Modest Expectations of Great Things

There shall be showers of blessing;

Showers of blessing we need.

Mercy drops ’round us are falling,

But for the showers we plead.

I sang this old gospel song on a recent visit to Iowa, and it surely spoke a tantalizing hope to the drought-weary farmers in the congregation. By that August Sunday any showers that might come were likely too late to make much difference in this season’s crops. But they would, if they were sufficient, give hope for next year. In drought, a few drops of rain evaporate in the dust they stir up; what’s needed for a blessing are steady, gentle showers.

The song and its refrain have come into my mind at unexpected moments ever since. And I’ve wondered about the yearning for spiritual showers, which is the kind of showers the song is really about.

A shower of the spirit can wash away sin and guilt, of course; it can signal the arrival of new possibilities. But it can also, if it comes "too much-too fast" cloud truth about ourselves, make us feel superior to others, or justify our ongoing wrong-headedness. A shower can impair our vision, as anyone who has driven into a sudden thunderstorm knows. I am cautious around spiritual showers.

I do think sometimes I need to be more aware of and grateful for the drops of mercy - the forgiveness, the love, the peace, the justice - that fall around me every day. I need to reach out my hand or stick out my tongue and feel and taste the smaller mercies that are all around me, and worry less about the supposedly greater blessings that are not. I might learn that a few well-placed and gratefully-received mercy drops are all I need...and all I need to offer to others. Just learning that could be blessing enough.

And furthermore, I plan to vote for _____, because...

Fairly complete honesty forces me to admit that as far as I can tell, when it comes to “truth telling” at conventions (see my previous blog), the Democrats are only slightly better than the Republicans. I don’t know if they told any outright lies like Paul Ryan’s story of the GM plant, but their “shadings” of fact and of what actually happened and when and as the result of whose deeds and misdeeds seem to have followed close on those of the their counterparts in Tampa. Pilate was whispering his eternal question in speakers’ ears in both arenas.

(By the way, the most annoying thing the Democrats did last week was insert “God” into their platform. That was a cheap shot at the Holy One, worthy of another blog, maybe someday.)

I think a purist mind in politics is impossible to maintain. I excuse no one; since I am a Democrat most of the time I’d like to see that party do better. I even emailed someone at the Convention’s web site and chastised them not only for their misrepresentations but also for their silence on deficit/debt issues. Their response? “Send money to US!”

I think two things:

1) Politics is about deciding who you believe, even when they are not telling the truth. Put more baldly, it’s about whose lies you want to believe and whose half-truths you want to trust.

2) In the end, we rely on promises made in campaigns to capture our votes. That’s not as small as it sounds, because the promises politicians make are enfolded in the narrative they tell about and the vision and hope they have for our nation…and,

…at the end of these two weeks, I think the Democrats tell the truer overall narrative: we got into trouble economically because of the poor stewardship of our nation’s finances during Republican administrations (particularly W’s), and because of the deregulation of financial institutions the Republicans constantly push for. It’s really hard to deny those facts, and they are recurring facts.

Further I think the Democrats have a corner on the hope and vision thing: they more widely represent the wild and often unwieldy and marvelous human diversity of our nation, and are therefore far more likely to govern in a way that keeps us together rather than tears us apart. And, very important to me, I think the only real chance of our facing up to the environmental crisis is, for now, in the hands of the Democrats, small as that chance is.

And since I generally want to believe Democrats (whether they are in fact always truthful or not), and since I generally much prefer their vision for our nation over that of the Republicans, I will vote for Obama/Biden and (here in Ohio) for Senator Sherrod Brown.

There you have it.