Our Political Crisis Requires a Spiritual Solution
And he arose, and rebuked the wind and said unto the sea, Peace, be still.
And the wind ceased, and there was a great calm.” Mark 4:39
As I was giving a talk earlier this year on my book Chasing Peace, I was asked what advice it offered for facing a political crisis.
The question was bound to come up. We were at Politics & Prose, a beloved bookstore in Northwest Washington, DC. It was the third week of the second Trump presidency. And while Chasing Peace is a spiritual memoir that doesn’t deal directly with politics, I am a former White House speechwriter. For me, the spiritual is the political.
A tornado of hatred has formed in our country, I said, and it’s been building for decades. How fast the winds spin, how far they reach, how long they last, and what they destroy all depend on how much hatred we add to this storm.
The urgent call on us is to find a way to manage our emotional pain without giving way to hatred. If we can do it, the benefits are enormous. We protect ourselves from our own hatred. We can better comfort and protect the people we love. We can deny the tornado more fuel. And we can act in a way that can heal.
But the follow-up question came: How can we not hate when innocent, defenseless people are being hurt?
Fantastic question. The answer is in understanding hatred. Hatred is a momentary pain-reliever, an energy booster, and a mood-enhancer. It gives us a beguiling feeling of power, and that tricks us into thinking it’s part of the answer.
But hatred at its core is a flight from feeling. When we hate, we’re running away from our emotional pain—and the only safe response is to embrace the pain. Don’t resist it. Don’t run from it. Face it. Feel it. Accept it.
In my most frequent spiritual practice, I stop. I get still. I let go. I become loose. I get soft and defenseless. And I try to open up to the excruciating feeling without clenching or flinching.
This is tricky to describe because we haven’t yet developed a common vocabulary for our inner experiences. But it’s as if a spiritual artery opens up—just a little—and feelings I’ve shoved down start to rise up. It’s excruciating because it’s on the very edge of what I can bear. I can barely stay with it, and then, just when I want to shut down, I open up. It’s not gradual and sequential. It’s a shift from a big “no” to a soft yes. And suddenly I’m not fighting it, I’m in it.
This happens in a climate of very little thought; it’s almost all feeling. Thought and feeling displace each other; the more we have of one, the less we have of the other, and this spiritual opening happens when thought gets still. The thought doesn’t get still because I push it out; it gets still because I open up to feeling.
This shift doesn’t always happen for me. It’s a gift. But when I’m seeking the gift, I linger longer in the pain, trying to soften. And then in a moment of release, I can feel the peace on the other side of the pain, and then the grace that can drive change is flowing in rather than being forced out.
It’s all about opening—ending our resistance to the pain, sinking into it. If you’ll notice, when you clench your fist, or grit your teeth, or flex your muscles, it reduces pain. That’s why we say “bite the bullet.” Clenching your fist and flexing your muscles are, physically and metaphorically, the building blocks of toxic masculinity—a suffering man’s flailing, failing effort to feel better, to protect himself from pain he can’t bear.
We need to learn to bear it.
Desmond Tutu writes in The Book of Forgiving:
“There are only two choices when we are faced with a loss. We can put our hands on our hearts and accept our suffering, our vulnerability, and our human frailty. Or we can reject this suffering, this vulnerability, this frailty, and raise our fists for revenge… When I am hurt, when I am in pain, when I am angry with someone for what they have done to me … the only way out of these feelings is to go through them. We get into all sorts of trouble when we try to find a way to circumvent this natural process.”
For those who dismiss this response as being a doormat, we need to remember: This is the counsel of the spiritual leader of the movement that ended Apartheid.
Obsessing over the evil deeds of the other side is an effort to run from the sadness, the heartbreak, the fear, the shame. Accepting and feeling all those emotions is the only way to ease the hatred and open to the grace that’s on the other side of the pain. That’s where healing lies.
We need to stand up for justice. But we need to do it without hatred, in a way that calms the winds.
Tom Rosshirt, co-creator of the Dignity Index, is a former Capitol Hill press secretary and White House speechwriter. He is the author of Chasing Peace: A Story of Breakdowns, Breakthroughs, and the Spiritual Power of Neuroscience, published by Maria Shriver’s imprint The Open Field. A version of this article first ran in Richard Rohr’s newsletter The Mendicant.
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