Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.
― Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Price of Abissinia

In 2008, I went with a group of Iowa volunteers on a mission trip to Nigeria. The children in this photo are but a few of the many who greeted us openly and wanted to hold our hands as we walked from one spot to another. I recall spreading my fingers on both hands as far as they could go, so that ten kids could each hold a finger. During our three weeks there, we visited both urban and rural areas, schools, libraries, and villages. Both this trip and my family’s year of hosting a Nigerian high school student were life-changing.

You think you know what an African country might look like, how the people might live. And then you actually go there and realize that the distance that has separated you from this place and these people is much more than geographical distance. You’ve been distanced culturally, psychologically, politically, and morally. Truth be told, you might as well be visiting another planet–heck, another galaxy!–as another continent. It’s as if you’ve been standing on a metaphorical mountain top where you’ve looked out on people that, from this distance, bear more resemblance to insects than humans. Perhaps at this distance, you’ve tried to explain things you’ve haven’t experienced, or you’ve romanticized peoples and places you’ve never known. Maybe this distance, as Samuel Johnson writes, has had the same effect on the mind as on the eye: what you can’t see is what you can’t know.

In a recent Newsweek opinion piece, Nigerian Anglican priest and journalist, Hassan John, sends a desperate warning to the West that he argues has largely ignored–and continues to ignore–the genocide in central Nigeria. He writes:

The central region of Nigeria has been trapped in a slow-motion genocide for over a decade now. More than 35,000 Christians have been massacred. Whole villages have been exterminated. Thirteen thousand churches and 1,500 Christian schools have been destroyed. More than two million have been displaced from their homes, and 304,000 are refugees. According to the International Red Cross, by September of last year 23,000 had gone missing.

According to John, the Fulani (cattle herdmen he claims are working with the Islamic militant group Boko Haram) aim to rid Nigeria of Christians. He laments that the government of Nigeria has described the massacres (the Fulani armed with machetes) as clashes between farmers and herders who are both at fault. Jonah Jang and David Mark, former high-ranking military officers and members of the Nigerian Senate, have argued that the way that these attacks were carried out bore the markings of a planned and orchestrated genocide.

Tragically, this is just one example of genocide in the world today. For me, however, it’s one I can see clearly and feel deeply because I’ve gone the distance to experience this country and love its people. Danny, our former foreign exchange student, lives in Kaduna State where there have been many such massacres. Danny who lived safely in our home for a year, who joined our small rural Midwestern community and whose biggest concern during the time he lived here was whether or not he remembered his clothes for basketball practice. Distance may literally separate us by thousands of miles now, but it can’t separate me from the horrific scenes that play out in my mind. It’s impossible to use distance to swaddle myself in ignorance. When I read reports of this ongoing genocide, for me, it’s all too real.

The former president of the University of Notre Dame, Rev. Thedore Hesburgh, writes: All of us are experts at practicing virtue at a distance. From an agreeable, safe distance, it’s all too easy to suggest the kinds of humanitarian and military aid we should offer countries like Nigeria, Myanmar, Syria, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Sadly, we are experts at practicing this kind of virtue at a distance. We may argue that we can’t possibly have firsthand experiences in all of these places, that our current technology offers us a nearly firsthand experience. And all this is true. Still–and perhaps I’m speaking mostly to myself–distance serves as a buffer so that we can be virtuous from the comfort and safety of our own arm chairs. There can be, and often is, sanctuary in distance.

At times, there is some necessity in out of sight, out of mind. Our psyches would implode if we took in all the suffering of the world, if we let the buffer that distance supplies dissolve, bringing us face to face with the atrocities we only read about and experience through media. In Robert Frost’s poem, “Out, Out–” he tells the story of a young boy who suffers a fatal accident while cutting wood. As the doctor is summoned, the onlookers wait. Frost writes:

And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

There are times when we turn away because we are not the one dead. We turn away because we must create some distance between ourselves and tragedy–at least initially. Later, we often revisit and reconsider what we’ve seen and experienced. Distance in geography or time affords us a psychic respite during which we can regroup. And this type of distance is often a blessed sanctuary, too.

In the end, as novelist Zora Neale Huston writes: [a] thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it. Historically, there have been so many mighty big things that neither time nor distance have shrunk. Even today, we experience them through the printed page and testimony, in video and in film. Their impact is not lost on us. And much as we’d like to think that the world has finally matured into a civilized adult, there continue to be so many mighty big things that time and distance cannot shrink.

Perhaps the best we can do is to bear witness to those big things we’ve experienced directly and to listen well to others who bear witness to those we haven’t. We can also check ourselves on the solutions we offer, often from a distance that should call our proposals into question and subject them to scrutiny. Finally, we can pray that there will be fewer and fewer of these mighty big things and that when they do occur, we will respond with more than virtue at a distance.

Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.
― Joseph Campbell

I think it’s safe to say that most people cringe when they hear the word zealot. It conjures up violent images of righteous indignation propelled by blind hatred and use of force. It just sounds bad. And if someone were to call you a zealot? For a few, this might be a badge of honor, but for most, this would be a terrible insult. Reasonable people aren’t zealots, they might say. Thinking people just don’t resort to such extreme measures, they might argue. And yet–

History is peopled with zealotry. The term has its origins in a Jewish sect that refused to compromise with the paganism of Rome (AD 6). This sect was a political party with deep concern for the national and religious life of Jews, a concern that caused them to despise even fellow Jews who sought peace and ccompromise with the Roman authorities. But there were clearly violent, single-minded individuals and groups who refused to compromise before, and after, the original Jewish Zealots. Zealotry is a force that knows no boundaries regarding people, time, or place.

That we should see zealotry all around us today shouldn’t really surprise us. We may believe that we’re too civilized, too educated for zealotry, but sadly, this a pipe dream. Any age can be the right age for zealotry, and ours is no different. Some may even argue that ours is exactly the type of age during which zealots flourish. Israeli writer and journalist, Amos Oz writes:

As the questions grow harder and more complicated, people yearn for simpler answers, one-sentence answers, answers that point unhesitatingly to a culprit who can be blamed for all our suffering, answers that promise that if we only eradicate the villains, all our troubles will vanish.

Undoubtedly, we are living in an age in which the questions we have grow harder and more complicated, in which we turn to one-sentence answers–to tweets and sound bites–and in which we desperately want a culprit–preferably a political figure–who can be blamed for all our suffering. Truth be told, we’d prefer that life be a melodrama in which the good guys are resplendent in white, and the bad guys are wicked in black. Melodramas are psychologically and morally so satisfying. How cathartic to cheer for the hero and boo the villain! To feel so righteous in your cause, so vindicated in denouncing evil is pretty heady stuff, indeed.

Robert H. Jackson, American attorney and judge who served as a former Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, had much to say about zealotry. Even though Jackson died in 1954, his words ring true today:

In our country are evangelists and zealots of many different political, economic and religious persuasions whose fanatical conviction is that all thought is divinely classified into two kinds—that which is their own and that which is false and dangerous.

Read any news feed or tune into any news program, and you’ll find those who write and speak as if all thought is divinely classified into two kinds: their own (which is true and good), and the other which is false and dangerous. Depending on the news source, the other–that is, the false, dangerous group–will vary. What will not vary, however, is the presence of fanatical conviction. Progressive or conservative, secular or religious, fanaticism and zealotry abide. It would take an exceptional leader to rise like a phoenix from the ashes we’ll inevitably leave the next generation and proclaim: Look folks, we’re all zealots! We’re all using the same tactics! You want unity, a better world? Start by clearing your own heart before you try to clear the world!”

Norman Finkelstein understands that the line dividing current moral and political tribes is ideological–not tactical. Finkelstein is an American political scientist, activist, and author whose primary fields of research include the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the politics of the Holocaust. He writes:

Conversion and zealotry, just like revelation and apostasy, are flip sides of the same coin, the currency of a political culture having more in common with religion than rational discourse.

Some may argue that really every -ism is religious in the sense that its devotees defend and promote it with something akin to spiritual ardor. I recall spending two hours with a colleague who defended Scientism with such ardor that I grew exhausted simply watching him proselytize. If you ignored what he was saying and simply listened to the pitch and rhythms of his speech, you might’ve thought that you were listening to an evangelist. The same could be said of many politicians, as well as all types of scientists: political, social, environmental, biological, educational, etc. Flip sides of the same coin.

I remember past years during which feeling or professing anything too passionately was uncool and unwise. These were years during which it was culturally and artistically vogue to be indifferent and cynical. Anything that reeked of sentimentality or ardor was to be, at best, laughed at, and at worst, scorned. At this time, the prevailing tone of all forms of art and entertainment was flat. Even the discourse of politics and social activism seemed relatively level-headed in contrast with the zealotry of today. This isn’t to say that this trend was necessarily preferable–just markedly different.

As different, perhaps, as the discontent of common people versus intellectuals. American academic Richard Pipes specialized in Russian and Soviet history and understands the particular zealotry of intellectuals throughout the ages:

When the so-called masses are discontented, they are inspired by specific grievances that are capable of being satisfied within the existing system. Only intellectuals have universal grievances: only they believe that nothing can change unless everything changes.

Pipes’ claim that intellectuals believe that nothing can change unless everything changes may describe the current climate of our own country as well as anything. This is the crux of the matter: the argument that we desperately need change, but that this change must be as comprehensive as a catastrophic forest fire which burns everything in sight, leaving the earth barren of any vestige of what once was and ready for new growth. And there is genuine fear on both sides of the political aisle and in diverse ideological groups. One side fears that what they have and love will be destroyed, and the other fears that it will not. It’s an all-or-nothing, apocalyptic kind of fear which leaves any real chance for compromise or working within the existing system unlikely.

Amos Oz argues that [m]ore and more commonly, the strongest public sentiment is one of profound loathing. Zealotry thrives on profound loathing, and today’s climate is rife with it. We’ve become zealots who are masterful loathers, killing with kindness or destroying with expletives. One sort of loathing may pass as more civilized, while the other reeks of vulgarity. Still, behind all of the rhetoric lies profound loathing.

How do we level the loathing, temper the zealotry? We might consider Campbell’s words carefully. We might consider clearing our own hearts as a necessary prerequisite for clearing the world. For much zealotry is fueled by hypocrisy, by our inability and unwillingness to see the logs in our own eyes. Turning attention away from the specks in others’ eyes and back to our own is hard work, though. Still, I’d like to think that we could take on this internal work with as much fervor and devotion as our own brands of zealotry.

They say that you can’t go home again. But thank goodness that the natural world pays no heed to such adages. Everything on my acreage testifies to the glorious return of birds and plants. They’ve come home again–the rose-breasted grosbeaks, the gold finches, the honeysuckle and wild raspberries, and the orioles. Oh, the orioles!

I set out my first bowl of grape jelly the last week of April and waited. Would they remember where the good stuff was? Would they come home to the faithful supply of grape jelly? Would they like the new feeder made especially for them? Would they return?

Yes. Within a week, a slew of orioles swooped onto and off of our deck. It was a veritable landing strip with orioles hovering, waiting to land. After landing, they ravaged the small bowl of jelly and relished the new feeder with its multiple-oriole capacity. They came home with a tangerine flourish.

There is a quiet assurance in the return we see in the natural world. Here, you can come home again. Here, perennialism is golden. Here, your reappearance is both ordinary and extraordinary, your homecoming wishfully anticipated.

In a world in which many things–and people–never return, there’s something particularly sacred about all this reemerging and reblooming and restoring. Sacred and hopeful. Every great story is founded on this archetype of leaving and returning (with a whole lot of searching and overcoming challenges in between). No matter how dark the journey may seem, how long the metaphorical–or literal–winter is, the hero returns in the end. Just as we wait expectantly for the return of our prize clematis, we wait expectantly for the hero’s return. Then, there is that moment when all seems right with the world. It may be just a moment–one brief but blessed stay against the confusion and despair of the world–but there it is, nonetheless.

Danish author Isak Dinesen wrote:

Nobody has seen the trekking birds take their way towards such warmer spheres as do not exist, or rivers break their course through rocks and plains to run into an ocean which is not to be found. For God does not create a longing or a hope without having a fulfilling reality ready for them.

This is it exactly: God does not create a longing or a hope without the assurance of a fulfilling reality ready and waiting. Herein lies the miracle of return in the natural world: that the long migration, the intervening seasons and unnatural intrusions finally culminate in the return to a fulfilling reality.

In this postmodern age, it’s often risky to talk about heaven as that fulfilling reality. It may be risky because there are some who’ll argue this is just foolish, wishful thinking. They’ll explain that we’ll return to the earth, period. That, they’ll assert, is our only reality. Others may cast us lovingly aside as sentimental, needy folks who must have something to long and hope for, something to keep us on the straight and narrow. Either way, if you talk of heaven, you may find that some respond cynically and some condescendingly.

Still, as the orioles’ almost-fluorescent orange backs flash through the leafed-out trees, I can’t help but think that this is one of God’s excellent ways to create a longing for a more fulfilling reality. And as these orioles return year after year, I can’t help but think that this is God’s assurance that there is, indeed, a fulfilling reality ready and waiting for us.

Undoubtedly, some will consider me a Pollyanna with all this talk of bird-watching and heaven. So be it. When I lose my way, when I find myself slogging about in perpetual winter, and when I long for something better, I’ll rest in the assurance that my journey will not end in a warmer place or in an ocean that doesn’t exist. No, I’ll find fulfillment in the place I was intended to be.