 2008 and 2012 by six to 10 points. “He never goes.” Clinton never went to Wisconsin in the general election. She didn’t talk enough about the economy. “When I saw her go to Arizona, I said, they’ve lost their fucking minds,” Bannon said. “What are they doing?”
The president’s next venture in preparing public opinion for the proclamation resting in his desk was more successful. On August 19 the New York Tribune published an open letter to Lincoln by editor Horace Greeley titled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions.” Greeley chastised the president for “a mistaken deference to Rebel Slavery” and urged him to heed the prayers of twenty million loyal Northerners for the abolition of slavery. In an unusual public response, the commander in chief carefully explained: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union by not freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because it helps save the Union.” In closing Lincoln said that these statements represented “my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.”46 This presidential letter was a stroke of genius. To conservatives who insisted that preservation of the Union must be the sole purpose of the war, Lincoln said that such was his purpose. To radicals who wanted him to proclaim emancipation in order to save the Union, he hinted that he might do so. To everyone he made it clear that partial or even total emancipation might become necessary (as of course he thought it had) to accomplish the purpose on which they all agreed. The same intentional ambiguity characterized Lincoln’s interview on September 13 with a group of clergymen who presented him with a petition for emancipation. This event took place at a time of what John Hay described as “fearful anxiety” and “almost unbearable tension” for the commander in chief, who was preoccupied with military crises in Maryland and Kentucky. Lincoln agreed with the delegation that “slavery is the root of the rebellion” and that “emancipation would help us in Europe, and convince them that we are incited by something more than ambition…. And then unquestionably it would weaken the rebels by drawing off their laborers, which is of great importance.” On the other hand, with Confederate armies on the offensive, “what good would a proclamation of emancipation from me do?…I do not want to issue a document that the whole world will necessarily see must be inoperative…. Would my word free the slaves, when I cannot even enforce the Constitution in the rebel states?”47
Tried by War
James M. McPherson
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