Robert Kennedy’s To Seek a Newer World reflects his growing discomfort with the way things were trending in America and abroad. It’s the roadmap Bobby would have taken, had he lived to win the presidency. He did not live, and there’s the pity, and yet he does.
Bobby was no saint. Occasionally ruthless, he even served for a time, at his nefarious father’s behest, as assistant counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy’s infamous anti-communist committee. Yet, Bobby had a capacity for growth, right in the public eye, as few politicians ever do. He investigated, pondered, analyzed, and changed course, drawing us onwards with him. Today, when the world seems, again, to be going to hell in a hand basket, with all of us complicit in the planet’s undoing, Bobby’s model is tonic.
It was the courage to confront the errors of our ways and the losses in our lives that humanized Bobby Kennedy. Victim though he was, he was also triumphant, for he embodied the tragic vision of Aeschylus: “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”
Moving, now, toward the November election, and slouching toward our collective future, we all have regret and shame on our hands, and yet, as Bobby would have had us remember, we can change, and we must, and it can be for the better.
I am praying for you now Ellie.
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Me too. Marilyn
ReplyDeleteAlong with my prayers, here's a Madeleine L'Engle quote that I love. "What about prayer? Surely the prayers have sustained me, are sustaining me. Perhaps there will be unexpected answers to these prayers, answers I may not even be aware of for years. But they are not wasted. They are not lost. I do not know where they have gone, but I believe that God holds them, hand out-stretched to receive them like precious pearls."
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