A Reflection for President's Day

Life beyond polarization, fear, and contempt.

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Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, with President’s Day just around the corner. Our guest author is Duncan Newcomer, a writer living in Belfast Maine. He is author of “30 Days With Abraham Lincoln: Quiet Fire” from Front Edge Press and “Quiet Fire: The Spiritual Life of Abraham Lincoln” from Santos Press.
Website: https://www.lincolnsquietfire.com/

Duncan writes:

Can you imagine a world without polarization, fear or contempt? I’ll take these one at a time.

First, we need to deal with the attraction of polarization. It is simply the deep and ancient desire for there to be truth, even an absolute truth. There have been and will be multiple crusades for that hope.

Yet what does the landscape look like when and if we chop down that one true tree?

Frankly, it feels bleak. It can seem like the empty and dangerous world of moral relativism. A wasteland.

One unique gift of Abraham Lincoln to our American life is that, while he was a wholly de-polarized being, his mind and body was absorbed in moral commitment. That was his whole temperament.

Lincoln had the fundamental gift of seeing two sides to every issue and one side to the moral resolution.

Whether it was Reason, or Law, or The Living God, throughout his life his was able to perceive and tolerate two-sided thinking because he was a unified good and humble person.

Most of his opponents were the opposite, arrogant and narrow-minded scattered believers in either transactional morality or militant believers in one absolute truth. Both lifted up and sanctified the battle cry of one freedom. Lincoln simply never went for one truth, as he made prophetically clear in his Second Inaugural. Rather he spoke awesomely of one moral force which he could not help but see in terms of Shakespearian humanity and Biblical affirmations of justice and the Divine Will.

Second, we need to find our way beyond political fear. The upshot of dominance is fear, the insecurity of the loser. As any follower of sports knows, everyone eventually is on a losing side. If not this year, then next or soon.

There are very few systems of dominance that don’t end up breeding massive fear. Interestingly, the dictatorship of Henry VIII, so much like contemporary authoritarian regimes, was a test case in state fear. It was not just women he be-headed, it was the church, the universities, and other landed elites, and the law.

What is so interesting about the spiritual life of Lincoln is that he was a human being that found life beyond fear. Certainly he knew sorrow and loss, certainly anger and anxiety over events. But his version of fear was the trembling dread that the theologian Kierkegaard perceived, what life would be without God. The only thing that Lincoln feared was the potential loss of the esteem of his fellowman. That, and in the end even that fear gave way to his fear that his word to God to see Emancipation and the war through was greater than his fear of any one man or men. He became a man for all seasons, if not eventually theologically so.

Finally, in a life without the loss of morality, and not in the presence of fear, Lincoln had no contempt. Whether it was the ant, whose life he proclaimed to be as a precious to it as ours is to us, even as a boy… to the wayward brother of the South whose sugar-high thinking simply did not get how important a democratic republic was to the future of humanity. Lincoln never rolled his eyes, or sneered, or laughed at his fellow human beings. Or animals for that matter.

A former president recently said, “When people feel uncertain they look to leaders who are strong and wrong not weak and right.”

Lincoln was strong and right. That’s the point.

On the 217th anniversary of Lincoln’s birthday, let yourself imagine a world without polarization, fear or contempt.