My mom and siblings, 2016

On January 10th, my mother would’ve been 90. She’s been gone almost a year now, and I’ve struggled for days knowing that I couldn’t pick up the phone and wish her a happy birthday. And I’ve struggled for days wanting to write about her and failing to find the words. It’s like that for most of us who’ve lost those we’ve loved. Words simply fail in the wake of such love–or they flounder about, well-intentioned but wholly inadequate. Still, we try–as we feel we must–to give voice to our memories and our longing. And so, I begin.

My mother never forgot a birthday. Edited in uniquely personal ways, she marked her birthday cards to us with underlined text (or double-underlined text) and an army of exclamation points. She took Hallmark verse to a whole new level. Or–as my dad once remarked–she out-Hallmarked Hallmark. In her final years when she’d taken up adult coloring, she sent us cards she’d lovingly colored with the set of colored pencils that were always within arms’ reach of her recliner. It goes without saying that her greatest embellishments were the notes she penned to remind each of us that we were loved and valued. In a world of throw-aways, her birthday cards were keepers.

My mother was the kind of woman who made birthdays real events. When I requested that my 5th birthday party be blue–everything blue!–she came through with blue Kool-Aid, blue frosted cupcakes, blue napkins, and blue party favors. When the party ended, she sent six kindergartners home with royal blue lips, teeth, and fingertips. I like to think that we were the original prototypes for Smurfs–blue toothy grins and all!

I often find myself thinking: If I could just have just one more hour–even a half hour–what would I say to my mother? It’s a silly mind game that generally results in the realization that I couldn’t even begin to say the things I want to say in an hour. Still, I play it often, rehearsing all the things I’d tell her over a cup of tea. As I ponder, I’ve come to realize that these moments are ones in which I feel her presence most, moments during which our imagined conversation is nearly as good as the real thing. For in these moments, I can hear her voice, can see her seated in her maroon recliner with her cat on her lap, and can feel the peace that always radiated from sitting next to her. In my many imagined conversations, I always say this: You are sorely missed and loved. The rest of of what I have to say is pretty much chicken scratch in comparison.

On her 90th birthday, how would I have begun to measure the worth of a woman who’d poured herself fully into so many lives? As I noted at her memorial service last year, she was a cup-half-full kind of woman who continually emptied herself into her husband and children, relatives and neighbors, friends and visitors. Paradoxically, in spite of all this pouring out, she was never empty. Magically, the more she emptied herself into others, the more she was filled. Each year on her birthday, I would tell her that when I grew up, I wanted to be a cup-half-full kind of woman just like her.

My mother was a tree-climbing, cat-loving girl who grew up to attend college on a drum scholarship. In the 50s! She was a honey-haired coed pounding away on a snare drum in a music practice room when my father heard her. And then he saw her, barefooted and lost in a rhythm that drew him in–for life. She was the kind of woman who happily consented to a first date that took her into a hay field at dusk, a dime cup of coffee in hand. There, she crouched with my father behind a haystack where they could watch the sandhill cranes before they left for the river at night. She was the kind of woman who told my father that the Chicago apartment they could afford to rent while he was stationed there in the Army wasn’t so bad. It was bad, my father told me, so bad that my baby crib occupied a small room that had once been a coal room. So bad that my grandmother cried when she visited. So bad that my mother wouldn’t let me crawl on the floor, which was cold and dirty despite her repeated efforts to scrub. It was very bad, he said, but at the time, neither of them could see how bad it truly was because they were desperately in love–with each other and with me. In old black and white baby photos of this time, I’m diapered and wearing my dad’s garrison cap as my parents smile widely in the background. There’s no trace of the poverty that marked their lives here.

My father was a prolific letter-writer in the early years of their courtship and marriage. And my mother kept all of these letters: those from college basketball trips when he was on the road, those from his weeks of basic training, and those from his university office where he did the majority of his writing. When I think of what I would take if my house was on fire, I know that I would take those carefully bundled letters in my first grab. In these letters, I’ve come to know my father and mother in new and glorious ways. Above all, I’ve come to see my mother as my father saw her. Quite simply, he adored her. From the beginning, he recognized her seemingly endless capacity to give, as well as her commitment to encourage and affirm. Over the years, he wrote poems and letters in which he acknowledged what he’d known from their courtship: she was–and always would be–the beautiful foundation upon which he’d built his life. She was his greatest source of peace and joy. In a 1987 Mother’s Day letter, he wrote:

Maybe, just maybe, someone will recognize someday what an unusual marriage we have had. If not, we know, have known, and will continue to know how much we love each other, how we move in unison so often.

As I walk the path at the nature center each morning, I pass a small stone bench tucked a few feet off the path. In a family of practical cedar benches that flank the path, it’s an anomaly. It would look more at home in an English garden, centered in a field of violets under an aging willow. Its legs are ornate corbels that have sunk unevenly into the earth. Its top is large enough to hold two people, but only if they sit shoulder to shoulder, leg to leg. Each day as I pass the bench, I imagine that this is where my mother and father sit, watching the sun rise over the eastern ridge as it flames the dawn. I imagine that this is where they begin their day, their talk mingling with birdsong. I imagine that they will always be here, their presence grounding me as it always has and always will.

On the occasion of my mother’s 90th birthday, I imagine that I’d linger at the bench for a while and chat. And then, handing my mom a birthday bouquet and a poem I’d written her, I’d call over my shoulder as I walked down the path: When I grow up, I want to be just like you.

The question, however, is not whether beliefs can lead us astray, as they all can, but what sorts of beliefs are most likely to lend themselves to respect for human life and flourishing. Should we see human beings as virtual supermen, free to flout any convention, to pursue power at any cost, to accumulate wealth without regard for consequence or its use? Are gold toilets and private rocket ships our final statement of significance? Or is it a system of belief that considers human beings all synapse and no soul, an outgrowth of the animal world and in no way able to rise above the evolutionary mosaic of which everything from the salmon to sage is a piece? David Wolpe, “The Return of the Pagans” (The Atlantic, Dec. 25, 2023)

David Wolpe’s analysis of the paganism that persists in the world today was not exactly the Christmas Day reading I was expecting. His article was a socks-and-underwear kind of gift, one that would never make your official “Christmas gift list,” but one that proves a necessary and valuable gift, nonetheless.

From Wolpe’s opening paragraphs, I was taken by his even-handed application of paganism to both conservative and progressive political views:

Although paganism is one of those catchall words applied to widely disparate views, the worship of natural forces generally takes two forms: the deification of nature, and the deification of force. In the modern world, each ideological wing has claimed a piece of paganism as its own.

Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple, Wolpe accuses those on the left of being “world-worshippers” who endow nature with sanctity, while accusing those on the right as being “force-worshippers” who hold wealth and political power as sacred. Of course, he generalizes both views, for he’s aware that there are individuals in both camps who refuse to worship nature or force. Still, he asserts that, generally speaking, “the paganism of the left is a kind of pantheism, and the paganism of the right is a kind of idolatry. Hug a tree or a dollar bill, and the pagan in you shines through.”

Thoughout his article, Wolpe reasons well and provides readers with many good contemporary examples of paganism and paganists. He does so, however, to raise more important questions about what we choose to believe. He concludes aptly by asking us to consider which beliefs are most likely to lend themselves to respect for human life and flourishing .

As I finished Wolpe’s article, the words of Martin Luther King Jr. quickly came to mind. In his “Letter to Birmingham Jail,” he writes to refute accusations from eight “dear fellow clergymen.” One of these accusations was that King and his followers were extremists. King’s responds that although he felt badly about being called an “extremist,” his disappointment was short-lived. He levels these words at his fellow clergymen:

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . .” 

And he finishes off this refutation with words I’ve never forgotten: So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. King asks if we will be the kind of extremists who love or hate, who defend or destroy justice. Decades before Wolpe began to write, King understood that the effects of extremism come directly from the belief system that girds it. Our beliefs can preserve and improve life, or they can weaken and destroy it. What we believe in matters greatly.

To a certain extent, I think it’s safe to say that many of us can respect the extreme devotion of those who live solidly within their belief systems. If respect is too postive a word, perhaps it’s better to use Webster’s second definition of respect: giving particular attention. We pay particular attention to those who live their beliefs intensely. Even if we vehemently disagree with their beliefs, we are often sorely amazed at the force with which they live them and die for them. Our world has been, and continues to be, a stock pot in which force heats some beliefs to the boiling point, scalding the guilty and innocent alike.

There have always been those who’ve argued that the ends justify the means, that if beliefs are worth living for, they’re worth dying for–and killing for; that violence and collateral damage are to be expected and accepted; that we must simply put our heads to the plow of our beliefs and not look back. In contrast, there have always been those who’ve asserted that the ends never justify the means and that we must live in the world, even as we strive not to be of it. History is marked with–and continues to be marked with–individuals and groups who promote their beliefs in disparate and often tragic ways.

As I aged, I became more convicted that high school students should be required to take a course on world views. The more I taught high school students, the more I realized how little they understood about the fundamental differences in what people believe regarding creation, free will, morality, life, afterlife, etc. As I designed and then taught a world view unit, I faced many challenges. Not the least of these challenges was the issue of exclusivity. No self-respecting high school student wanted to go on record and admit that every world view is exclusive; that is, that subscribing to the tenets of any world view meant that you must exclude tenets of others. I recall classes during which students asked questions like these: “Wait, does that mean that if you hold a monotheistic world view that you can’t believe in other gods?” “If you’re a Christian, does that mean you don’t believe in reincarnation?” “If you believe in Scientism, does that mean that you can’t believe in an afterlife because only science can give us the truth about life and death?” In truth, most of my students preferred a smorgasbord of beliefs–a mashup of their favorite tenets from different world views. Still, they came to understand that these views were fundamentally different and exclusive, that subscribing to one meant that you accepted it as truth.

I had colleagues who advised me to consider the costs of teaching such a unit–the professional and personal costs. They weren’t so sure this was a good idea and thought it was better to be safe than sorry. But I remembered my own freshman year in college, shuddering at how naive and unprepared I was to be confronted with professors who challenged what I believed. Sadly, some did more than challenge; they attacked, using their classrooms as bully pulpits to advance their beliefs. Unarmed and mostly defenseless, I lacked the understanding of world view differences that would’ve better prepared me to ask good questions and refute propostions. Recalling all my confusion and shame, I became more convicted that my students would be better prepared with, at the very least, a general understanding of how and why belief systems differed greatly. I wanted them to know that they would be challenged intellectually and spiritually. I wanted them to carefully consider what they believed, for as David Wolpe argues, some beliefs can lead us astray. And I wanted them to put on the full armor of knowledge as they made their way through postsecondary education and life beyond. I was preparing them for battle.

And though I’m certain I didn’t say it as eloquently as Rabbi David Wolpe, I wanted my students to examine a variety of belief systems, so they might decide for themselves which beliefs were most likely to respect life and cause it to flourish. Our beliefs provide us with strongholds, places to which we go for strength and inspiration, for truth and virtue. Behind the walls of such fortresses and in the company of fellow believers, we take refuge and prepare for intellectual, social, and spiritual battle. But may our belief systems also be sanctuaries to which we go in supplication, in humble examination of our own souls. May the penitent among us challenge the way we live our beliefs and continue to ask: Are our beliefs most likely to lend themselves to respect for human life and flourishing?