Patricia Smith Melton

- by Patricia Smith Melton
Founder, Peace X Peace
Editor, Sixty Years, Sixty Voices: Israeli and Palestinian Women

It is the middle of the night, my heart is bursting with rediscovery of self after struggles over nearly two years that have left me weary. And instead of yelling to the skies about human failings or duplicities or savageries or excuses, the thought comes that politics is the highest calling.

Even as I say this, I look at a painting I have of Joan of Arc, seeing her as I have not seen her these 20 months even though she appears 24” x 24” on the wall next to my desk.

It is 3 am. I have come out of a day’s negotiations for a divorce suit in which obscure law was used by a crafty lawyer to undo me.  I hope he reads this.

Yet, the thought comes: politics is the highest calling.

If we are in the care of each other, saints and sinners as we may all be, then tending our global selves and planet is the highest calling. And those who care for us now tend to be a motley crew of show-offs, charlatans, and people who think they are smarter than they are.

What if a poet led? What if a poet went right into the middle of the chaos and led the people, shone a light and had the gumption to lead? What if?

What if someone with heart and art went into the middle of the nastiness and said “Follow me.” Joan of Arc was burnt at the stake. Jesus, a cross. And how many assassinated? Okay, got that, but even so, what if?

Isn’t well-lit leadership what’s called for? I personally don’t have that gumption right now. I am hunkered down, licking wounds, opening my arms as best I can to embrace the time and process needed for organic healing with help from friends.

But what if everyone first searched, with drooling longing, for their inner poet, for their integrity, for their true light? First, that large step, and then said, “I’m taking this public. I’m going to go in with this light and do things well. I will confront the selfishness, the greed, the self-serving, the confusion, the cheating, the liars, and the moneychangers and I will lead.”

Isn’t that what we should do?

Why doesn’t it happen?

How did most leadership get separated from deepest wisdom? How does leadership even lead without wisdom and compassion, and the ability to appeal to and gather the spirit of the people, to inspire our better selves to best visions and action? Why do we allow leaders to be amoral?

There is such a huge gap. Chalk it up to being couch potatoes, test cheaters, older men running from death to sexual distraction, and to cultural sloppiness that forgot to critique personal actions against the golden rule.

Perhaps most of it is that we have misdefined happiness. We have lost track of the energy, of the light, of happiness, saying it is sex that is mildly or greatly forbidden that is the transcending goal, or tech toys like adult legos, or going to exotic places or being obsessed with food or drink or drugs. I have nothing against sex, I like sex. I have nothing against travel and exploration, it is vital. But what saint or leader do you know who improved our world by their sex lives or vacation experiences? More importantly, how did soul transcendence come to be perceived as something that one can gain through self-absorption?

We have lost something so major, and I am here tonight, having lost so much of my life today to a man who will soon be my ex, and, of all the surprises, I realize that politics is the highest calling. That dirty sloppy stuff is the place where the light of soul must be infused.

Perhaps it was the amoral lawyer or my upside-down husband who hired him, but I realize that what happened to me today is magnified and spread acutely and chronically across the world. I am lucky. I will land on my feet, and even as I grieve for loss of spouse and place, that little eternal spark of gratitude continues through my dark. I have learned again that there are (polite word) scoundrels in the world. But the blessing of tonight is that my soul rises and I experience what happened to me as happening daily in kinship with others in the world. It is the soup of our culture.  It is endemic.

And it is, indeed, a battle between light and dark, and it needs to be named as such.

It is a spiritual calling, and politics needs to be flooded by people who function as humans open to spirit, by seekers, by people who see beyond tit for tat in legislation, beyond mind games, beyond name calling, and certainly with more abilities than knowing how to skin a bear.

Politics should be led by poets, and saints in the making. I am not talking fundamentalists here. I am talking of people who know their own souls and recognize that as personal integrity, as their compass, as the place where they are the larger soul manifest in a single body.

And politics is where change for the better can become manifest in culture. It is, necessarily—and one could say unfortunately, but that is beside the point—where we find our cultural path to greater ways of living. There needs to be a sea change, including of morals, including of some husbands, many lawyers, and most politicians perhaps.

Praise to the good ones. Rejoice in the good ones. Let’s build their ranks. Poets out there, seekers out there, women who want to move beyond cupcake making and men who swear during your daily commute, let’s pledge to take our souls, those of us who can still find them, and bring them into the public arena and change our world. We cannot leave those who strut and bully, who are narcissists or deceivers, who are suck-ups or seduced by power, who are confused and play-act, to create our world.

Poets and saints in the making, find yourselves. We are not outnumbered. We simply are, so far, outmaneuvered by people who aren’t working at the highest levels. Let’s join those few poetic warriors who still keep their eyes on the prize, and let’s flood the political ranks with enlightened spirits who know what good is and how to create it and share it.  That is transcendence.  That is a gift that keeps on giving.