After her flying house landed, Dorothy walked out on a strange new landscape. “Toto,” she famously said, “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Then a huge bubble delivered Glinda the Good Witch. “Now I … I know we’re not in Kansas!”

Dorothy’s words seem fitting as we trudge through the bizarre events — terrorism, the campaign, sexual chaos, and bathroom wars — of 2016. We are on unfamiliar territory. There are brainless scarecrows, heartless tin men, and cowardly lions. There are wicked witches, bumbling wizards, and flying monkeys. Like Dorothy, we had better face the facts.

In her April 21 column “That Moment When 2016 Hits You,” Peggy Noonan wrote, “The Moment is that sliver of time in which you fully realize something epochal is happening in politics, that there has never been a presidential year like 2016, and suddenly you are aware of it in a new, true and personal way. It tends to involve a poignant sense of dislocation, a knowledge that our politics have changed and won’t be going back.”

That last part is important. If somehow we click the heels of our ruby slippers three times and everything goes back to “normal,” praise God, but don’t count on it. American public life as you knew it is now little more than a pleasant memory and it “won’t be going back.”

That means we can’t “re-” America. We can’t revive, renew, reclaim, restore, repair, refurbish, or re-anything. The question is how to negotiate an uncertain and confused future, not return to an idealized past.

Noonan says she wept when she finally grasped what was going on: “Because my country is in trouble. Because I felt anguish at all the estrangements. Because some things that shouldn’t have changed have changed. Because too much is being lost. Because the great choice in a nation of 320 million may come down to Crazy Man versus Criminal.”

Perhaps from nostalgia, perhaps from longing to hear lost voices of wisdom, I’ve wondered what some of my heroes would say if they were still alive. What would Fr. Richard John Neuhaus say?

I bring up Neuhaus because I’ve just finished reading Randy Boyagoda’s excellent biography, Richard John Neuhaus: A Life in the Public Square. While I can’t speak definitively or with his inimitable wit, the book gives us a sense of what he would say.

Before founding the Institute on Religion and Public Life and First Things magazine, Neuhaus ran the New York City office of a think tank headquartered in the Midwest. The culture of the two offices was, to say the least, as different as the culture of Manhattan is from the culture in a small Midwestern city, that is, vastly different.

In a chapter called “The Raid,” Boyagoda describes the rocky relationship that developed between the two offices and the sudden and decisive closure of the New York office that led to the founding of First Things.

Summing up the cultural and, in the final analysis, ideological differences between the two offices, Boyagoda writes, “Compared to the rearguard and resenting sensibilities that were emerging from [the think tank] and its magazine, Neuhaus and his arguments were far more persuasively positioned to contribute to American public life in ways that were forward-looking, integrative, and reasonable.”

There it is: Fr. Neuhaus’ wisdom in Boyagoda’s words.

He would, I think, tell us to reject “rearguard and resenting sensibilities.” While I’m all for passing laws that may be useful in defending marriage and our eroding religious liberty and freedom of speech, law follows culture and is not a reliable levee against a cultural flood. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) bought us time and a false sense of security. Now the time has run out along with the false sense of security. Don’t sit there resenting it. Do something.

That something is develop and implement a cultural and political strategy that is “forward-looking, integrative, and reasonable.” In that, like Fr. Neuhaus, we need to be happy warriors. Why? Because despite the changes Peggy Noonan rightly laments, our God still reigns. America may be in trouble and that trouble may prove fatal, but the Church and all God’s people even in the midst of chaos still have “a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:10-14; 31:15-17).

In the final words of his final book, American Babylon: Notes of a Christian Exile, Neuhaus wrote, “As Christians and as Americans, in this our awkward dual citizenship, we seek to be faithful in a time not of our own choosing but of our testing. We resist the hubris of presuming that it is the definitive time and place of historical promise or tragedy, but it is our time and place.”

The time and place God assigned us is one of intense and dislocating change in which, despite claims to the contrary, He is doing a new thing. Our job is to see and seize that new thing with creativity, passion, and joy.