A Pastor Talking About Politics
One of the most treasured memories of my life was a many years long conversation via handwritten letters with my grandfather. Growing up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, I probably saw him 3-4 times a year, as he and my grandma lived just up the turnpike in Rutherford, New Jersey. When you’re in elementary school, most people are pretty tall, but he was one of the tallest people I knew—not only in height, but in the sheer gravity of his presence. When he walked into a room, he would usually stop just inside the doorway with a smirk on his face and wait for everyone to give him their attention, which they would. Once it was quiet, he would allow a well-timed pause, and then deliver some kind of funny joke or one-liner. Everyone would laugh, and then return to what they were doing.
They didn’t pay attention because he commanded it. He wasn’t like the teacher in the front of the classroom waiting for everyone to notice that they were waiting for us to quit wasting time and get down to business. They paid attention because he’d earned it. He was simply such a good and kind and genuine person to everyone he encountered that you just couldn’t help but pay attention to him. Sometimes I wonder if he developed the one-liner entrance because of how many people would stop what they were doing and pay attention when he walked in. Did he feel some pressure to do something with the stage once he was on it, perhaps?
I really don’t know how he did it. How did he so effortlessly connect with everybody in the room even though every room he was ever in was crowded? My mom was one of his nine kids. While I lived up there his older kids had 8-9 grandchildren already, while his younger kids still had high school friends coming over. It was constantly a mob scene, yet somehow each individual felt like he was their dad, their grandpa—even for the high school friends, he was their Mr. Strehl. There probably weren’t all that many times that I ever had him all to myself, but it definitely felt like I did every time I saw him. In the end he had 19 grandchildren, and to each of them he was their grandpa.
We moved to Florida in 1986, which obviously put an end to the 3-4 visits per year to Rutherford. You’d think that would have also put an end to that feeling of connection with my grandpa, but the effect was actually the opposite. We’d been down there only a few weeks when he sent me a letter in the mail with some articles about sports. As residents of Rutherford and Philly, we of course were rivals in our choice of NFL teams, the Giants and the Eagles. On top of that, he was a huge Notre Dame fan, but the Philadelphia college sports team options were pretty much limited to Temple, Villanova, and Penn State. He’d generously sent me some articles about how the Giants were better than the Eagles, and how Notre Dame was better than everything else on the planet. (You should have heard him the day that Lou Holtz replied to one of his fan letters…)
The sports correspondence sustained us through my middle school years—I sent him news about my baseball and soccer games, and he sent me news about, well, mostly Notre Dame. (In hindsight, I wonder—was he recruiting me? I think I might start adding that to my personal story. “Yeah, I was recruited by Notre Dame, but picked Florida State instead…”) While Notre Dame was included in all of our correspondence up until the last letter before he died, in high school we got talking about politics.
Though I was born in the waning days of the Nixon Administration, the earliest President I can remember is Ronald Reagan. My parents and paternal grandfather (another giant figure in my life who lived with us both in Philly and in Florida for most of my childhood—but more on him in another blog…) always had the evening news on our little black and white TV as we were setting up for dinner every night in our dining room, and Reagan became, for elementary and middle school aged me, the personification of America itself. To this day I still get this warm, safe feeling whenever I hear his voice, more than three decades later.
I saw him as resilient when he recovered with smiles and jokes from a near assassination. I saw him as strong, because when he took office, it was commonplace to talk about the inevitability of “when we all get nuked,” but it wasn’t anymore after he faced off with the Soviet Union and actually won over and befriended Mikhail Gorbachev. I saw him as reasonable as he engaged in fierce but friendly debate with the Democratic Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neal. I saw him as kind as he comforted the families, the nation, and students like me who would not be getting a lesson from space with teacher Christa McAuliffe after we all watched the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster unfold live on TV.
When the Bush vs. Dukakis election was going on, I was in my freshman year of high school at Palm Bay High. I’d moved on to big kid subjects like history instead of that middle school “social studies,” stuff, and was feeling well equipped to do my part in making the case for a continuation of the Reagan years. When I wrote my grandfather as such, he would have none of it.
I'd espouse the virtues I’d learned from Reagan—limited government, private charity, low taxes, personal responsibility, etc. He’d counter with articles he'd clipped from the Bergen County Record up in New Jersey, and send them to me with commentary about the good that the government could do with the tax dollars that the rich don't need anyway.
I’ve had people tell me that I write letters and emails that are too long, (It’s true—being concise is an area of growth for me, despite the tragic loss of all of the artful words I won’t get to use for the sake of brevity, but I digress…) but that’s because they never saw the letters I wrote to my grandfather about politics. I knew that I would win him over because of my many good points, so I sent them—all of them—to him. I couldn’t wait to get the letter in return that he’d send admitting defeat and thanking me for showing him the light, but it never came.
Don’t get me wrong—plenty more letters came, along with plenty more clipped newspaper articles about the gifts God had sent us in Michael Dukakis and Notre Dame. (Don’t worry—my grandpa eventually forgave Lou Holtz for being a Republican.) The man would not budge, so one day I took it too far. It was after the Bush vs. Clinton election during my freshman year of college when I wrote and told him that there was just nothing else I could do to show him the truth about politics, and so I wasn’t sure it was even worth writing to him anymore.
He was crushed. While I thought of our correspondence as a mission to change his mind, he saw it as a beautiful gift, letting him still connect with his grandson even though I’d moved 1,200 miles away. We stopped writing for a while after that, until one night my mom told me about a conversation she’d had with him. He’d cried as he told her what I’d written, about how I might not write to him anymore, because it had meant so much to him to see me grow up through my improving penmanship and grammar, through my developing logic and ideas, and through my growing ability to write. It all hit me like a ton of bricks.
He had loved me. I had been an idiot.
I’d lain in my bed in my fraternity house for about an hour unable to sleep, thinking about my grandpa and how the last thing he heard from me months and months ago was this mean, condescending lecture still lingering in his heart. I got out of bed and started writing.
I told him about how I’d been an idiot. I told him that surely I was one of very few kids in the world whose grandfather continued writing letters back and forth with him from the 7th grade and on into college. I told him I realized that it was a tremendous gift for a young man to have a person like him invest as much time and energy and thought into his relationship with me. I apologized, and thanked him profusely with all of the many words I could muster for all of his letters, even the ones that repeatedly compared the graduation rates between Florida State and Notre Dame.
My mom called me again a week later. Grandpa had gotten my letter, called her, and cried again—this time as he read her the whole thing over the phone and told her how beautiful it was, and how glad he was to be able to return to our correspondence, which we did. With each letter, we both became more convinced of two things--that we were both writing to a formidable debate partner, and that we were both exceedingly thankful to have each other in our lives, even while 1,200 miles apart in both distance and political point-of-view.
Just after we moved and I started writing to him in 1986, my grandpa told me that he wanted to see three things before he died. He wanted to see Notre Dame win another national championship, he wanted to see the year 2000, and he wanted to meet his great-grandchild.
His hero, Lou Holtz, gave him a Notre Dame championship in 1988. His health began to decline, but he made it to the year 2000, getting to see along with the rest of us that the flying cars we were promised were not quite ready yet (and we’re still waiting…).
As for that third thing, well, Susan and I had gotten married in 1999, and were planning to wait until I finished graduate school before trying to have kids, but perhaps God was getting invested in seeing my grandpa get that third thing. Jenna announced her impending arrival a little sooner than we anticipated, and once again my mom was on the phone to my crying grandpa.
Jenna was born on August 14th, 2001, and my parents got pictures emailed up to my aunt in Rutherford as quickly as possible to show him. While the pictures were great, we knew that it wasn’t the same as getting him to meet her in person. However, you’ll recall that not long after Jenna was born, flying up to the New York area was no longer a very easy thing to do. In fact, we weren’t even sure that 9/11 was the end of the plot to turn America’s airplanes against us, so nobody suggested that we take her up there. In fact, the advice we got was quite the opposite—but we did it anyway. I didn’t know how much longer he had, and after all that we’d shared back and forth from the 7th grade to my last semester of graduate school, there was no way I could deny him that third item on his bucket list. Even though smoke was still billowing up from the World Trade Center as we flew over it to land at Newark Airport, we made sure that just two months after she entered the world, and two years before he left it, my grandpa and his great-granddaughter got to meet, face to face.
I allowed her to wear a non-FSU hat just this once.
Now that I’m the pastor of a church, I’ve been told that no good can come from talking about political issues. I do believe that churches serve the nations in which they reside best when they give voice to the needs of the poor and powerless when sociopolitical forces seem oriented to keep them that way, so sometimes it’s our responsibility to discuss politics and compare the values of Jesus Christ with the values of our culture when they seem to be at odds. However, we live in a politically charged climate, and the quality of our relationships is often decided by the similarity of our voting records. For this reason, it’s true that someone may be prevented from being able to hear what I’m saying about Jesus Christ if in the past I have said something at odds with their views on a political matter.
I admit that I have been caught off guard by how much anger people have expressed when I said or wrote something that was out of line with their political views. Perhaps that was naïve.
Talking about differences of political opinion helped me to learn to love and trust and befriend my grandpa, and so perhaps my instincts are to talk about them with the people whom I want to love and trust and befriend. It hasn’t been working very well lately. I don’t want to believe that the letters to my grandpa have hindered me as a pastor, but maybe they did.
Jesus put aside the perks of his parentage in order to connect with us, but he never forgot it. Perhaps that’s the journey we must take to navigate the today’s interpersonal climate. How much can we put aside who we are and where we come from in order to connect with another, without ever forgetting it? Or does the cost of putting aside who we are and where we come from exceed the cost of not connecting with them? There are certainly no easy answers there.
As I think about it, bringing up the tough political issues of the day in letters to my grandfather over years and years didn’t get us any easy answers that swung the debate one way or another. It did show me, however, that he sure did love me. It showed me that he entrusted himself to me. It showed me that he offered me enduring friendship.
Who knows… maybe in the end the letters to my grandpa left me more eager to love and discuss politics, and therefore made me less effective as a pastor. I retire in 18 more years, so the jury is probably still out, but no matter how much harder it is for me to become the pastor my congregations want or need, or how much longer it will take because of those letters to my grandpa, I hope they can forgive me. He was totally worth it. —MH
