The Episcopal Diocese of Bethlehem NPColumns

Because my diocese covers 14 counties, our parishioners interact with many state legislators and senators when the situation calls for it. Not long ago I joined 130 parishioners in Harrisburg to visit law makers from our eastern and northeastern Pennsylvania counties on a matter with a high moral impact.

Most of the visits were good. Politics can be a more than honorable calling. We were received well and listened to by some highly motivated women and men -with one appalling exception.

A state senator, who couldn't be bothered to put his jacket on to receive his constituents, listened with too-obvious patience as we made our case and urged him to do what was best for the entire Commonwealth and its future.

"Yes, yes," he then said, "but if this doesn't bring money to X County, I'm not interested." Hearts do sink into the pits of stomachs. Sometimes, it feels like that is what is happening. One gets that sinking feeling of hopeless despair.

My heart sank. This man is fairly young, apparently full of ambition, and yet totally clueless about his job. He was not elected to be nothing more than a pork butcher for his county. He was elected to help rule one of the few states in the country that calls itself a commonwealth, an entity organized for the common good.

We elect people to represent our local interests in part, of course, but the welfare of the entire Commonwealth is a matter of local interest. We elect people to have a share in the governance of the whole state. This man could not see beyond his nose. Nothing we said could make a dent in his patronizing attitude.

There are people who do not recognize the difference between political questions and moral issues. It is a moral issue when a law maker has no vision beyond the amount of cash a decision will deliver to his constituents in the short term. It is a moral outrage that he is so crassly focused on pork instead of the common good. It is stunningly unstatesmanlike behavior.

He was a startling contrast to senators and representatives I met in Washington on a trip seeking aid for the Christian victims of genocide in Sudan. I encountered one Midwestern senator who was not only willing to put his career on the line for powerless people, but was doing so cheerfully. He was a person whose vision extended far beyond questions of pork.

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." That's from a familiar passage in the Hebrew prophets. It is a step from the original context, focused on vision from God, to the question of national or state vision -- but not a big step. Where elected officials do not have their minds on something greater than themselves, something more than the (necessary) acquisition and maintenance of political power, nothing much happens, and people suffer.

If we consider a great Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and a great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, we see people who knew how to get into office and how to stay there. But we see something else, a concern that transcended self interest, a search for a greater good, an inkling of such good that the prophet called it vision.

In our society it is not reasonable to expect that persons who ask for our vote should share our creed. What people of good will have every right to demand of those who seek the power and privileges that elected office brings, however, is that they have some vision beyond the grotesquely crass -- some striving for long-term good for the whole people.

The biblical idea that where there is a lack of vision the people die is far too serious an observation about human events for us to let any public servant forget it.