Sarah Reardon

Like Mary and all Israel waiting for the Messiah, like a mother welcoming a child, we are to “wait for it with patience.”

But our culture’s celebration of Halloween suggests that we know yet more. We sense not only that we are dust and will return to it; we also sense that life exists beyond death.

In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem there. “That triumph” is the triumph of the way of love, the life of silence.

These modern forms threaten the desire for familial and communal life—an aspiration traditionally associated with conservatism, especially the conservatism inherited from Aristotle, Cicero, and Burke. The spirit of the careerist and the influencer counter this classically “conservative” spirit that aspires towards an actual family and community with all the duties each entail.

Perhaps activism needs such determined gentleness, illustrated in the pro-life students’ hours of prayer and the work of adoption agencies like my grandmother’s. Activism must be framed by an understanding of common grace, shared depravity, and our implications with each other: our membership, which is “the way we are.”