Canadians burning with federal election fever might temper the side effects of overzealousness with a calming balm passed along by Calgary Bishop William McGrattan’s dad.

“I remember my father telling me to make sure you pray before you go and vote,” McGrattan told The Catholic Register’s Quinton Amundson recently. “He always said he would say the Our Father before placing the ballot in the box.”

The purpose, the current president of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops added, was not to implore the Father to put his thumb on the electoral scale and tip it in favour of a favoured candidate. Nor was it to be able to march out of the polling station fervent with feelings of self-righteous political piety for having done God’s presumed will.

Rather, he said, his dad’s nostrum was about having the “sage wisdom and prudence” to see the periodic act of participating in democratic life – i.e., casting a ballot – as a gesture of “love and service” to one’s family, neighbourhood, community, and fellow citizens. 

Would that we had more such sagacity and perspicacity visibly active in our public life. Use of the Our Father seems especially apropos despite its self-evident Christian origin – Jesus of Nazareth gave it to the world, after all. Every one of the prayer’s “seven petitions” is translatable (hey, the original was in Aramaic; He intended it to be translated) into seven secular prerequisites for social order and right treatment of others.

Delivery from evil? Check. Daily bread? Check. Recognition of legitimate authority? Check. Right direction against wrongdoing? There you are. Then there are the words perhaps most directly applicable to politics and the polis: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.

Who, having a foot stepped on in the subway doesn’t need to be reminded of having stepped on someone else’s foot? Just so, which of us hasn’t gone all in on some office-seeking seeming saviour who turned out to be the better part of a dirty rotten scoundrel? Oops. What’s there possibly to do but trust our fellow voters to forgive on the understanding that we will do the same in the next election?

Despite what we’ve been led to believe by the spawn of Montgomery Burns puppet string pullers holed up in the circles of Hell where much political marketing is manufactured, democracy, elections, voting itself are neither art nor science nor witchcraft.  All are, at bottom, matters of trust. In a religious sense, they are matters of faith.

Not, of course, of the Faith. On the contrary. Precisely because we are people of the Faith, we know not to put our trust – our faith – in princes. We know our full fealty is to Our Father, who is infinitely higher in terms of power and protocol than a mere Right Honourable Prime Minister. Should we even momentarily forget that order of things, Our Father Himself has given us the historic sense to remember what a sad sack of lost mitts the last occupant of earthly office turned out to be. We govern ourselves accordingly in our expectations for the next one. 

Yet alongside that, we accept the practical reality that human beings are gestated to be governed. Ask the nearest loudmouth libertarian who just had his Amazon delivery stolen off his front porch. So, as with barber shop quartets or federal and provincial sales taxes, we harmonize. Democracy, the democratic act, is our best available means to live out the power and the glory. We participate in it with an authentic sense of duty, which includes the duty to agreeably disagree. 

Continue to advocate? Check. Sharpen our arguments with the truth? To be sure. Pay attention on Earth even as we look to Heaven? Absolutely. But always with charity. When in doubt, vote with charity.

For as Bishop McGrattan put it so eloquently to the Register: “God knows the outcome, and God has in some ways ordained what is to unfold in our life and in the life of a country. He wants us to act freely and responsibly. Voting is part of that human dignity we have given to us by God.”

What simpler, more loving way to remind ourselves of that fatherly wisdom, during the sound and fury of the current election campaign, than to commit ourselves on voting day to saying the words Our Saviour taught us before we slip the ballot into the ballot box.