Quiet Time: A Better Political Imagination

Dear God of Love and Justice,

When You spoke humanity into being — Imago Dei, bearers of Your own image — You did not create Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or progressives. You created people. You pressed Your thumbprint into every soul, from the refugee clutching her child at the border to the senator casting a vote in the chamber, from the protester holding a sign to the officer standing across the barricade. Genesis tells us You gave us dominion — not domination, but the sacred stewardship of a parent tending a garden where every living thing matters.

Forgive us, Lord, for the times we have reduced Your children to talking points. Forgive us for the moments we scrolled past a human face and saw only a political opponent. Teach us the holy discipline of what Catholic social teaching calls subsidiarity — the conviction that every person, every community, deserves a voice at the table, not just the loudest or the wealthiest.

Give us the political imagination of the Magnificat, where Mary dared to envision a world turned upside down — the hungry filled with good things, the lowly lifted high. That was not partisan. That was prophetic.