Carol Lee Flinders on Being Yourself and Ending the Death Penalty
There are so many things a guy has to do to be elected president …
He’s got to eat the Philly cheesesteak; he’s pretty much obliged to drop the final “g” in words like “working,” “talking,” and “praying;” and he has to make it clear that he’s “pro-death penalty.”
And if he can do all three during the same stump speech, so much the better.
But once the election is locked, his scope for choice opens back up again. He can change. Especially if from the very beginning of his campaign he has encouraged his supporters to see hope as contingent upon change.
He doesn’t have to conceal healthy eating habits now, any more than he does his daily stint at the gym.
He doesn’t have to go on trying to sound so folksy.
And having heard himself say, emphatically and forcefully, “America doesn’t torture,” he can begin to think out loud—to himself, and to the rest of us—about whether capital punishment is finally any more compatible with American values than torture.
He might even ask us to consider—as many have—whether execution isn’t in fact a form of torture.
He could certainly call attention to the fact—publicly—that more than half the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty in law or practice, and that among those who have not, our companion nations include North Korea, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran, Pakistan, and China. He could add that nobody’s been able to demonstrate that capital punishment is a deterrent to violent crime, and that it’s actually a lot more expensive to execute people than sentence them to life in prison.
Fact is, I suspect he will. Because, President-elect Obama, you have moved from strength to strength to strength. Thrilled as I am that you will be our president, I am in particular grateful because my own son is among the millions of young people whose life feels dramatically altered by the fact of your election.
If there were one thing I would wish for you, it would be for you to be able to keep half an hour a day sacrosanct for whatever spiritual practice allows you to sustain the poise, the calm, the depth, and great good humor you have displayed thus far. Maybe because I’ve been thinking about the death penalty, something Sister Helen Prejean has written comes to mind: “I find that I can’t function if I don’t have that sense of being at the center of myself and in the soul of my soul, so that I am truly operating from the inside out. And it’s important to be very self-directed, because it is so possible to be caught on other people’s eddies in the river.”
May you find your way to the center of yourself, the soul of your soul, and live and work always from there.
Blessings.
Carol Lee Flinders, Ph.D., is the author of Enduring Grace; At the Root of This Longing; Rebalancing the World; and Enduring Lives: Portraits of Women and Faith in Action. She is a lecturer at Holy Names University’s Sophia Center.
