Seeking Hope

Pope Francis is visiting America for the first time. On Friday night’s Newshour, political commentators David Brooks and Mark Shields took up the subject of his visit.

I have been struck lately by the entrance of religion into their discussion. They talked about the reaction of the families of those killed in the Charleston shootings. They talked about the spiritual depth of Jimmy Carter’s response to his brain cancer. And on Friday, they talked rhapsodically about the Pope’s visit. Here is David Brooks:

The first thing we’re going to see is our countrymen, thousands, millions of them moved by faith, their eyes looking to heaven, their heart warmed by God’s love. And we’re going to see that in public. And we’re going to see that in tens of millions of people. And that will be a moment of seeing faith in a way we rarely see it in this country in public.

 

And, secondly, we will see the example of the man. The message is the person. It’s the way he conducts himself. His love for the poor is not out of any self-congratulatory. He — whether you’re Jewish, Muslim, atheist, whatever, he is the embodiment of the Christian virtues that I think we all admire, the — seeing the meekest, seeing the poorest, seeing the lowest, and lifting them up, and seeing the brokenness in people, and then lifting them up with joy.

 

And so, to me, it will be a theater of spiritual — a spiritual theater more than a political theater. And I suspect tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people’s lives will be changed, in the way that politics can never change them, from within. Their lives will be transformed because they will be at this visit. And they will be moved by something they had never felt or only have felt weakly before.

 

And to me, that’s just a seismic event, whatever happens to our political culture.

I hate to say it, but the Pope is a mere human.

Jesus is the one who, when lifted up, will draw all men to himself. Jesus is the only one worthy of adulation like this. Jesus is the one who changes hearts. I am mystified by the hyperbole in Brooks’s comments — except that it seems both of these men are searching for something, reaching beyond their normal scope of “political theatre” for something to inspire and provide hope.