If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet 

A single indigo bunting appeared on one of our bird feeders a few days ago. Since then, he’s returned multiple times, and I’m equally astonished each time. Buntings are small birds–think bigger than a goldfinch but smaller than a robin–but their splendor is great and immeasurable. In the right light, they are neon blue, otherworldly blue, a blue that makes bluejay-blue wave the flag of surrender. In the jewel box of summer birds, here is a true sapphire, a real sparkler.

Seeing this bunting makes me happier than I can say. I’ve waited for almost 24 years to see one at my feeder. My family can attest to my obsession with the elusive indigo bunting. They tell tales of how I’ve nearly walked into all sorts of objects, my eyes trained on the tree tops, my ears fixed on the bunting cries. They’ve been known to say things like, “If you see Mom standing in the middle of the yard looking at the tree line, she hasn’t lost her mind. She probably thinks she’s spotted an indigo bunting” or “If Grandma shushes you, don’t take it personally. She probably thinks she’s heard an indigo bunting in the timber, and she’s trying to locate it.” It’s safe to say that my obsession manifests itself in behavior that some may call crazy. I call it necessary. For one intent upon small things hardly noticeable, such vigilance is necessary. You have to be prepared–even if it means an occasional run-in with a parked car or lawn chair.

Yes, you must be prepared to look for those small things which often become immeasurably great. Years ago when I was walking the rural roads in late summer, the roadsides and ditches were largely mown off. The county crews had cleared them of Queen Anne’s lace, wild chicory, trefoil, and occasional stands of daylilies. There was something funereal about these shorn shoulders of gravel roads that stretched for miles along the creek bottoms. One day, however, I looked down to see a 50-yard stretch of roadside where wild chicory had begun to grow again. Here were miniature versions of the chicory’s summer self; small but stout stems held star-shaped periwinkle blossoms. You can’t keep a good wildflower down, I thought as I marveled at the life that had risen against all odds from the hard-packed clay of late summer.

In her 1974 Pulitzer Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard reflects on the time she spent at Tinker’s Creek in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. With Dillard, I find myself in good company, for she, too, is unabashedly obsessive about those things in the natural world that simply amaze her:

I have often noticed that these things, which obsess me, neither bother nor impress other people even slightly. I am horribly apt to approach some innocent at a gathering, and like the ancient mariner, fix him with a wild, glitt’ring eye and say, “Do you know that in the head of the caterpillar of the ordinary goat moth there are two hundred twenty-eight separate muscles?” The poor wretch flees. I am not making chatter; I mean to change his life.

I’m certain that I’ve fixed family and friends with that wild, glitt’ring eye as I’ve recounted my hunt for the elusive indigo bunting. If I could hear their thoughts, I’m guessing that I’d hear collective groans: Oh no, she’s going to talk about that bird again. . . . But, like Dillard, I don’t set out to make idle chatter with my bird talk but to change lives. Because the preternatural blue of the indigo bunting is life-changing. Oh, there may be innocents who flee the tales of bunting or goat moth sightings, but I’ve learned to let them go. You just can’t force this kind of wonder on those who have no eyes to see.

Just this morning I was leaving the nature preserve and noticed some hefty waves in the pond across the road, so I decided to investigate. I suspected the work of muskrats, but I was wrong. At the pond’s edge, there were two behemoth snapping turtles mating. For a time, they circled each other in a ritual dance. And then they locked up, their prehistoric claws wrapped around each other, their tails, like antennae, shooting straight for sky. They floated entwined–an eight-legged reptilian marvel–as mist burned off the pond, and curious sunfish moved around and below them. For at least ten minutes I stood there, rapt. When one of the naturalists pulled into the parking lot to begin her day’s work, I considered yelling and beckoning her to come and see. But I didn’t. I stood there alone, bearing witness. Eventually, I ran to my car to get my cell phone, so I could take a video. For proof, I thought, as I imagined recounting this event to my family who would almost surely question that this was what I’d really seen and might chalk it off to a just another new obsession. For nearly 10 glorious minutes, it didn’t occur to me to take a photo. I inched towards the pond’s edge, watching, barely breathing, and fully present. This is the power of an ordinary, natural act that unexpectedly becomes great and immeasurable.

In Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” he writes of the peace of wild things like the wood drake and heron which “do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” He commends the “grace of the world” which gifts us with “still water” and “day-blind stars.” I love this poem, for it speaks to the heart of those, like Dillard, who contend that “[b]eauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” It speaks to the heart of those who want to do their part, to bear witness to their share of beauty and grace. It speaks to a world grown weary of ugliness and evil, a world that too often sacrifices the natural for the artificial. It speaks to me as I continue to explore my own habitat in search of small things of inestimable worth.

In her book, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, Annie Dillard claims that “[a]t a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive.” Although it’s taken decades, I believe that I’m ready. I want to be present for those small things that poet Rainer Maria Rilke believes may unexpectedly become great and immeasurable. And I want to know the names of all these things, for to name them is to see them–and to love them.

There is always a sadness about packing. I guess you wonder if where you’re going is as good as where you’ve been.
― Richard Proenneke, One Man’s Wilderness: An Alaskan Odyssey

Even as I write this post, I can hear my critic-voice accusing me of being too maudeline. Still, I must confess that I’m sad. Sadder than I’ve been for a long time. There’s no getting around it: packing up is sad business.

Yesterday, my family home became someone else’s home. When I close my eyes, I will always be able to walk the rooms and see where my mother placed all her treasures, most secondhand or inherited finds from family and friends. I can see my father’s racing pigeon trophies high on the book shelves in his den and the gallery of family photos that completely took over the upstairs hallway. I can see the bedroom where I slept under the eaves and the small galley kitchen where we once ate on stools, barely an inch of space between us. When you pack up a house, you also pack up the glorious and the painful moments that have lived companionably in that space. And I suppose that, as author Richard Proennecke writes, you wonder if where you’re going is a good as where you’ve been.

I recently learned of the death of a dear friend. Her unflagging optimism and quirky sense of humor sustained me throughout junior and senior high school. We shared secret jokes that insulated us from the sharp edges of the “popular girls.” We cooked up missions that sent us into unsuspecting yards to pose with the lawn ornaments there just as cars of college students passed. We shared an appreciation for the humor of Jerry Lewis and regularly greeted each other in the school hallways with “Come fly with me!” We got each other. And this was more than enough to make the slings and arrows of adolescence bearable. We pack up homes, but we also pack up lives, boxing up moments and images that we’ll carry with us. Today, I remember my friend and know that I’ll need a storage container for the friendship I’ve packed.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been really lousy at leaving places and people. While others may part in what appear to be graceful exits, mine are most often messy, slobbering affairs. I always had to circle the block several times when I left my parents’ home, hoping to get one last glimpse of them on the terrace. When I finished a school year, I always planned parting celebrations for my students, so that I could memorialize all we’d shared. As a young mother, when I drove out of town without my children, I felt the compulsion to formalize my goodbyes, just in case I died and never saw them again. Each time I drive into town, I still pass the Queen Anne house we left decades ago. It never occurs to me to take another route; it’s a ritual I must perform. Before I left my family home a week ago, I walked through each room and into each closet one last time, as I formally and tearfully let go. Then I packed up the life I’d lived there and drove away.

It comes as no surprise to me that I’m struggling with this season of packing up. As people I know and love die or move on, as familiar places change hands or are torn down, sadness seems inevitable. But it’s a particularly sweet sadness that comes with boxes of treasures, all waiting to be opened again–and again. It’s a sadness that overwhelms you with tears one moment and smiles the next. And it’s a sadness that reminds you that you have loved and been loved and that your storerooms are full.

Packing Up
--for my siblings

I’ve been trying to pack up all our treasures:

that bright space we leaped into,
our nightgowns like flannel sails in the evening air
as we jumped from bed to bed,
the wooden slats underneath trembling—once breaking—
and our father, cajoling and laughing,
urging us higher, but quietly or your mom will hear;

the moments after supper
when dark mounds of fudge cooled on wax paper
and us crowding the kitchen doorway, salivating
and asking Now, now?

the history of us around the big table,
warming our lives over casserole and pie,
each of us refusing to be the first to leave,
all of us tethering ourselves to the wooden chairs
which numbed our butts beyond reason.

All these things I’ve tried to pack,
knowing that soon I’ll shut the door 
on our family home one last time,
fearing that I may not remember the magic of my closet,
the sweet hours there with dolls and books and plastic horses,
fearing that I won’t hear the gray cat purring on our mother’s lap
or the low cries of mourning doves from the eaves,
fearing that I may not be able to close my eyes
and see the walls papered with our father’s words.

Yet even now as I close the door,
there is the soft hum of the black Singer from the basement
and our mother’s able hands
stitching these remnants into a family.

Monsieur Geroux collected small good things. The unexpected sound of birdsongs, a half-price sale at the bakery, a smile from a passing child. Storing them in his mind for later, when needed. –Lily Graham, The Last Restaurant in Paris

I started young. With my 15-cent-allowance in my pocket, I headed directly to the mezzanine of Kaufman-Wernert Department store in downtown Kearney, Nebraska. There amidst bunches of gaudy, artificial flowers were trays of small glass animals: dogs, cats, horses, forest and jungle creatures. Most cost a dime, so a quarter bought you two treasures. I could never be rushed; I would look through the boxes at every animal, searching for just the right ones. The top of my bedroom dresser held my collection of small, good things, which grew and changed as I did. Before I moved to the dorm for college, the collection held a legion of glassed animals, a POW bracelet, my great-grandmother’s blue glass powder box, and an antique iron elephant bank I’d inherited from some relative. As I opened my eyes each morning, It gave me great pleasure to survey my small treasures.

Today, a milk glass dish in my office holds the small, good things my grandchildren and I have collected over the years: snail shells, buckeyes, acorns, and unique stones. As lovely as these things are in their own rights, they pale in comparison to the small, good moments during which we found them. What gives me the greatest pleasure these days is the knowledge that my grandchildren have developed the sensibility to see and appreciate the objects and experiences of our ordinary days. Having such eyes transforms the ordinary to the extraordinary. You can’t put a price on this. This gift–and it is a gift, indeed–bestows wonder on a world that too many find mundane and simply bearable.

During one of my guest visits to an elementary classroom, I was preparing them for a creative writing exercise by asking them about their own small, good things, their keepsakes. I always came prepared with a toolbox of activities, for I’d learned early that 8-year-olds could often fly through what I’d prepared, devouring exercises like a woodchipper. So, I’d anticipated that this keepsake activity would be a kind of warm-up and had designated a few minutes to work through it. But I was wrong. As I asked the class about their keepsakes, hands went up and stayed up. Kids patiently waited for their turn to share their keepsake with their classmates. And they listened with an intensity that took my breath away. As each student shared, a reverent hush came over the room, and all eyes fixed on the speaker. One by one, they shared their treasures: a pocket watch passed down from grandfather to grandson, a magic fountain pen from a vacation gift store, a locket that opened to reveal a friend’s photo, a frog dagger (this from a tiny, freckled girl who announced that her grandfather was keeping it for her until she was “more responsible”), and a Nolan Ryan autographed baseball (this from a tall boy in a desk that barely contained him who said, quietly, that this was a gift from his mother weeks before her death).

I was not prepared for the power of these small, good things to transform an elementary classroom into a museum of treasures. The marvel of it was that these kids didn’t have to actually see or touch these treasures to appreciate them. They could imagine them. In an article in Science, “‘Like a film in my mind’: hyperphantasia and the quest to understand vivid imagination,” David Robson cites studies that suggest that hyperphantasia, the condition of having extremely vivid mental imagery, is far more common among children. One study by Professor Ilona Kovacs at Eotvos Lorand University in Hungary reveals how our brains store more sensory details in infancy, details which are slowly replaced by more abstract ideas as we age. Professor Kovacs writes, “The child’s memories offer a more concrete appreciation of the world, and it seems that only a small percentage of people can maintain this in later life.” Standing in this room of 8-year-olds, I could feel the power of their sensory details and their profound appreciation of the concrete world.

Years and many such classroom visits later, I lamented the loss of such details that were too quickly replaced by “right answers” and generalizations. I might ask a kindergartener what she had for breakfast, and she’d lay out a smorgasbord of details before me: “Well, I wanted to have the new Lucky Charms with the birthdaty cake sprinkled marshmallows, but my brother ate them all. So, I had to have a frozen waffle. But it was really good, too, because I spread Nutella on it before I put syrup on. It’s really good this way. You should try it.” If I asked her 5th grade brother the same question, I’d get a much different response: “I don’t know. Cereal, I think.” By fifth grade, most children have learned to generalize “cereal” for the host of sensory details they might offer as kindergarteners. The small, good things that once delighted them are relegated to childhood, and abstractions mark the passage into adolescence.

Over the decades during which I’ve taught creative writing, I’ve mourned how quickly we lose our love for small, good things. And for small, good moments. Perhaps, what I really mourn is our propensity to rush children from details into ideas. Don’t get me wrong: I love ideas, having devoted much of my life to reading, discussing, and teaching some of the world’s greatest ideas from the world’s greatest thinkers. I understand the value of learning to generalize, to draw big ideas from literary works and experience. Still, it seems a shame that we not only rush children into the world of ideas but that we also communicate–consciously or not–that this world is preferable and should replace any childish love of detail.

I came to my own love of small, good things naturally–both through genes and through modeling. As my siblings and I prepare to sell our family home, the process of cleaning and sorting has resulted in so many small, good things: paper weights, wooden trinkets, Depression glass bowls and plates (lovingly restored and painted by my mother), pigeon paraphenalia (collected by my father, a homing pigeon raiser and racer), letters, notes, papers, and photos. All of my ideas about what makes a good home have grown from these things. Through who they were and how they lived, my parents modeled how to see the ordinary world as extraordinary. It was years into adulthood when I realized–much to my surprise–that I’d grown up barely middle-class. For me, my life with my parents and siblings had seemed unusually blessed, marked with a deep love for each other and the world we lived in. The things my parents leave behind testify to their power to transport us again into Christmases and birthdays, Sunday afternoon drives in the country, meals around the family table. Our family house will soon pass to another, but the little pieces of our lives there have found special places in our own homes.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to better nuture and sustain the natural hyperphantasia of children. But I think we should try. There is time enough for abstractions and generalizations. There may be far too little time for those small, good things which color our lives so brightly.

Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy.
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses 

Constancy is not a flashy virtue. Dressing modestly and speaking demurely, it lives quietly in a noisy world. Few champion its cause or sing its praises, and many consider it to be old-fashioned and just plain boring. On the dance floor where virtues such as courage, determination, and passion whirl wildly about, constancy stands at the edge, a wallflower with a glass of warm punch in her hand.

But I confess: I’m a big fan of the quiet virtues. A few weeks ago, I was at my granddaughter’s trackmeet. As a former sprinter, I still get unreasonably nervous when I watch running events. When Gracyn took the track to run the 3,000 meters, I realized that I was holding my breath. And then I realized that I’d better relax and breathe because she had 8 laps to run. At dusk, the wind picked up and whipped across the metal bleachers. On the track below, the high school girl runners looked particulalry vulnerable with their bare legs and thin jerseys. After the first 800 meters, I watched Gracyn on the back straight-away and thought: pick it up. But I was also painfully aware that I had no experience as a distance runner and no real idea about pacing a 3,000 meter run. Still, I could see the runner a few meters ahead of her and willed her to take her before the curve. With each lap, however, Gracyn’s pace remained the same. It was as if she were a metronome of will, ticking off lap after lap with constancy. Though she didn’t win, she did place.

Weekly columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan claims that [p]art of courage is simple consistency. Novelist Cormac McCarthy echoes the same sentiment when he writes Long before morning I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy [All the Pretty Horses]. There is something courageous about taking the track alone and running 3,000 meters. And there’s something quietly remarkable about running a consistent pace you can sustain until the very end.

Oh, there are those like Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde who argue that consistency is the hallmark of the unimaginative. No doubt, Wilde wouldn’t have been impressed with Gracyn’s run that night. Nor would he be impressed with anyone who lives and performs with that sort of constancy. We often find comfort and joy, however, in the very constancy he claims is unimaginative. I always knew that my grandma would make me a chocolate pie for every family dinner. There would be other pies, of course, but there would always be chocolate pie. My grandma might have been more imaginative, branching out into coconut or banana cream. If she had, though, my disappointment would’ve been palpable.

Pie is one thing; love is quite another. My parents’ love for each other wasn’t flashy. My dad’s idea of a perfect first date was a dime cup of coffee and a cozy spot behind a haystack in a field where thousands of Sandhill cranes were feeding. My mom’s Christmas gift to him one year was a sweatshirt on which she had printed: Strictly for the Birds. Their love story wouldn’t have made great reality TV with its elaborate dates, grand gestures, and Oscar-worthy proposals. Their love story was not the sort that flashed but invariably fizzled after the filming is done, but rather one of quiet constancy through sickness and health, for richer and for poorer. This is the kind of constancy on which to stake your life.

Today, realtors will begin showing my family home at 611 West 27th in Kearney, Nebraska. For my parents and siblings, grandchildren, cousins, neighbors, friends, visiting poets and pigeon-racers, this home has been a reliable place to gather. My family home is an ordinary house whose walls my mother lovingly filled with family photos, my father’s poetry and awards, and artwork. The wall at the top of the stairs has been a family gallery with photos that range from the endearing to the humiliating (you know the kind: the official middle school photos with braces, questionable hair styles and attire). Still, in spite of our pleas that some of these photos might be removed, they remained. And there has been something quite wonderful about knowing that every time you climbed the stairs, you could expect to find the same photo gallery spread out before you: a constant reminder of you of who you are and to whom you belong.

In her novel, Her Name Was Rose, Claire Allan writes:

Watching the sea never ceased to ground me. It was unchangeable. It was constant. Whatever happened – whatever seasons came and went, whatever way the wind blew, whatever was going on in the world, whatever was going on in the lives of the people who walked along the shores – the waves always just did what they did best. They came and went.

I know that my family home is a house: a foundation, a set of walls, and a roof. And yet, even as I understand the necessity of selling it, I’m grieving the loss of it. Like the sea, it has been unchangeable and constant for me, a port in the storms of life, a place that has blessed so many simply because we’ve spent time there. I mourn the loss of such constancy, for it has sustained me in ways I’ve only begun to understand.

For many of us, things can’t move and change quickly enough. We entertain ourselves by scrolling quickly on our phones and computers, searching for the next image or video which amuses us–or at least moves us. In the background of all this, however, are those people, places, and things which remain quietly but firmly constant. I’ll set my heart to these.

My Granddaughter Runs the 3,000 meters

At dusk, the sun bruises the horizon 
with deep orchid, and the south wind whips 
across the metal bleachers.

On the track below, she is ticking off meters, 
each lap the same as the last.

As former sprinter turned spectator,
I stuff my gloved hands in my pockets, turn up my collar 
and think: pick it up, pick it up, pick it up.

But she is ticking off curves and straight-aways
with bare legs that are pistons of resolve.

She is a metronome of will:
pounding out strides in iambic regularity,
her face cloudless and open.

On the far straight,
she drops her head into the wind
as the bell signals the last lap.
And I think: she will start her kick now.

But her pace—furiously constant—holds. 

As she takes the last curve, I can read her, 
measure after steadfast measure.

And I think: I will set my heart to this.

--Shannon Vesely

It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder, let alone resurrection wonder, to another. It’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can’t be packaged, and it can’t be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.
― Eugene H. Peterson

A single forsythia bush is blooming along the path at the Nature Center where I walk each morning. Canadian geese have paired up and nest in the inlet of the pond along the trail. At dawn, the trees, just beginning to bud, are alive with birds. After months of walking in the dark and silence, all this seems a miracle. Of course, I’ve anticipated the arrival of spring. I’ve known that it will come, and that the earth will green again. Still, as pastor, theologian, and poet Eugene H. Peterson claims, it’s the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard. And each morning when the sun blooms above the hills–all orchid and rose–I find myself thinking: how could I begin to put this into words? It seems that I should try. And, as a poet, I do. But this kind of wonder requires some sense of being there, some sense of engagement.

Years ago, I bought a bag of tulip bulbs from one of my children’s school fundraisers. Eager, but naive, I planted them in a bed just outside our backdoor, imagining the riot of color that would bloom in spring. When my tulips didn’t bloom, I asked friends if they’d ever had this happen. One friend asked me to recount how I’d planted them. What do you mean? I said as I felt a growing sense of shame. I just planted them. Tenderly, she suggested that I may have planted the bulbs upside down. Later, I learned that bulbs can bloom regardless of how they’re planted, but for whatever reason, mine didn’t. Until one morning, I looked out my kitchen window to find that–against all odds–one bulb had broken the earth and stood alone in the flower bed. Days later, there was a glorious pink bud and then a blossom. I recall thinking that this was resurrection wonder. From an empty bed of earth, from seemingly hopeless odds, a tulip broke free. I was sorely amazed.

The earth, by its very nature, grounds us in our mortality. Like the flora and fauna around us, we live and die. And yet, the earth gives us glimpses of immortality, as the death of winter gives way to the abundant life of spring. And this abundance, this victory over death, astounds me. Every time.

In an epitaph for his wife, Joy Davidman, author and theologian C. S. Lewis writes:

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

This is resurrection wonder: that we might cast off our clothes, that we might be re-born from holy poverty, that we might have our Easter Days. Wishing you a blessed Easter.

Resurrection

A wood thrush has thrown itself against the window
and sits stunned now on my front porch.
It must have seen a way through 
into the day that was blooming so brightly over the hills.

It must have felt a quickening 
in its small bird bones, a joy flickering
through its small bird wings, building

into a desire so great that it must have flown 
without thought, just given itself to the air,
as birds will. 

And wingless now,
it works to quiet the riot of heart 
threatening to undo it.

What must it take to pull yourself in like this? 
To pull in and down,
to shut out light and flight,

to move deeply into the core
where all-things-bird germinate.

Now, it drops its head.
It’s so still that I think it must be dying.
So, I close the door on a life that’s been
and might be. 

But an hour later, it’s gone.
Not even a feather marks the place where it fell.

And I’m senselessly happy that it’s risen,
finding a way through to the sky and the day
and beyond.

          --Shannon Vesely

And one perfect day can give clues for a more perfect life. ― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

My grandson has been driving since he was a toddler. From the battery-driven plastic car in the photo above to a small 4-wheeler to a full-size riding mower, he’s driven with confidence and joy for years. So, when he burst through the door a few weeks ago on an unusually mild February day–the 4-wheeler idling eagerly in the driveway–I grabbed my jacket even before he could say, “Do you want to go for a ride?”

I’ve been Griffin’s passenger for years. He’s earned my complete trust as he’s navigated the northern edge of the pond which is a veritable minefield of stumps. He’s given me acceptable thrills as we’ve gained speed across the pond dam, gravel flying in our wake. And he’s often narrated our journeys as if he is a naturalist or a historical tour guide, offering such comments as: “This is Indian Ridge, Grandma. See how high up we are? This is where the Indians could see the buffalo below” or “If you look closely in this corner of the pond, you might be able to see the koi. This is where they like to hangout.”

On this spectacular Sunday afternoon, we drove around for almost an hour. At one point, I turned my face to the sun just as Griffin said, “I’ve really missed this.” “Me, too, Griff,” I said. And I struggled to hold back tears, for I’m painfully aware that I’m living on borrowed time. Soon, Griff will pass into adolescence, and such intimate moments with his grandma will be relegated to childhood memories.

Still, as I consent to one more time around the pond, I will myself to be present in this moment on this fine day. I’m grateful, so very grateful for the sun and the speed and this boy. In L. M. Montgomery’s classic novel, Anne of Green Gables, Anne exults:

Isn’t it good just to be alive on a day like this? I pity the people who aren’t born yet for missing it. They may have good days, of course, but they can never have this one.

Yes, this is it exactly. I’m so happy to be alive and to know that, although others may have fine days, they can never have this one. This day is mine–and Griff’s. This day is particularly fine because it is ours alone. Despite–or perhaps because of–this ownership, I can pity those who aren’t born yet for missing it. In truth, a perfect day may evoke both a sense of possession and magnanimity.

American naturalist and “Father of the National Parks, John Muir contends that our finest days must be cherished:

These beautiful days must enrich all my life. They do not exist as mere pictures–maps hung upon the walls of memory to brighten at times when touched by association or will, only to sink again like a landscape in the dark; but they saturate themselves into every part of the body and live always.

To live in the sanctuary of a fine day demands this kind of saturation. For Muir–and for me–such days can’t exist simply as photos or fond memories; rather, they must penetrate us wholly. Living in this sanctuary, then, is a willing immersion into the essence of beauty, love, peace, and joy. It demands that we arm ourselves with these virtues as we move into and out of other days, days which may sink again like a landscape in the dark. This is a sanctuary of submission. Having waded into the beautiful waters, we give ourselves to a life-sustaining baptism. We offer our finest days as the best of who we are, and we’re born again, and again, as we invite them to saturate every part of us.

American writer and aviator Anne Morrow Lindbergh claims that one perfect day can give clues for a more perfect life. Thirty minutes into our 4-wheeler ride, I remember the niggling thought that came to me, first as a whisper and then as a proclamation: be present. Throughout my life, I’ve perfected a look that says: I’m listening. I’m present. And yet I know that this is often a facade, for even as I’m desperate to be present, I often unwittingly project myself into the future. Walking the tightrope of now-and-then, I’m often left unable to recall the names of those to whom I’d just been introduced or to simply savor a moment. Riding with Griffin always offers me clues for a more perfect life: be fully present.

In his speech, “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson writes of his age: This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we know what to do with it. There’s something sentimental about holding a fine day in the scrapbook of your life. If you know what to do with it, however, it can be so much more than a pretty page. But this means that you do what you know you should do. This means you must get down off your high wire and abandon your balancing act.

Truthfully, I’ll continue to struggle with staying present. Such is my lot as a worrier. Too often, I project myself into the future, as if imagining every possible scenario might give me a measure of control over my life. Sadly, this has been my default position: always be one step ahead. At times, this has served me well. More times than not, however, it has prevented me from being present. When Griff drives the 4-wheeler, I’m simply along for the ride. I let time run its course. I let the sun shine as it will. I give myself to the moments when I’m reminded that the notion of “one fine day” is a perspective and a choice. And as I do, the sanctuary of fine days stretches endlessly before me.

Haunted and haunting, human and inhuman, war remains with us and within us, impossible to forget but difficult to remember.
― Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War  

I have no real rights in this matter. I’m neither soldier nor loved one of a victim or survivor. Still, nearly five decades later, the Vietnam War haunts me.

Kristin Hannah’s most recent novel, The Women, is Frankie McGrath’s coming-of-age story, a searing tale of a young woman gone to war as an Army Corps nurse in Vietnam. Frankie’s story brought it all back to me: the nightly news stories of the early 70s, the images that assaulted the covers of news magazines and television screens, the impending draft that threatened to take my high school classmates. Mostly, it brought back the nights when I lay awake imagining what I would do if I were male: Would I enlist? Would I wait, in hopes that I wouldn’t be drafted? Would I find refuge in college deferment? Would I flee to Canada? Would I conscientiously object?

My mother once joked that I excelled at living vicariously through others’ experiences, recalling how I’d begin to cry during the opening theme song of Lassie. Even before little Timmy got into trouble, you cried, she said, anticipating tragedy as you lived through Timmy’s pain and fear. It has been this gift (or curse) that has marked my Vietnam War experience. For reasons I couldn’t explain as a 17-year-old, I felt compelled to watch Vietnam movies and television series, to read Vietnam accounts and to listen to survivors. I agonized through Platoon, my knees drawn to my chest in my theater seat, my hands gripping the arm rests. I suffered through Apocalype Now–several times–and to this day, can’t hear Wagner’s The Ride of Valkrie without seeing images of helicopters vanquishing a Vietnamese village. I watched the television series, China Beach, and marveled at the persistent trauma that beleagured nurses, medics, and doctors encountered each day. I read veteran Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, and wept. And with each film, each television episode, each written or spoken word, I found myself mired in the same moral quandary: What would I have done? How would I have survived?

In 2017, filmmaker Ken Burns produced an 18-hour documentary series, The Vietnam War. Burns understands the impact that this war continues to have on Americans:

The Vietnam War was a decade of agony that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans. Not since the Civil War have we as a country been so torn apart. There wasn’t an American alive who wasn’t affected in some way. More than 40 years after it ended, we can’t forget Vietnam, and we are still arguing about why it went wrong, who was to blame and whether it was all worth it. (“Ken Burns to preview Vietnam War documentary at free San Diego event”, San Diego Union-Tribune, April 22, 2017)

As a high school and college student, I was keenly aware of the political and social aspects of this war. But my Vietnam experience remained grounded in the most personal, philosophical, and ethical bedrock. I anguished over “what-ifs” and tried myself in the court of morality. I recall one moment during college when I came face-to-face with my biggest fear. As I imagined myself working through the jungle with my platoon, I saw a shadow–or maybe just a movement–shouldered my gun and fired. I remember thinking, I don’t fear being shot; I fear shooting–instinctively and unthinkingly pulling the trigger and killing someone. I sat up in bed, my heart racing and my hands trembling. I could kill, I thought, and this awareness slayed me.

Years later as an English teacher, I taught Tim O’Brien’s short story, “Ambush.” He opens this story with a scene in which his 9-year-old daughter asks him if he’d ever killed anyone. She knew that he’d been a soldier in Vietnam and that he wrote stories about the war. The story that follows is a grown-up answer to her question, an account that he hoped she might read and understand years later. He writes of being on a two-man watch, the heat oppressive and the fog thick. He describes seeing a man dressed in black with a gray ammunition belt emerging from the mist. Gun at his side, he was making his way down the trail. In this passage, O’Brien recounts the next moments:

I had already pulled the pin on a grenade. I had come up to a crouch. It was entirely automatic. I did not hate the young man; I did not see him as the enemy; I did not ponder issues of morality or politics or military duty. I crouched and kept my head low. I tried to swallow whatever was rising from my stomach, which tasted like lemonade, something fruity and sour. I was terrified. There were no thoughts about killing. The grenade was to make him go away—just evaporate—and I leaned back and felt my mind go empty and then felt it fill up again. I had already thrown the grenade before telling myself to throw it. (“Ambush”)

After killing the man, O’Brien realizes that [i]t was not a matter of live or die. There was no real peril. Almost certainly the young man would have passed by. And it will always be that way. He concludes the story by confessing that he hasn’t finished sorting it out, that sometimes he can forgive himself, and sometimes he can’t. O’Brien’s account here is one that I’d imagined so many times through the decades. This is why I can’t forget the Vietnam War. It stripped away the veneer of the person I thought I was and uncovered someone who could be–who probably would be in the right circumstances–a killer.

Although Hannah confronts a host of political and social issues regarding the Vietnam War in The Women, she does an exceptional job of profiling in-country field hospitals. She writes of the relentless trauma of 18-hour shifts, the crude facilities, the incessant heat, the constant threat of attack, the dying and the dead piling up in mind-numbing numbers, and the tragic inexperience of many doctors and nurses. In their article “In Country: U.S. Nurses During the Vietnam War,” Aaron Severson and Lorilea Johnson report that although the average age of a Vietnam nurse was 23, many were as young as 20, and only 35% of these nurses had two or more years of nursing experience when they enlisted. Most were recruited directly out of nursing school. Such is the case with Hannah’s protagonist, Frankie, who is thrust into trauma surgery after several weeks of stateside nursing duties which amounted to emptying bedpans and filling water pitchers. Severson and Johnson explain that [a] nurse who had been in Vietnam for six months had more credibility than a doctor who had just arrived, even if that doctor was very experienced in the States. These nurses had to learn quickly; this was trial by fire.

I’m haunted by Hannah’s Frankie as she is thrust into trauma surgery. I’m haunted by her experiences with devastating mortar wounds and napalm burns. And I’m haunted by her relentless terror, a terror that soldiers, helicopter pilots, doctors, medics, and nurses often tried to drink and laugh away, finding refuge in whatever might bring them temporary relief. I know that watching a film or reading a book is not active service. As I said, I have no real rights in this matter. But to the extent that I could, I’ve imagined this. In a sense of duty–perhaps misguided but nonetheless sincere–I’ve forced myself to imagine all this.

I can’t forget the times when Vietnam vets shared some of their experiences in college courses I taught. One vet admitted that he’d volunteered for a second tour, as my 18-year-old freshmen looked on in sore amazement. When one student finally asked why he’d gone back, the vet looked him directly in the eyes and said, Because I liked it. Because I was good at it. You could’ve heard a pin drop in that classroom. The look on his face still haunts me. He knew that they didn’t understand. How could they begin to know what it was like to serve in a unit of men who depended on one another, who’d give their lives for one another, to live on adrenaline and the hope that you’d see another day, to stay alive? And to return to a country in which many would rather you didn’t talk about your war experiences, and others condemned you for your service? He knew that they couldn’t understand, and his painful awareness haunts me.

Until I read Hannah’s novel, I wasn’t aware of the reception that most Vietnam nurses received upon coming home. Again and again, her protagonist, Frankie, tries to convince people that there were, indeed, women in Vietnam, that she was truly a veteran. They don’t believe her, insisting that there were no women in Vietnam. And to confound matters, after two years of experience in combat trauma surgery, she’s relegated to changing bed pans and filling water pitchers again, for hospital administrators argue she doesn’t have the proper raining or experience to be a surgical nurse. Hannah’s portrayal of Frankie’s struggle is tragically accurate.

In a profile of Army nurse Edie Meeks (The Washington Post, Nov. 8, 2013), Ruth Tam recounts an incident in 1992 when Meek’s daughter told her that her Mount Holyoke College professor proclaimed that you women will never know what it’s like to be in war. Aghast, her daughter approached the professor and asked if her mother could address the class. To her professor and classmates, she introduced her mother by saying, This is my mother, Edie Meeks. She was an Army nurse in Vietnam. I’m so proud of her. Meeks confessed that this was the first time that anyone had truly acknowledged her service. Twenty-three years later, she finally felt as though she’d been welcomed home. Like many combat soldiers, these nurses suffered from PTSD. It wasn’t until 1978–three years after the war ended– however, that the VFW accepted female veterans. I can’t begin to imagine what this must have felt like, and I can’t begin to forget these women’s pain and disappointment in reentering a country that didn’t appear to know–or care–that they’d even served.

I’m quite certain that I’ll never be able to forget what I’ve learned and what I’ve imagined about Vietnam. I don’t want to forget. It’s important that I don’t forget. Living vicariously through real and fictional characters has helped me experience the moral complexity, the indelible trauma, the exceptional comraderie, and the inconceivable costs of war. For me, the Vietnam War continues to be a moral testing ground, one on which I’ve discovered who I am–and who I’d like to be.

Smitten with love for my mother, my father bought 50 penny valentines at a drug store while he was on a college basketball road trip. It was 1952, and before he took the court that night, he mailed this legion of little cards in a declaration of love that would last a lifetime. This was the beginning of a love story that emerges in surprising ways through the letters that my mother lovingly archived. She kept them in their original envelopes, secured them in groups with rubber bands, and labeled them: Letters from Basketball Road Trip, Letters from Basic Training, Letters from Chicago, Letters from Summer School/Masters, Letters from Summer School/PhD. Before my father was a serious writer, he wrote remarkable letters that chronicle astonishment and gratitude for his great fortune in meeting and marrying his beloved, Marcia Lee Zorn.

Many children struggle to see their parents as lovers. Some outright reject the notion, preferring to believe that the father who changes their oil and the mother who makes special birthday dinners began their “real lives” after they became parents. That is, they may insist on beginning their family stories with parenthood. Of course, we know that our parents met and dated, fell in love and married. But to think of them as lovers? This may seem too intimate, too human.

I confess that my journey through these letters has been fraught with a whole host of emotions. Mostly, I’ve cried as I’ve read the tender proclamations of a man who preferred “shall” instead of “will” in his early letters, who elevated his love language to Jane Austen heights and rivaled the ardency of a Mr. Darcy. In one of my father’s early letters to my mother, he closes with these lines of verse and this final comment:

I pray thee bear with me. I need you so
When you’re away, life’s river ceases to flow
Your warmth, your tenderness, I’ll love you my own
Till eternity’s ash replaces my bone.

Whatever may happen in the future, I’ll always remember you by that last verse. It is a tribute to the finest girl I know, and I’m only reluctant that I can’t portray it better. I am yours forever. Your husband, Don.

In other letters that followed throughout the years, he often closed with “I’ll love you my own/Till eternity’s ash replaces my bone.” My mom often remarked that my Dad really knew how to close a poem. I’d add that he really knew how to close a letter, too. Each letter became a Valentine in spirit, as my father poured out his love in words that would make Wiliam Wordsworth weep.

My father’s letters from Basic Training in 1954 reveal a husband desperate to be reunited with his wife. He wrote daily from his tar-paper hut at Ft. Bliss, Texas, a 24 x 24 ft. shelter that had previously been used (and later condemned for use) as a prisoner-of-war shelter during WWII. On one hot and dusty night after he’d returned for the day’s training, he writes:

Your voice has been with me every minute today and as I am still with you and you with me, I will try to speak to you this evening through these written words. Never in my life have I loved anyone as much as I loved you today while speaking to you. . . To be in a strange place without you is like being lost in a forest, calling and calling, but no one hearing your plea and no guiding hand to guide your steps home. As I look back on this past year, I never cease to marvel the way God brought together two people who were so perfectly suited to each other.

In letter after letter, my father writes of the strength and simplicity of their marital love, a love he understood –even as a young man–to be infinite and eternal. He confesses to committing my mother’s letters to memory and to living for each long-distance phone call from Gothenburg, Nebraska. And he reveals the vulnerability of a lover who is overcome with gratitude, as he confesses:

The tears of happiness are streaming down my face, for I realize how truly fortunate I am. Why did God single me out among men to bring so much happiness into my life? You have never seen me cry, but I am tonight, and the tears are coming without shame, for being alone, the happiness is overwhelming.

To think of my dad sitting in that tar-paper hut, overcome with tears as he poured out his love and longing over three handwritten pages (front and back), almost breaks me. In a good way. In the very best way. From the early days of their marriage, he could see through the years and knew how it would end: with a love for the ages, a love set apart and blessed by God.

In a few days, men and women will make their way to greeting card aisles all over the world. They’ll scan the rows of Valentine cards for just the right one; they’ll read the verse inside for just the right sentiment. And then, perhaps they’ll buy a dozen roses or a box of chocolates (or some cashews–always a good choice, I think!) for their Valentine. Over the years, I’ve read and received many Hallmark Valentines, but I don’t think that I’ll ever read words as poignant, as utterly lovely as these of my father:

My wife, if I never deeply convince you of another thing, know that I love you beyond my strength and with such a love that reaches far into a reserve that is not mine.

Throughout their marriage, my father wrote birthday, Christmas, and Valentine poems for my mother each year, tucking them into a clip on her vanity mirror. She kept all of these in a scrapbook decorated with pink and red hearts. As his writing style developed over the years, the ornate style of his early letters evolved into the leaner–yet no less ardent–style of a free verse poet. Consider these lines from a 1984 Christmas poem for my mom:

We may be broken hard upon
time’s stone, but what I’ve come to love
is nothing time can break. There are those who
deepen into love by way of all the risks love takes,
and you are one. This Christmas let me
name you what you are, a woman beautiful in time,
and tell you what I know: I could not come
to love for any better sake. 

The night my father died in our family home, I had to wake my mother who’d finally fallen asleep. She refused to leave the living room where his hospital bed had been moved, insisting that she sleep on the sofa. I will never forget my mom throwing her arms around my dad, quietly weeping, her heart broken and yet full of gratitude for his peaceful passing and for their love: one born from a great and holy reserve that neither time nor distance could break.

In those years after my father’s death, I know that my mom regularly reread my father’s letters. As she pulled each letter from its envelope and read her husband’s words, I know that she could hear his voice and that she found great solace in passages like these:

When in later life, we sit together and perhaps even with the children gone, for it may be in those years when they have married, we shall recall the most memorable times in our life together, and it will help us to realize once and for all, how very fortunate we were that God brought together two people so remarkably suited for each other to live under and within the laws of matrimony. Darling, we have so very much to be thankful for, and lest I forget, never let me forget that our children must come from the same kind of homes and live among the same love that we have experienced. If love was a tangible thing, I would capture as much of mine as would be possible and send it to you. But it is not tangible, and perhaps, therein lies its real beauty, for it cannot be seen, only experienced, cannot be purchased, only given. Tonight, I give my love to you, my darling, and hope that you will treasure it always, for it is honorably given and created in a simple but powerful heart, capable of enduring strife, loneliness, pity, hunger, and most of all being away from its earthly source.

I take great solace and find great hope in these words. I’ve always known that I had remarkable parents, but through these letters, I’ve come to see them as lovers. For them–and for me–these letters are a sanctuary. In this sanctuary, I’ve discovered a man and a woman who suffered poverty and separation, who raised six children and opened their home to visiting writers, friends, and students, who enjoyed the simple pleasures of crane-watching and Potato Olés at Taco Johns, who loved their family beyond measure, and who’d always known that their marriage would go the course, for it was uniquely blessed. The legacy of this marriage is, indeed, a Valentine for the ages.

The Valentines 
--fifty-three years ago

Each one cost a penny.
While I was picking them out,
your face hovered over the counter
like a vision—

better than a two-bit sack
of peanut clusters,

better than the Sales
in Lingerie.

Later, in my single-bulb
hotel room

I signed all 50
with a sigh.

        ---your varsity guard, No. 11, 1952 (Don Welch to Marica Welch on Valentine's Day, 2005)

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?