The week before I started freshman year of college in California (some time ago), I spent the night with my two girl cousins, sleeping in twin beds with a cot between us. The older of my two cousins, who was in high school, asked me what I thought about the meaning of life. She still poses big questions, probably picking up the trait from her deep-thinking father, my favorite uncle. I told her I thought life was like a clock ticking. The large round dial of her alarm clock glowed on the bedside table between us. “You just have to wait for it to wind down.”
“You don’t really mean that, do you?” she asked.
“I do.” Depressing, I know.
I did attend college that fall and, after dropping out twice, did graduate.
Then I left the United States, hoping never to return. I was furious about the war in Vietnam and about our country preaching democracy at home and toppling governments abroad that didn’t serve our economic interests.
I worked for an anthropologist in Chiapas, Mexico, and made my way south through Central America with friends and eventually southern Colombia, by this time traveling alone. I fell in with some people from the United States, who were making a circuit of Latin America and who urged me to renew my Colombian visa in Ecuador, which wasn’t far away, come back to Colombia and travel some more. Several of my new friends had just been in Chile, where the United States was overthrowing the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende because he was nationalizing key industries.
From that remote spot, I wondered what to do. More than ever, I hated the United States, but I realized it was my country. If I was upset, I should go back and do something about it.
And here’s the part where the Pope and Bernie come in. They’re telling us the same thing — we have a moral responsibility to each other and to this planet.
Bernie, a Jew from Brooklyn, who, in his own words, is not particularly religious, features on his presidential campaign website a direct quote from the Pope: “we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. – Pope Francis.” (link)
During his closing remarks at Democratic Debate #1, Bernie asked all of us to take action: “Nobody up here can address the major crises facing our country unless millions of people begin to stand up to the billionaire class that has so much power over our economy and our political life.”
Pope Francis has given us the same message. His environmental encyclical in June called on “every person who lives on this planet.” In his public appearance to the crowds outside the U. S. Capitol in September, he reached out to people whether they believe in God or not: “I ask you all please to pray for me and if there are among you any who do not believe or who cannot pray, I ask you please to send good wishes my way.”
Why would the most powerful Christian leader in the world need us, whether we believe or not? He says he has many weaknesses and problems. “I am a sinner too,” he says.
He’s also saying everyone matters. Not just the great, the powerful and the righteous. Our voices make a difference too.
Bernie and the Pope are pleading with us to take action, to get involved and to make the world a more just, equitable and sustainable place.
And I’ve realized that fighting for what I believe in has given me a reason for being here.