Tikkun Magazine, January/February 2008

The Presidential Primaries

Dear Senator Edwards

by Tracey Lind

You're right, of course, when you write in your Plan to Build One America, that "especially now, our country needs to hear the truth from its leaders." And applaud your platform planks: End the War in Iraq, Guarantee Universal Health Care, Support Middle-Class Families, Teach Our Children, Achieve Energy Independence and Fight Global Warming, and Revitalize Rural America. If our nation could achieve those goals, there's little doubt that we would pass on a better life to our children.

As you travel around the country promoting your plan, however, I hope that you will also answer another, much deeper need of the American people. Especially now—after years of a devastating war, escalating environmental ruin, a chasm between rich and poor that has grown nearly unbridgeable, and prejudice that has been used to create wedges between minority groups for political gain—Americans need to hear more than just solid policy proposals and workable plans. We need a prophetic voice in our national political debate. We need to know that the things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us. We need a presidential candidate who, in the words of the prophet Isaiah, will help bring about the day when the wolf shall dwell with the lamb and the leopard shall lie down with the kid.

Recently on the American Public Media program Speaking of Faith, evangelical Christian leader Jim Wallis said that one of the obstacles we have to ending poverty is that we do not know poor people. He said that "until poor people are our friends, not just the objects of our concern on the liberal side or the people who are to blame for their own misfortunes on the conservative side," we will never be able to address the root causes of poverty or have a hope of ending its scourge.

I think that Wallis's approach is right, not just for poverty, but also for war, health care, global warming, lesbian and gay rights, immigration policy, civil rights, and all of the other issues you lift up in your platform. We need a leader who will tell us the truth about these problems, to be sure. But even more, on the 2008 campaign trail we need a leader who knows that we will only be truly unified when we have listened to one another's hopes, dreams, and pain, and allowed ourselves to be transformed by that experience into people who embody true justice, love, and mercy for all of God's creation.

Late in 2007, We Believe Ohio, a group of more than 100 clergy and committed laypeople from Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions, issued a call to declare Ohio a "political sleaze-free zone." The petition, now signed by nearly 1100 Ohioans and available at www.webelieveohio.org, asks candidates to run positive campaigns in Ohio, and we invite you to be the first presidential candidate to sign. In calling for an end to political sleaze in Ohio, we have practical concerns, of course: we want the inevitable political din that will soon descend upon our state to be as focused as possible on giving Ohioans real information about the issues that face our state and our country.

But even more than wanting a campaign that gives us real political choices, We Believe Ohio has profoundly spiritual reasons for seeking to end the politics of polarization and its damaging focus on deeply divisive issues. We know, as leaders of diverse faith communities, that only when we can sit down together and talk, without invective and mudslinging and attack, do we have any hope of healing the deep wounds and divisions from which we all suffer.

Even with the right leadership—even with a prophet in the Oval Office—we won't overcome our divisions quickly, and the work will not be easy or light Myles Horton, the great labor organizer and civil rights activist, tells a story in his autobiography about the backlog, the log that is set at the back of the fireplace to keep the fire burning. According to Horton, the owner of a southern plantation once promised his slaves that the Christmas holiday would last as long as the backlog in the master's house burned. The slaves knew that Christmas meant less work and more food, and so by planning and ingenuity, they managed to find a backlog that would burn for a very long time.

To be one in America today—to know that the things that unite us are much greater and more profound than the things that divide us, to listen to one another and be transformed by what we hear—we need a backlog that will burn for a very long time, lighting the way to a place of peace and justice for all God's people. As you continue your campaign, I pray that you will be that light.

Tracey Lind is the Dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, convener of We Believe Ohio—Greater Cleveland, and author of Interrupted by God: Glimpses from the Edge (The Pilgrim Press, 2004).

Source Citation

Lind, Tracey. 2008. Dear Senator Edwards. Tikkun 23(1):37.