April

The absence that has wintered here
sheds its woolen coat.
And here in the hollow of its shoulder,
spring pins a bouquet of dandelion
and sun. 

I lean in
to smell the top notes of cut grass
and joy.

I run my fingers down spring’s arms
where hopeful buds preen and pink,
eager to open.

I place my palm upon its heart
and feel the wings of thrush and finch
thrum expectantly.

Oh, lie with me in fields of violets,
our purple mouths drinking in
this day!

For all those who have knelt in Gethsemane and soaked the earth with tears

For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait. C. S. Lewis

I often forget that Gethsemane is a garden. For gardens are enchanting spots with flowers, manicured rows of vegetables, and lovingly weeded berry patches. Gardens—at least the good ones—shout life and abundance. They offer Crayola signature crayon names like periwinkle, marigold, fushia, rose, olive,  blueberry, carnation pink, and pea green. They enchant us, encourage us, and feed us.

Gethsemane was such a place, a quiet grove of olive trees that offered a respite from the world, a place to pray and recharge. But for all its quiet beauty, the night that Christ brought his disciples there to pray, it was less garden than wasteland. I can recall the first time I saw Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of the Christ.  The scene in Gethsemane still haunts me. Head to the ground, blood beading on his forehead, Jim Caviezel, who played Christ, prayed. His arms outstretched, his body prostrate, he prayed. His was an agonizing prayer: Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done. In Gibson’s film, here he wrestles with evil, battling the very human temptation to flee and live, to take his own cup into his own hands.

Gethsemane is the dark night of the soul, the valley of the shadow of death. When you have reached the end of your rope, when the beautiful garden of your life turns black, Gethsemane beckons you. German theologian and Holocaust victim, Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes:

When a man really gives up trying to make something out of himself—a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called clerical somebody), a righteous or unrighteous man, . . . and throws himself into the arms of God. . . then he wakes with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith, that is metanoia and it is thus that he becomes a man and Christian.

Gethsemane is just this: throwing yourself into the arms of God. Stripped of any pretense of trying to make something of yourself, you leap into the abyss of shame and sin and fear. You join the communion of the forlorn. You prostrate yourself and weep, searching for—but not finding—the words to pray. In agony, you ask for your cup to be taken from you. Here, Bonhoeffer claims, is where you find Christ. And he should know. His Gethsemane was a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. There, he threw himself into the arms of a suffering God.

Bonhoeffer’s cup was not taken from him. Two weeks before the Allied soldiers liberated Flossenbürg concentration camp, he died on April 8, 1945. In a letter (July 16, 1944) Bonhoeffer writes:

God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us . . . The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering; only the suffering God can help.

Bonhoeffer understood that only the suffering God can help us as we kneel in our own Gethsemanes. This God holds our hands and our hearts as we weep. When others forsake us, this God remains steadfast in His love.

This God agonized as His son prayed in earnest. C. S. Lewis reminds us:

In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.

Like me, like you, Christ soaked the garden ground with tears and called upon His father. He became an intimate friend of suffering—human suffering in all its awful, life-stripping forms. And in spite of his repeated prayers, the cup did not pass. How can we measure the love of a God who willingly submits to the most human agony? Why do we feel alone in our suffering when we know that our Gethsemane is the very garden that Christ visited? And when we fall to the earth, when the night threatens to consume us, how could we forget that He kneels beside us?

As a young woman, I was well acquainted with despair, and I often forgot that Christ knelt beside me. I remember nights during which I teetered at the edge of an abyss so deep and so dark that all I could do was to literally hang on by my finger nails. I remember how adrenaline coursed through me, urging me to act, to do something—anything—to keep the blackness at bay. In desperation, I turned to others to convince me that these days would pass. I buckled down and muscled my way through fear and despair by working harder and longer. In misguided pride, I recall thinking that certainly suffering was a solitary venture for hardworking, thinking people like me, wasn’t it? Undoubtedly, God had enough work to do, comforting those who really needed it. He’d given me the resources I needed to take care of my own suffering. I just had to put them to good use.

How painfully arrogant I was in those days! And how incredibly ignorant to forget Christ’s prayer, which is—as C. S. Lewis argues—the only model.  No, I squared my shoulders, gritted my teeth, and set to work. Single handedly, I would move the mountains of my despair. Bulldozing my way through dark days, I would be both contractor and worker, fixing my eyes and heart on the job–not on God. And when despair threatened to undo me, I would simply make a better plan. I owned my cup of suffering, and I would not ask God to take it from me.

For years, my own propensity for self-help made my Gethsemane a private hell. What I didn’t understand, and only later came to realize, was that Gethsemane could also be a life-giving sanctuary. For in Gethsemane, I had only to fall into the arms of God, who waited patiently there to suffer with me. In this sanctuary, I could find the well trodden path to redemptive suffering.  Here, I could look over the edge into the abyss of my own fear and despair and not look away. I could see it for what it is and, more importantly, for what it might be. I could take heart, knowing that God suffers with me, and that others, too, suffer with me and I with them. In community, suffering loses much of its power. And the power that remains is largely redemptive. From the tear-soaked earth, I could rise with others in the assurance of God’s saving, suffering love.

Perhaps the most important thing that I had forgotten in my early years was that Gethsemane gives way to Easter. Christian author Max Lucado writes:

The Bible is the story of two gardens: Eden and Gethsemane. In the first Adam took a fall. In the second, Jesus took a stand. In the first, God sought Adam. In the second, Jesus sought God. In Eden, Adam hid from God. In Gethsemane, Jesus emerged from the tomb. In Eden, Satan led Adam to a tree that led to his death. In Gethsemane, Jesus went to a tree that led to our life.

In Gethsemane, Christ took a stand, suffered, died, rose, and brought us new life. As I think of my own suffering and that of my fellow humans, I see how our Gethsemanes might offer redemption if—and when—we follow Christ’s model. Our garden stories are surely ones of darkness, but they may also be sanctuaries of beauty and blessing. Jesus offers us the way to restore beautiful gardens from our sorrow-soaked patches of earth. His is the model of redemptive suffering. Moving mountains can most certainly wait.

1 Peter 2: 19-21

For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly.  For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.  For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps.

You can have no influence over those for whom you have undying contempt. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Recently, I had the privilege to speak to a group of college students who were being honored for their academic achievements. When I began my banquet address by telling them that I wanted to speak about motive attribution asymmetry, you can imagine the looks on their faces. Say, what? Motive what?

A big term, a big mouthful. Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard this term and would have responded with similar skepticism. And then I read an article in The New York Times by Arthur Brooks, the president of the American Enterprise Institute and a public policy scholar. In “Our Culture of Contempt,” Brooks claims that Americans are suffering from motive attribution asymmetry, the assumption that your ideology is driven by love, while your opponents’ is driven by hate.

Brooks cites a 2014 study in which researchers discovered that the average Republican and Democrat suffer from a level of motive attribution asymmetry comparable to that of Palestinians and Israelis. In a nation more divided than at any time since the Civil War, this discovery shouldn’t surprise us.

Years ago, when I was teaching a high school English class, a group of juniors and I were discussing potential issues for their upcoming argumentative essays. In the discussion that ensued, two girls engaged in a passionate debate over one of the issues for the better part of the class period. Their classmates looked on, sorely amazed at the intensity of their debate. When the bell rang, one of the girls hung back, waiting for her peers to exit. Then she pulled me aside and, in hushed tones said, Mrs. Vesely, I don’t think we should talk about things like this again, do you? She didn’t wait for my response. Honestly, I don’t think she expected or wanted one.

She had a point: this had been uncomfortable. Friends disagreed. Friends raised their voices in rebuttal. Friends left the room in righteous indignation. And this, she argued, was not good. Her conclusion was that we shouldn’t have discussions like this in the future.

Like the conclusion my student reached, Brooks claims it is tempting to argue that we should disagree less. But this is wrong, he says. We should seek ways to disagree better. This was the message I brought to my high school class on the day following the great debate. I told them that we should learn how to argue with conviction—but conviction tempered with empathy and understanding for those who held views contrary to our own. We should learn to disagree better.

When we disagree badly, Brooks believes that the tragic consequence of this is contempt. In the words of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, contempt is the unsullied conviction of the worthlessness of another. Incivility and intolerance are bad, Brooks argues, but contempt is the real cancer. If you are convicted that your opponents are worthless, you believe you have the moral high-ground. And from this moral high-ground, your contempt often makes compromise and persuasion nearly impossible. Adding insult to injury, the by-product of your contempt is often hate-speech that is intended to rally your own troops and to reinforce the belief that while you motivated by love, your opponents are motivated solely by hate. I agree with Brooks when he writes that no one has ever been hated into agreement. 

I don’t imagine that there is a single individual who has not been cast as an opponent driven by hate at some point in his or her life. Several years ago, I was verbally accosted—via an hour-long telephone call—for a position on tolerance I had presented to a group of teachers. In my presentation, I argued for a better definition of tolerance, one that countered the definition that had become culturally popular. I proposed that genuine tolerance meant that we respectfully acknowledge and consider—not necessarily accept—views that were contrary to our own. I argued that we couldn’t expect our students to accept opposing views, for these students came from diverse cultural, political, socioeconomic, and spiritual backgrounds. To expect them to accept opposing views would be asking them to abandon their own. We could—and should—however, expect our students to honestly listen to and consider such opposing views and to treat those who held them with respect.

The gentleman who called me disagreed. In no uncertain terms, he told me that teachers must teach tolerance, which means acceptance. After nearly an hour, he concluded with demands that I retract my definition of tolerance, and then he hung up. Stunned, I sat in my office replaying the phone call. I realized that there was never any point at which I was being heard. Before he even picked up the phone, he had already determined that I was a person driven solely by hate. This was motive attribution asymmetry at it best—or worst. 

And this was contempt, up close and personal. The initial contempt he dished out was ideological, but this escalated into contempt that was acutely personal. Samuel Johnson writes,

Contempt is a kind of gangrene which, if it seizes one part of a character, corrupts all the rest by degrees.

I’d be the first to admit that all too often, contempt feels pretty darn good. To be contemptuous of another person, group, or ideology seats you squarely in the good guy corner. You and your people think, speak, and act in love. Your enemies can be clear targets for contempt because they think, speak, and act in hate. It’s often easier to rest in the moral indignation of contempt for others. It’s an emotionally and morally heady feeling to be in the right, when others are in the wrong. And when contempt seizes one part of you, like cancer, it can corrupt all the rest.

I also like to win arguments. I like the way that a strong rebuttal makes my nerve endings quiver and my blood thicken. I love the scenes in legal films when a passionate prosecutor or defense attorney makes such a compelling argument that the jury has nothing to do but accept it. Trial over, justice served. But I admit that my own compulsion for argument has often come with a price. The fact that this price has been contempt is not one that I’m proud of. I’ve gone for the kill, so to speak, in arguments with ideological opponents. And momentarily, it felt remarkable. In bed at night, however, it often felt petty and wrong.

Writing about motive attribution asymmetry in a 2014 article in The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman claims that you don’t need to like your opponents, and you certainly don’t have to agree with their positions, in order to look at them the way you’d like them to look at you. If you were to consider your opponents as those who are also driven by love—albeit love for different ideas and people—this would make the potential for compromise and genuine persuasion more likely. It would also make it more likely that you may have to consider the merit of their causes, for people driven by love are generally those with worthy causes.

As I concluded my banquet address, I challenged the college students to lead us towards a better way: better ways of disagreeing, better consideration of our opponents and their motives, and better, less contemptuous living. This is a personal challenge for me, as well. It goes without saying that our nation could do without the level and type of contempt we’re experiencing now. American journalist H. L. Menken writes that the only cure for contempt is counter-contempt. And as with so many things, counter-contempt begins first in the lives of single individuals. Like me and you.  

Here’s the thing about earnestness. Our culture discounts it; but the people are yearning for it. Jeffrey Zaslow, author and columnist for The Wall Street Journal

I’m sure that earnest is not a household word for most of us. It’s not the kind of word you casually drop into conversations or dust off for those times when you seek to impress. Earnest seems like it might live in the lexicon of some fussy, old-fashioned matron who sits stolidly on her divan contemplating the state of the world. A matron who might brandish such a word as she lectures her nieces and nephews on the virtue of character. Above all, live your lives earnestly, she might say as she pours tea from her grandmother’s china teapot.

If you look up the definition of earnest, you will find something like this: characterized by or proceeding from an intense and serious state of mind; grave or important. Herein lies the problem. Proceeding from an intense and serious state of mind is not really fashionable today. It’s fashionable to be cool, to act as though you don’t really care, to perfect a respectable state of aloofness. It’s stylish to refrain from excessive displays of emotion, particularly joy and wonder. It’s très chic to live in a world of intense irony.

American novelist Lauren Groff writes:

I feel like in American fiction we’re moving out of a period of intense irony, and I’ve very glad about that. I feel like irony is fine for its own sake but it shouldn’t be the sole reason to write a book. It has been an ironic world view: that the best way I can describe it. I’m a fan of earnestness. I feel like there is a new wave of earnestness and I’d be happy if I’m some small part of that.

I’d like to write Ms. Groff and tell her that I, too, am a fan of earnestness. Actually, I’m a card-carrying member of the earnestness fan club. I’ve long tired of the ironic world view which flattens all that is serious and intense, all that purports to feel.

Writers Matt Ashby and Brendon Carol argue that Lazy cynicism has replaced thoughtful conviction as the mark of an educated worldview. They lament that fact that this cynicism has permeated our culture and has influenced contemporary literature and art through post-modernism. Jeffrey Laslow agrees that our culture discounts earnestness, but he claims that the people are yearning for it.

I’m yearning for it. Which is why I have developed a keen eye and ear for it. And I didn’t have to look far to find a lovely example. The photo above of my grandson, Griffin, is a typical photo. When asked to smile for the camera, he routinely looks away or looks directly into the camera with serious intensity. Griff is an earnest kid. I’ve watched him in his kindergarten classroom as he goes about his business. What some may perceive as indifference or reluctance to engage is really a serious intensity that often prompts him to watch from the edge of the rug. While others are eager to share, he frequently looks on, considering how he will proceed. Earnestness in a five-year old is unexpected and often misunderstood. In a classroom of kids who have clearly learned to do school, Griff’s earnestness distinguishes him, and I’d like him to know that there are those who value its virtue.

Novelist Gillian Flynn writes: Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it’s their kryptonite. As a fan of earnestness, I can attest that I have seen it bring ironic people to their proverbial knees. In a graduate poetry class, my classmates and I were asked to bring a poem we admired and be prepared to share it with the class. The first student to share read a poem I will never forget: Outside my window, a sparrow chirps. That was it. Short and sweet. And what? When asked to comment on his choice, the student ventured that it was so short that it was deep, wasn’t it? Here was the ironic worldview at its best–or worst. There was really nothing in this poem, and therefore it was deep? When my father, the professor, asked him earnestly how the poem was deep, it was this confrontation that dissolved him. There was nothing much in this poem, and the emperor had no clothes. For the remainder of the class, he sat silently as others read poems that were unabashedly earnest.

Poet, playwright, and religious writer, English woman Hannah Moore writes: Prayer is no eloquence, but earnestness; not the definition of helplessness, but the feeling of it; not figures of speech but earnestness of soul. As one who has felt herself prayer-disabled for years, I, too, have come to know prayer as earnestness and not necessarily eloquence. Earnestness cuts to the chase, to the heart. It doesn’t bother with figures of speech or fancy words. It is the language of God’s heart, and it is with this serious intensity that we pour out our fears, our sins, and deepest longings.

I say let’s dust off our old-fashioned notions of earnestness. Let’s make it fashionable and preferred. Let’s speak, act, and pray in earnest. And if we do, perhaps we can send the ironic worldview packing.