On Friday, Nov. 1 — All Saints’ Day — I sang at the students’ Mass at my local church to honor my mother, whose death anniversary it was, and to savor one of my favorite hymns, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “For All the Saints.”
The pastor informed the congregation that a day earlier the seventh graders had dressed up as the saints whose names they’d be taking for Confirmation. There was a Cecilia, a George and several Peters and Pauls. (What, no Catherine and her wheel?)
But I digress. In a last ditch effort to engage the kids, not the most loquacious bunch, during his homily, the pastor asked about their favorite sports figures. One child piped up with “Michael Jordan,” to which the pastor replied, “Oh, he played a long time ago.”
And right there, he lost a teachable moment. Those of us of a certain vintage, which these kids definitely weren’t, will remember the 1997 NBA Finals, in which Jordan, sick as a dog, nonetheless powered the Chicago Bulls to a victory and ultimately a championship over the Utah Jazz in game five, known as “the Flu Game.”
Jordan was a transcendent player, one who met the moment. And that’s what the saints were and represent — ordinary men and women who met extraordinary challenges. Francis renouncing wealth to serve the poor and found an order. Joan, heeding her voices and rallying the French to victory over the British. The Rev. Maximilian Kolbe changing places with another prisoner at Auschwitz and accepting his death there. These weren’t perfect people, but they were great when they had to be.
I’ve been thinking a lot about transcendence in sports and politics — two fields in which the quantitative and the qualitative collide. Jordan as well as the New York Yankees teams of the 1920s, late’ 30s, ‘40s,’50s, early ’ 60s and ’late 70s and ’90s were transcendent. The current Yankees — led by a pair of Aarons, the overrated manager Aaron Boone and the slugging centerfielder Aaron Judge, whose streakiness serves the long regular season but not the short, pressure-packed post-season — are not transcendent, as their World Series performance against the Los Angeles Dodgers made painfully clear. This is unlike the New York Mets, who punched above their weight class in losing to the Dodgers for the National League pennant.
And that brings us to perhaps the salient point about transcendence — it doesn’t necessarily ensure victory. Many of the saints led what we would consider to be unsuccessful lives. They often died horrible, humiliating deaths. But when they were called to a challenge, they did not shrink.
Kamala Harris tried to be a transcendent figure. Even though she never mentioned her race or her gender, she would’ve been the first woman and the first woman of color to be president. We can go down the laundry list of what she and the Democrats did wrong, including not reading the room of the rural working-class, who are aggrieved at being forgotten economically. (But weren’t they aggrieved in 2016 when Trump won? Why didn’t he solve their economic and immigration problems then?)
The Dems, in their clueless political correctness — never ask me what my pronouns are; they’re the same as the august English language — and their endless virtue signaling, never got it. But then even if they had, the majority of voters didn’t want Harris or President Joe Biden. They wanted Donald J. Trump, the once and future president, with all his Mexican-rapist, Revolutionary-airport, Sharpied-hurricane, pet-eating Haitian, Covid-slaying Lysol baggage. And they wanted him for a reason that few understand and that has only dawned on me in recent years.
America is not, if it ever was, an exceptional country or a transcendent one. Oh, yes, there was the Revolution (more about the British losing than the colonists winning); the Civil War (basically a numbers game and a transcendent President Abraham Lincoln); the Great Depression and World War Ii (mostly about President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill respectively). But with the exception of the John F. Kennedy Administration, which emphasized excellence in every field, this is not an aspirational country in any way except one: Many people aspire to have as much money as possible and to do the least amount of work to attain that goal so that they can spend all their time LOL-ing on their iPhones and vaping pot. If you have an education, particularly in the arts and humanities, forget it. It’s “Lord of the Flies” time, minus William Golding’s writing.
People may have voted for Trump based on their concerns about the economy and immigration. But do not discount the fact that Trump allows and even celebrates MAGA’s lack of transcendence, its narcissistic mediocrity.
“True instruction is this,” the Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus said: “To learn to wish that each thing should come to pass as it does.”
How are we to square this advice with what has happened, with what is going to happen, to this country? Epictetus doesn’t mean that we should revel in misfortune, but rather that we must accept adversity if we are to transcend it.
For my part, I am going to rededicate myself to education and my feminist principles. I’m going to find and spread joy — not the magical thinking Democrats had about the Harris campaign, which in the end only delivered false hope — but actual, radiant joy.
I’m going to survive and thrive and find where I belong, even if only to myself.
I’m going to call on the saints and angels and ancestors in this the month of all souls to bear witness.
I am going to continue to write and read history and biography to see how others have transcended challenging moments.
And I am going to learn, as I have in my studies of Stoic philosophy, how to wish that each thing should happen as it does.
Or in the words of another philosopher, China’s Lao Tzu, I’m going to learn how to “yield and overcome.”
In the next few weeks, I’ll be writing about many of the issues — abortion, the battle of the sexes, education, history — that have divided the electorate and sank the Democrats. Look also for continuing sports/culture posts, including one on the retirement of Rafael Nadal.