By Fr. David Khorey, OCAN Spiritual Advisor
On election night 2024, my perspective changed. On election night, I was reminded of what matters most. I was reminded, once again, of why I am a Christian.
We are told that this election could be the most momentous of our lifetime, if not in American history. Like many lawyers, I have been interested in history, politics, and government for as long as I can remember.
Even as I have been drawn to these things, yet they have been from time to time a source of great anxiety to me. In this respect I hope that I am different from other lawyers, but I do not believe that I am.
What is the source of this anxiety?
As lawyers, and as people interested in history, politics, and government, we derive and abide by principles that we consider governing. “Controlling,” we might say. This is one pole of our life. We are people of principle, to a greater or lesser extent. This is our idealistic side, and it must be so. Yet how often the ideal is unrealized, even as it nevertheless provides the measure of judgment not only on others, but on us, who can only hope to live up to it.
At the same time, as lawyers and people interested in history, politics, and government, we tend toward the force of another pole. This pole pulls us through irony and skepticism, to cynicism. We incline not to principled aspiration, but rather to cynical frustration if not desperation. This is our realistic side, we might think; a horrifying conclusion, but one with a seemingly never-ending supply of evidence to support it.
Neither pole satisfies, because neither pole is wholly true. Thus, the practice of law makes us anxious. History, politics, and government leave us equally bereft of certainty, and so we inevitably experience them as an enduring cause of anxiety at one time or another in our lives.
But must this anxiety endure? Will it always be this way?
Until this election day, I would have been tempted to say yes. But on election night, I didn’t watch the results when the polls started to close around 7 pm.
Instead, I went to a funeral home.
I went to pray the Trisagion prayers of mercy for a woman of our parish, successful in her business life, three wonderful grown children. At the funeral home, I saw true grief, and I saw death, and I knew that was the enemy to be conquered, and I knew that Our Lord had conquered it, trampled it, by death, so that we may have eternal life.
In that moment, as I stood before the casket, nothing else mattered, and everything else had faded away. The next day was her funeral. Who then, was red or blue?
That moment awaits all of us. What else can we say is certain? We are anxious about many things. Yet all we know in this life will pass away from us. Only Christ, the One Who Is, remains. He is our perspective. He is our controlling principle, our sure hope. May He have mercy on us all, and save us.
Father David Khorey is the associate pastor of St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame and Vanderbilt University Law School. He was a partner at a large regional law firm where he practiced labor and employment law for nearly four decades. He also served as chair of the firm's labor section for many years, and as managing partner from 2016-2018. He was a member of the national College of Labor and Employment Attorneys and the Michigan Lawyers Weekly Hall of Fame, and received the Distinguished Service Award from the Michigan State Bar Labor Section.
Active in the Church throughout his life, he completed the St. Stephen's Course through the Antiochian House of Studies and received an M.A. in Applied Theology from its joint program with Balamand University. In 2003 he was ordained as a Deacon and in 2010 he was elevated to Archdeacon. He was ordained to the Holy Priesthood in 2023 and attached to his home parish to assist in serving its growing needs.