Robert F Kennedy is bringing Desert Father mysticism to US election – it’s needed
There have been many times in both the recent UK parliamentary election, and the forthcoming US presidential election, when I have been reminded of the words of the great Desert Father, St Anthony of Egypt, who said: “A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they meet someone who is not mad, The post Robert F Kennedy is bringing Desert Father mysticism to US election – it’s needed appeared first on Catholic Herald.
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There have been many times in both the recent UK parliamentary election, and the forthcoming US presidential election, when I have been reminded of the words of the great Desert Father, St Anthony of Egypt, who said: “A time is coming when people will go mad, and when they meet someone who is not mad, they will turn to him and say, ‘You are out of your mind’, just because he is not like them.”
Recent attempts by Tim Walz and Kamala Harris to portray Catholic politicians Robert F. Kennedy Jr, often known as RFK, and JD Vance, as “weird”, have again reminded me of those words of St Anthony.
It seems to me, however, that, although Vance and Kennedy, like all the rest of us, are obviously flawed characters, their political agendas would have struck St Antony as absolutely not weird, there being so many parallels between the times in which he lived, and the world in which we find ourselves now – a world dominated by corruption, abuse of power, violence and rampant materialism.
Let’s compare Harris and Walz policies with Vance and Kennedy policies, and decide which ones, in Anthony’s view, would be judged “weird”.
Harris and Walz advocate armed intervention across the world in support of US interests, which are basically business linked, whereas both Kennedy and Vance have voiced concerns about the military industrial complex and its avariciousness.
Whereas Harris and Walz support victim-based human rights agendas that allow for abortion on demand, and gender change without parental approval, both Vance and Kennedy support policies designed to combat the poisoning of children through environmental pollution and ultra-processed food by corrupt, profit-oriented corporates.
Whereas Vance and Kennedy champion small communities against the “Washington Swamp”, advocating, for example, the use of tariffs to protect US industry, Harris and Vance advocate support for the globalised economy and policies which send American jobs to China, and American men to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Whereas Vance and Kennedy are concerned about rooting out the kind of corruption that helped bring pagan Rome to its knees, it seems doubtful that Harris and Walz have yet to work out, let alone deal with, the utter pervasiveness of corporate corruption and influence in the corridors of power in Washington.
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What was it that St Antony had in mind when making his point about the difference between those who are mad and those who are not?
Well, the difference between the two is that the kind of the people that the world thinks are mad, are in fact sane.
They are sane because, unlike the supposedly “sane” masses, they have come to know that they are not sane, and in order to become “sane”, in order to take control of their lives and become what Kennedy calls an “efficient” human being, they have repented. In so doing they have come to think in a new way. They have come to prioritise the internal over the external, God over man, Self over selves.
Whereas Western artistic depictions of Christ’s Resurrection from the dead often show him rising out of a tomb on the third day – for example, Meister Francke’s 1424 Resurrection, and Piero della Francesca’s risen Christ half in, half out of the sepulchre, the banner of his victory held high – Eastern depictions of Christ’s Resurrection show his descent into hell on the second day.
Perhaps the most artistic expression of the latter is the fourteenth century Anastasis fresco in the Khora Church in Istanbul, which shows Christ descending into Hell in the manner of a Greek hero descending into Hades.
The doors of Hell lie at Christ’s feet in the shape of a cross, together with enough broken bolts, locks and bars – symbols of fallen, sense-driven, self-willed man’s captivity to darkness, illusion and death – to stock a decent ironmonger’s shop.
Light, life and freedom have triumphed over darkness, death and captivity. It is in the depths of darkness that the light of Christ shines most brightly of all.
The difference in emphasis between Western and Eastern artistic depictions, the Western one focusing on Christ’s emergence from the tomb on the third day, a historical event reported in the canonical gospels; and the other focusing on Christ’s descent into Hell on the second day, a quite obviously non-historical event, reported in a non-canonical gospel (the Gospel of Nicodemus), reflects the tendency of the Western mindset to prioritise the external world over the internal world, and the Eastern mindset to prioritise the internal world over the external world.
Across the world, sacred tradition has long understood the redemptive value of suffering, based on the insight that before a man can climb the inner mountain, he must first descend into a deep pit of despair, and that the deeper that pit is, the higher the spiritual mountain that man will ultimately be able to climb.
The late medieval-era Catholic philosopher theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart, who ended his days awaiting the verdict of a Papal court on charges brought against him for heresy, was himself no stranger to suffering. Eckhart’s writings include his view that, “even now, one rarely hears of people achieving great things unless they first stumble in some respect.”
The psychologist CG Jung attached importance to that comment, believing it suggested that Eckhart had himself experienced some kind of descent into the darker regions of the mind, a confrontation with all that was most chaotic and destructive within himself, and that it was because of that experience that Eckhart’s writings were so full of penetrating spiritual insight.
What was it that caused Vance and Kennedy to repent? The answer is that they both, in different ways, experienced the hell of heroin addiction – in the case of Vance via his mother’s addiction, and in the case of Kennedy, via his own youthful addition.
RFK, a scion of the famous Catholic political dynasty, independent presidential candidate, and now supporter of former President Donald Trump’s bid for the White House, has made it clear that, despite his religious faith, he is no paragon of moral virtue:
“I am not a church boy. I had a very, very rambunctious youth. I said in my announcement speech that I have so many skeletons in my closet that if they could all vote, I would run for king of the world.”
The Gospels, however, make it clear that the Christian faith is not for the morally righteous. “I came not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance” (Luke 5:32). Christ told the repentant thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise”, and to the prostitute he said, “your faith has saved you”. In respect of the prodigal son, Christ’s parable shows how the son’s repentance meant that his father treated him with far more generosity than the son could have ever dared hope for.
Whereas Christ was generous in his attitude to repentant sinners, he was withering in his condemnation of the morally righteous, specifically the Pharisees, calling them an evil “brood of vipers” (Matthew 12:34). In the Gospels, the Pharisees represent men who are unrepentant; men who value the world of appearances over the world of the spirit, the external world over the internal world. Men who have not come to see themselves in the light of Truth.
RFK has spoken of his own descent into Hell as a result of a youthful addiction to heroin, a time when he was, as he puts it, “a bundle of appetites”, “driven by self will”, so that, as he put it, “my name is Legion.”
For Kennedy, however, there came a day when, like the Prodigal Son, he “came to himself”. He decided to turn around in himself – he repented. The word “repent”, as it appears in the Gospels, is a translation of the Greek words meta (change) and noia (of mind), and in this – original – sense, repentance has nothing to do with a pious resolution to be a “better” person, which is how we have generally come to understand the word. Instead, repentance means a fundamental reorientation of mind. A reorientation in which a man begins to attend to the world from within rather than without.
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The Desert Fathers, the early Christian hermits and ascetics who fled into the Egyptian desert beginning in the third century AD, were, above all men who had repented.
Many had had colourful lives before themselves reaching a spiritual nadir and decided to make a fundamental reorientation of the way in which they attended to the world.
Evagrius Ponticus, for example, was chased out of Constantinople by the husband of a woman with whom he had been having an affair. Moses the Black, or Moses the Robber as he is sometimes known, had once roamed the Egyptian desert as part of an infamous and violent gang of 75 robbers.
Kennedy has spoken of how his life now goes well when he is able to maintain what he calls a “posture of surrender” to God, a state of being the Desert Fathers would have called prayer – understood not in a petitionary sense, but rather in a non discursive, image-free sense – a state of being in which a man surrenders his self will to God. For the Desert Fathers, such a way of life can ultimately lead a man into a contemplative state in which it becomes possible to see the Uncreated Light, the Light that Christ manifested to his disciples on Mount Tabor.
The spiritual path of the Desert Fathers is intended to lead a man towards life in God, but for this to become possible a man must be prepared to struggle within himself. He must be prepared to surrender his self will and make an effort. Only through effort can a man hope to begin to receive grace, and ultimately begin to love.
Kennedy has spoken of his daily struggle to overcome his self will, which he achieves through scrupulous self discipline, ranging from mundane tasks such as making his bed each day, and hanging his clothes on a rail, to attending daily Mass.
Kennedy says that when he finally came to himself he knew that if he was to be able to overcome the self will that had led him to the edge of destruction he would need faith, but the kind of faith he now subscribed to was not the kind of faith that is based on a blind submission to a set of propositions, which he was unable to do anyway.
Instead, Kennedy’s faith is the kind of faith that derives from trust in God, the kind of trust that can only come about through a willingness to accept that there is more to the world than can be perceived through the senses alone. From the point of view of a materialist mindset, which is the orthodoxy of our times and only accepts the existence of what can be discerned through the senses alone, such a simple, humble faith is “weird” because it posits the existence of a higher, invisible world that is more real than our own.
Kennedy has explained how his newfound, simple faith meant, at first, “acting as if” he believed. Then he began to notice things – synchronicities, for example – that he would not otherwise have noticed. In time it became easier to have faith.
The Desert Fathers would have understood this. For them the word translated as faith in the New Testament, pistis, means much more than belief – it means another kind of thinking. Faith is a kind of thinking in which the visible world starts to be understood in the light of the invisible, the world beyond what can be apprehended through the physical senses, and in this way the heart of a man of faith begins to be opened up to the possibility of intuitions that are denied to those who lack faith, those who remain asleep in the world of the physical senses.
Kennedy’s faith, so it would seem, is a desert faith. This is the kind of faith that understands Christ, not as a moralist, or a social worker, but rather as the Great Physician, and the Church as a hospital to which the sick come to be healed.
It was to the writings of the Desert Fathers that Dostoevsky, another Desert Christian, turned when he himself descended into a pit of despair, following the death of his only son, and as part of his attempts to overcome his own self destructive lifestyle of gambling and adultery.
Famously, the German historian, Oswald Spengler declared that Dostoevsky’s “desert” Christianity would be the Christianity that the world turned to next, a form of Christianity that would last for a thousand years.
Long may it be that Harris and Walz continue to call Vance and Kennedy “weird”. It is, in fact, the highest of compliments. May we all have the strength to follow Christ into the desert in order to die so that we can begin to live and discern where the real madness lies.
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Photo: Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks at the Libertarian National Convention, Washington, DC, USA, 24 May 24. Kennedy subsequently ended his independent bid and endorsed Donald Trump’s candidacy to be the next US President. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.)
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