A Word for Inauguration Day

A Homeboy's prayer, how not to despise the other

Usha Vance, wife of Vice President J. D. Vance, and President Trump

To hear the related 5-minute audio file that I uploaded today as my Morning Journal flash briefing for Alexa devices, please click on the play button:

Acatamiento

I wrote a poem, “Inauguration Day,” before I watched the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. You can hear it by clicking on the Morning Journal link above. I would not have written the same poem if I’d waited until after the event.

Instead of printing the poem here, I will share a word from Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention program in the world.

Acatamiento is a Spanish word that Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, wrote in his spiritual journal in 1544. It gets translated as “affectionate awe.”

Father Boyle’s book, Cherished Belonging: The Healing Power of Love in Divided Times, was published 76 days ago on Election Day.

Though based in Los Angeles, Homeboy’s center has not been damaged by the wild fires. But this week-old “Thought for the Day” video contains a moving reference to the fires. Joseph, a member of the Homeboy community says:

It’s been very hard for me to watch as people’s childhood homes are no longer standing and the sense of helplessness I feel when it seems there’s not much we can do. I guess some might feel like we’re not being affected, if it wasn’t our home that burned down. But could you imagine if it was this place that caught fire? … Say a prayer for our extended family that stretches across the city of Los Angeles, because at the end of the day there is no us and them. It’s just us.

“Our practice is about quieting the mind and opening the heart,” Father Boyle writes in Cherished Belonging.

He recalled being a novice in 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. The director of novices, Leo Rock, was in the front row every evening during the Watergate Hearings. Leo was not shy in his critique of Nixon, but on August 8 he did not join in the jubilation when Nixon gave his brief resignation announcement. Instead, Leo wiped a tear from his eye. Father Boyle later asked why.

He told me that, in an instant, all he saw was a broken man, and that was his point of connection. To become wholesome, we need living connection with the whole. Acatamiento looks like this. We welcome our wound, and it keeps us from despising the other. Connective tissue.

I thought I was done with this post, so I read it just now to Darlene.

“What does that have to do with the inauguration?” she asked. “What do you really think about it?”

Here goes:

I do not want to spend the next four years hating Donald Trump.

With Joe Biden sitting behind him, the President spoke in a low, calm voice. But his words were harsh.

“From this moment on, America’s decline is over,” he said. He declared today Liberation Day. He said God saved his life from a wold-be assassin’s bullet in order to make America great again. He stated that henceforth the Gulf of Mexico will be named the Gulf of America. He promised to take back the Panama Canal and to plant the Stars and Strips on Mars. He said, “We will recognize only two genders: male and female.”

“Here I am,” he said. “The American people have spoken.”

I was barely able to sit through the entire ceremony, much less tap into acatamiento. Affectionate awe was in short supply.

I hope I find some soon.