A Binary Meditation: The Two Standards

On this day in 2009, Barack Obama was being inaugurated as president of the United States of America. I wasn’t watching, I was on retreat at Eastern Point on the Massachusetts coast, wrapped in 30 days of silence making the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. No TV, no newspapers, no internet. No conversation. 

Reading the news about today’s events, I found myself thinking about one of those meditations, called the Two Standards. I pulled out my journal from the retreat to look at what I had written about that meditation. It is, in fact, the mediation I was making on January 20, sixteen years ago. 

Ignatius asks you to imagine two armies arrayed on a great plain, their standards snapping in the wind. On one side, Satan. On the other, Jesus. Choose, says Ignatius. Easy, you think. Think again, says Ignatius. Choose riches, choose honors, choose to be puffed up with pride in what you have accomplished. Or. Choose to risk being stripped of whatever you have — wealth, health, positions, honors. Choose the humble. This is the binary that matters, not the binary that the new administration wants to enforce. Choose. 

This is not the prosperity Gospel. This is not a stance that bulldozes the encampments of the unhoused or vilifies the immigrant or fails to provide for the millions of children in the US — and in the world — who are hungry.  This is a choice to reverence our LGBTQ+ brothers and sisters (and daughters and sons) as we reverence Christ. This is a choice for peace.

I chose. To echo poet and priest Daniel Berrigan SJ, “Know where you stand, and stand there.” I know where I stand. I intend to stand there, for the next four years and beyond. 

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“Not the goods of the world, but God. 

Not riches, but God. 

Not honors, but God. 

Not distinction, but God. 

Not dignities, but God. 

Not advancement, but God. 

God always and in everything.” — St. Vincent Pallotti

Photo is of my bed in the shelter my parish hosts for unhoused families. I don’t so much stand there as I occasionally sleep there.