Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.
Why I Think about Retiring to My Vineyard
As CBS begins streaming Picard this month, I find a kindred soul in the old, bald hero of Maxia. I also understand the desire to retreat from institutions to which you’ve dedicated your life when they become so unrecognizable and so disappointing that the despair feels overwhelming, a life’s work feels wasted.
Thirty years ago, while Star Trek: The Next Generation exploded to syndicated success on UHF stations across America and beyond, I experienced the first stirrings of a vocation to understand our politics through the lens of Roman Catholicism and to live my Catholic faith as an academic vocation devoted to the study of politics. No day has passed in those thirty years when I have not reflected at length on the same subject.
If I am being completely honest, something in the idealism of Star Trek probably fueled my vocation, as strange as that may seem to say about Gene Roddenberry’s secular utopia (though we could have an interesting conversation about the chapel seen aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise in “Balance of Terror”…). But the sum of my three decades of reflections comes to this — the church and our politics are about the same thing. Our church and state are and should be separate. But they describe the same aspiration from different directions.
That aspiration is found in the teachings of the Second Vatican Council as much as in the Constitution of the United States. Vatican II asserts the primacy of the baptismal vocation. The church is a community of the baptized, first and foremost. Every baptized person counts equally before God, regardless of whether she or he is a member of a religious community, a layperson, priest, bishop, or pope. In the same way, the Constitution demands a “republican form of government.” A republic (respublica, in Latin) means a state that belongs to the people, all of them, equally. The government of a republic is a public trust. Our government is different from other forms of government because it is not for the profit of a monarch or an oligarchic class. The people are the owners. That is the characteristically Roman idea that sits underneath both the Roman Catholic Church and the Constitution of the United States: we are embedded in a community.
What all of this means is that our church (in Greek, ekklesia) and our politics are about building the same kind of community, one where all of us share responsibility for one another and the whole community together. Especially when we recall the origin of the word politics “(the Greek politeia which means “what the people share in common”), we come to see quickly that seeing the church and the state both in this way is important. It teaches us something about how we should live. Our ecclesiological understanding of the church tutors us to be good citizens. Being good, republican citizens makes us responsible, active members of the church.
But what if all of that no longer were true?
What if we have drunk so deeply the poison of partisanship for so long that we no longer notice when the state becomes a private fiefdom for those in power? What if corruption and self-dealing become normalized, and so does attacking those on the margins? What happens when all of that begins to seem so normal that we no longer react to it? We accept it — perhaps, happily — because our side is prevailing.
And, what happens when that poisonous partisanship becomes part of church life, too? Where we only wish to worship or otherwise be in the company of those who see the church and the world the way we do? When incredible lies or deceptions are told to discredit some other faction in the One Body of Christ in order to gain the upper hand? What happens when all of the possibility for renewal during a Francis papacy itself becomes the glaring point of division, blunting all possibility for renewal because we cannot stop an argument that is not even about renewal anymore — it is about who should win because we don’t like each other very much?
I’m reminded of something Jean-Luc Picard said once —
When one has been angry for a very long time, one gets used to it. And it becomes comfortable, like… like old leather. And finally… becomes so familiar that one can’t ever remember feeling any other way.
Isn’t that where we all are now, together?
And, if that’s even close to being true, then what is left to do? If you’ve spent your life trying to promote a different vision, as I have, it is hard not for some old admiral’s thundering, “This isn’t your house anymore, Jean-Luc! Go home!!” to land with a dispiriting thud. The Roman Catholic Church and our American political community could not be rejecting that other way of seeing things more definitively.
I was reading a 1973 interview with the Italian writer and filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini, recently. Pasolini came to Rome from the north after World War II ended, and he became enchanted by the old city’s dirty charm. He lived in Rome long enough to see it gentrify, become a wealthy, global destination. By 1973 Pasolini had rejected this new Rome altogether, saying, “It has changed, and I don’t want to understand it anymore.”
I am unsure what to expect as the Francis papacy winds down toward what seems like inevitable schism. I am unsure what to expect from a 2020 election, no matter who wins. I’m unsure even what to expect from Picard. But I recognize myself in Pasolini and in Picard. It didn’t need to be like this. It shouldn’t be like this. And, it’s not what I signed up for.
Perhaps someone will show up at my dusty vineyard one day while I’m ruminating over another glass of wine and lead me on a new adventure. Maybe, “The past is the past, and the future is yet to be written.” It would be nice if there could be a redemptive arc for the church and the world, like on a television show.
But, as tempting as it is to end here on a note of, “Make it so,” I’ll reserve judgment. The best I can do is to say, “I’ll be in my Ready Room.”