Whatever you think are the root causes of our country’s current status, “crisis” seems like an appropriate descriptor.

The now-rebounding coronavirus pandemic, coupled with the death of George Floyd and the subsequent violence and unrest in our cities, has both exacerbated and manifested deep fissures at the heart of American society. It’s not just that we don’t agree about the extent of racism or the appropriate government response to the virus — we don’t even agree on fundamentals like the nature of justice or the meaning of liberty. Where a civil consensus should exist — built on shared values and a common vision — there’s only a gaping void.

For some, this is an invitation to exploitation. Rather than viewing this crisis as an event to be engaged with and learned from, partisans of all persuasions treat it as raw material to be used and manipulated to advance a presupposed ideological agenda. All other factors, including truth and charity, are subordinated to achieving victory at any cost, for in ideological warfare one either wins or loses absolutely. With no shared values to moderate aims and tactics, ideologues manipulate emotions, weaponize shame and actively distort information in a way that would make wartime propagandists blush. To reverse an old saying of Thucydides, politics has become war by other means.

Obviously, this is a fundamentally non-Christian view, more befitting of a disciple of Machiavelli or Saul Alinsky than Jesus Christ. At its root, this approach to our national crisis is borne out of a practical denial of God’s involvement in the world — not even primarily in our personal lives, but in the life of society itself. In the words of Josef Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI), God is treated, at best, as “a God with nothing to do.”

As a result, we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s completely up to us, to mankind, to bring about perfect justice, but without any reference to transcendental truths that provide a secure foundation for any effort, or the grace needed to surmount our self-centeredness. In such an environment, even noble intentions and causes can become deformed and hollowed out, and the most deplorable means become justified. When this happens, conservatism counterfeits what it attempts to conserve and progressivism cuts itself off from any coherent grounding and objective. And “what profit is there for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” (Mk 8:36).

While ideologically appropriating the present crisis must be rejected, there is, nonetheless, a deep Christian sense in which a crisis must be recognized as an opportunity. While never asked for, crises, when they come, are inevitably the means through which God is actively willing us to “work out our salvation” today; to be perfected in Christian love, personally and societally.

Confidence in this in the midst of such turmoil is something we can only have through a profound faith in Providence and a deep trust that this reality — the only one that exists! — has been ordained by God, and is therefore ultimately good.

A crisis can increase our yearning for heaven by reminding us that this world is passing away, but it should also compel us to live our lives here and now more intensely, to take reality more seriously. In her 1968 work “Between Past and Future,” political philosopher Hannah Arendt noted that a crisis forces us to grapple with fundamental questions that we otherwise might ignore, “and requires from us either new or old answers, but in any case direct judgements.”

How important and essential is it, in this moment of our nation’s history, to engage in honest reflection and open dialogue, in order to conserve what is good and work for what needs to be changed? Is this crisis not also an opportunity to ask deeper questions about the ultimate purpose of life and how our society is or is not contributing to that end — questions that, in the midst of complacency and comfort, too often stay beneath the surface?

But as Arendt notes, the type of contemplative humility we need is anything but automatic. In fact, a crisis can become a disaster “when we respond to it with preformed judgements, that is, prejudices. Such an attitude not only sharpens the crisis but make us forfeit the experience of reality and the opportunity for reflection it provides.”

It’s not an exaggeration to say that much in our society thwarts our attempts for such critical reflection. Social media, cable news, and our hyper-partisan political landscape actively reinforce our prejudices and biases by feeding us ideologically driven narratives, perpetuating what the theologian Jesuit Father Bernard Lonergan calls “the flight from understanding.” The signs of this “flight” are easily identifiable: kneejerk dismissals of new perspectives (and its counterpart, automatic rejections of anything “old”), retreating into echo chambers that only strengthen our presumptions, and a willingness to use or at least tolerate self-serving lies that advance our chosen cause. At the heart of this “flight” through bias is a fear that reality cannot be trusted, which is ultimately a form of pride.

The antidote to this ideological arrogance is fidelity to what Father Lonergan, following St. Thomas Aquinas, calls “the tension of inquiry” — the laborious and uncomfortable experience of sitting with our unresolved questions, acknowledging that we do not have all the answers ready-made. This requires us to trust that God’s will and truth is revealed, not through shortcuts and ideologically imposed frameworks, but by humbly embracing reality, withholding judgment until we’ve arrived at understanding borne of patient and selfless receptivity of the facts as they are.

As Father Luigi Giussani, founder of the Communion and Liberation movement, says, we “must love the truth more than ourselves,” more than our preferred preconceptions. Only by lovingly and humbly grappling with reality, and not settling for the convenient answers of the various dogmatic ideologies on offer today, can we authentically respond to our current crisis and determine our next step forward.

Liedl is a seminarian in formation for the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.