A canon is a list. That’s all. We need it because we have to read Shakespeare; we have to study Dante; we have to read Chaucer, Cervantes, the Bible; … we have to read Proust, Tolstoy, Dickens, George Eliot and Jane Austen. It is inescapable that we have to read Joyce and Samuel Beckett. These are absolutely crucial writers. They provide an intellectual — dare I say a spiritual — value which has nothing to do with organized religion or the history of institutional belief. They remind us in every sense of re-minding us. They not only tell us things that we have forgotten but they tell us things we couldn’t possibly know without them. And they reform our minds. They make our minds stronger; they make us more vital. They make us alive! —Harold Bloom [interview with Eleanor Wachtel, host of CBS Radio’s Original Minds]

As a literature student and teacher, I know a bit about the Western canon, those books that scholars have identified as the works most influential in shaping Western culture. I say a bit because I’m humbled and awed enough by the likes of such authors as William Butler Yeats, Fydor Dostoevsky, and Nathaniel Hawthorne to know that I’m still a novice in the literary land of the canon.

But this literary land is peopled by many DWEMs (dead white European males), and many have argued that this is a problem. They contend that their works don’t represent modern perspectives and, as such, are no longer relevant. They insist that the very fact that these works are written by white men is enough to question their literary value and authority. After all, they argue, the white men of the Western world are colonialists who have dominated by might and by pen. For decades, the traditional Western canon has been questioned, criticized, and denounced.

Although I’ve been awed by traditional Western writers, I’ve also been awed by many other writers who represent a variety of cultures and viewpoints: Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, Louise Erdrich’s The Master Butchers Singing Club, Amy Tan’s The Valley of Amazement, as well as the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, Leslie Marmon Silko, Li Bai–the list goes on and on. I added these writers and their works to the literary canon in my classrooms. And if I were still teaching, I would continually expand and modify my reading list, hoping to expose my students to a variety of the best works.

It goes without saying that there will be continued debate over the value and relevance of the traditional Western canon, but that’s not what really concerns me today. I wholeheartedly agree that the canon should include a variety of authors from a variety of cultures, races, and persectives. What concerns me is that many (most?) of the books in the traditional canon may be removed from high school and university courses, taken from library shelves, and perhaps canceled altogether. I mentally ran down the list of works I’ve taught in American Literature courses and found that many wouldn’t pass muster using the current standards for what is offensive and harmful, what is acceptable and what is not.

For example, Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men would probably have to go because of Curly, the stable hand who, as a black man, must live apart from the white ranch hands (there is also mild profanity as well as some use of the “n” word). Kate Chopin’s The Awakening has a host of black maids and nannies who serve wealthy white folk, and the female protagonist who can find no way to fufillment as a woman ultimately takes her own life (her story is a far cry from I am woman, hear me roar). Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark” centers on a husband who finds his wife’s birthmark repulsive and kills her while trying to remove it (think about the American With Disabilities Act and all those with physical scars, marks, and defects who might be deeply offended–and terrified–by this story). Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” includes African natives whose job it is to risk their lives by literally beating the bush for the wealthy white hunters as they hunt wild game (not to mention that Hemingway is considered a “man’s man” and has been accused of being sexist). Tennesse William’s play, The Glass Menagerie, has two female protagonists: a melodramatic mother and mentally fragile daughter. Neither represents an empowered female role model. And Mark Twain’s The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn? The controversy around this novel persists. Many schools have removed it from their curricula because one of the primary characters is a black slave and because Twain uses the “n” word throughout the novel.

British psychiatrist, prison physician, and author Theodore Dalyrmple shares my concern:

This posture of skepticism towards the classics displays a profound misjudgment. For the great works of Western culture are remarkable for the distance that they maintained from the norms and orthodoxies that gave birth to them. Only a very shallow reading of Chaucer or Shakespeare would see those writers as endorsing the societies in which they lived, or would overlook the far more important fact that their works hold mankind to the light of moral judgment, and examine, with all the love and all the pity that it calls for, the frailty of human nature. It is precisely the aspiration towards universal truth, towards a God’s-eye perspective on the human condition, that is the hallmark of Western culture.

Dalrymple contends that only a shallow reading of these classic authors would reveal them as endorsing the societies in which they lived. Many of these dead white men actually held their societies up for scrutiny, exposing the flaws and sins of their systems and cultures. For example, Twain’s primary character, Jim, may have been an uneducated black slave, but he is also the best man in the entire book. Twain portrays him as a compassionate, loyal, courageous man who truly cares for others, including Huck, a foolish white boy. He doesn’t endorse slavery but rather criticizes it. His use of the “n” word is is an attribute of literary realism, a writing style that authentically portrays the speech, actions, and thoughts of a particular time period. Twain isn’t cavalier in his use of this word but intentional. The very white folk he criticizes are those–including Huck–who carelessly use this word. Again and again, Twain exposes the frailty of human nature, and in this novel, the white characters are the frailest of them all.

Will shallow readings of these works be the primary means by which they are judged? Will works of literary realism be summarily banned because of their authentic portrayals of the past? Will the traditional canon be canceled as a whole because of its authorship?

In a PBS radio program, host Ben Wattenberg interviewed Stanley Fish, English professor at Duke University, Andrew Delbanco, humanities professor at Columbia University, and Andrew Flaumenhaft, dean of St. Johns College, which places a special emphasis on the Western canon. He asked these academics whether or not we need the Western canon today. Mr. Flaumenhaft defended it:

Because good books make people think. They make — they shake you out of your complacent assumption that what you know or what you believe or what you think is the only thing to know, or believe or think.

It’s true that the traditional Western canon isn’t exclusively responsible for works that make people think and shake them out of their complacent assumptions. As I’ve mentioned earlier, there are many excellent works outside the canon that do this well. But we’re often a throw-the-baby-out-with-the bath-water people. That is, charged with new principles and perspectives, we tend to trash the old and celebrate the new. We do this with great conviction and the best intentions. And sometimes, we realize too late what we’ve given up and regret our losses. This, I fear, may be the fate of the Western literary canon.

At the very least, I think there is much to be studied and discussed. I think there are important questions that should be answered: How should we view works of literary realism? Should we remove works from curricula and libraries on the sole basis of an offensive word(s)? What do we really mean when we identify a work as relevant or irrelevant? What is the end game here and who should be responsible for it?

In his interview concerning the Western canon, Ben Wattenberg asked Stanley Fish about how he viewed his work as an English professor at Duke University. Fish responded:

I’m a literary person, mostly. My job is to present the materials that make up the content of my discipline. And to introduce students to those materials in as forceful a way as possible. What they then do with that material, and my teaching, when they go into the ballot box, or go into the marketplace is, of course, something I cannot predict, and over which I shouldn’t want to have any control.

Fish’s claim that he shouldn’t want to have any control over what his students do with the ideas from the works they’ve read in his courses is particularly important, I think. Removing works from the Western canon–or the entire canon itself–would be an attempt to control by omission. I’d like to think that capable teachers could create the appropriate context in which these works might be taught. I’d like to think that students have the right to be exposed to these classic works and the right to think about them as they choose. I’d like to think that this isn’t–and shouldn’t be–an either/or venture. Above all, I’d like to think that we won’t make these decisions emotionally from shallow readings.

Only time will tell what will happen to the Western canon. I’m hoping that we won’t lose literary works that hold mankind to the light of moral judgment even if they are written by DWEMs.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
 --Ellen Key 

Many of us may be closet abstract-lovers. I mean, who wouldn’t choose a grand abstraction over a puny particular? In Charles Schultz’s 1959 comic strip, Peanuts, Linus said: I love mankind. . . It’s people I can’t stand. Both Albert Einstein and Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote something similar when they claimed to love humanity but hate people. Publicly, we may scoff at these admissions, but if we were to invite others into our own closets, they’d see that we’ve generally been a whole lot better at loving mankind than loving people (especially those people we neither like nor understand).

In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamozov, a lady admits to Father Zosima, a wise elder, that she fears she may not be able to actively love. She confesses:

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular. In my dreams, I often make plans for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly necessary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity.

Here, she admits that she has great plans to serve humanity but that she becomes hostile to actual humans as soon as they get close to her. To love humans abstractly means that she can keep them at arm’s length. That is, she can love the idea of them without actually having to break bread with them or–God forbid–befriend them. Her advisor, Father Zosima, tells her he regrets that he can’t say anything more comforting, [but] active love is a harsh and fearful thing compared with love in dreams. Active, individual love is labor and perseverance, he explains. In short, active love is so much more demanding than abstract love.

Our struggle to love particular individuals with all their warts and gifts isn’t new. This is an age-old struggle. Thirty years ago, I stood in a college classroom teaching Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “The Lovers of the Poor.” In this poem, Brooks describes the ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League who magnanimously offer to give money to the poor, the very, very worthy and beautiful poor. And they agree to deliver the money in person, traveling from their wealthy Chicago neighborhoods to the projects. When they arrive, however, they find the sights and smells, the make-do-ness of newspaper rugs entirely too much for them. They decide it would be best to post the money and leave. These ladies have romanticized poverty and can only love the poor they’ve created in their minds, the worthy and beautiful poor. In contrast, these particular poor people don’t look, smell, speak, or act anything like they’ve imagined.

From a distance, we can love abstractly, legislate abstractly, create and reform abstractly. We do it all with good intentions, sometimes the best intentions. And we believe that when we generalize, we’re acting for the common good. Too often, we defend our broad strokes, rarely stopping to consider that we’ve lost sight of our intended subjects. Swedish writer Ellen Key argues that when our world becomes more terrible, our art becomes more abstract. When life becomes especially cruel, too many of us aim to soften its rough edges with abstraction.

The fact that we leap to abstraction–that we’ve always leaped to it–is no surprise. But once we recognize this, what do we do about it? I suggest that we start by asking our elected leaders to leave the sanctuaries of abstraction for the real relationships and experiences of the particular.

If we want to eliminate poverty, then why don’t we ask our leaders to move from their own communities into impoverished neighborhoods? Why shouldn’t they live in and among the very people they intend to help? Before they legislate programs for the poor, why shouldn’t we insist that they ask their new neighbors what these programs could and should be?

If we want to eliminate inequities and problems in public education, then why don’t we expect our leaders to enroll their own children in struggling schools? Why shouldn’t we demand that they see the challenges in these schools firsthand? Before they suggest sweeping reform, why don’t we ask that they start with their children’s schools by learning what it takes to create a better school, one classroom at a time?

If we want to address immigration, then why don’t we ask our leaders to move their families to border communities, so that they can experience the real challenges for both immigrants and natives? Why shouldn’t we refuse to accept the practice of legislating from afar and instead insist that our leaders learn from their neighbors, crafting policy and legislation based on their experiences with real people?

Some will argue that all this sounds good, but it’s not realistic. They will insist that our lobbyists and legislators must live in Washington, D. C. But I would contend that if teachers can teach remotely, why can’t legislators debate and legislate remotely? I would argue that millions have effectively relied upon platforms like Zoom for over a year, so this isn’t impossible. And finally, I would propose that it’s more unrealistic (and potentially more dangerous) to make policies and laws without basing them on real relationships and experiences. It’s more unrealistic to live in the world of abstractions than to join the world of the particular.

I’m proposing a kind of servant leadership that we’re sorely lacking. Our affinity with abstracting, with generalizing and romanticizing may seem naive and benign, but it is presumptuous and condescending at best. I’m not questioning good intentions but rather consequences. And these consequences suggest that we shouldn’t accept the type of leadership we currently have.

During my lifetime, I’ve only had the privilege to work under a handful of genuine servant leaders. For example, I worked under a high school principal who pushed a big rolling garbage can around during every lunch period, stopping to pick up trash and, more importantly, to talk with students, all 1,500 of whom he knew by name. Here was a leader who knew and understood the real world of those young adults in his charge, a leader who ultimately changed the culture of an entire school. He could have stayed in his office and eaten his own lunch in relative peace. He could have stationed himself there each day, making school-wide decisions from a comfortable desk chair. He could have, but he didn’t. Instead, he walked the hallways, visited classrooms, and greeted students coming and going from school. Each day, his actions revealed that he loved humans more than he loved humanity.

In her journals, poet Sylvia Plath wrote that [the] abstract kills, the concrete saves. As harsh as these words sound, I think she’s right. We’re killing the very people, institutions, and ideas we long to save by abstracting them. We’re the ladies from the Ladies’ Betterment League come to call on a whole host of social, economic, political, environmental, and educational problems that affect real people. And all too often, we don’t show up–or we get of whiff of something unpleasant, and we run. We decide it would be better to send our policies, laws, proposals, guidelines, and regulations from the sanctuary of our abstractions.

That’s the bad news. But the good news is that we can learn from those servant leaders who understand that power is a privilege, a privilege that must be grounded in reality. Regardless of how horrifying the world is, they accept the challenge of climbing down the abstraction ladder into the mire. And to effectively lead, they know that they must first understand and love humans before they can ever understand and love humanity.

No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive.
Mahatma Gandhi 

Disclaimer: If I had the answers to the questions I’m about to pose, I’d undoubtedly have my own TED talk. I’d have written best-selling books, I’d be sought after as a guest speaker and globally regarded among the “truly wise.” But sadly (and understandably), I don’t. I do, however, think the questions are worth posing.

Chilean writer Isabel Allende echoes Gandhi’s words when she writes: Peace requires everyone to be in the circle—wholeness, inclusion. At face value, I suspect that many people would agree that inclusion is the remedy to most of what ails us today. They may agree with Gandhi that we threaten cultural extinction if we continue down the path of exclusion that we’ve been on. They may applaud Allende for her rallying cry to open up the metaphorical circle so that everyone stands in the center. But if pressed for the truth, they may sympathize more with the frank words of Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber:

If the quality of my Christianity lies in my ability to be more inclusive than the next pastor, things get tricky because I will always, always encounter people—intersex people, Republicans, criminals, Ann Coulter, etc.—whom I don’t want in the tent with me. Always. I only really want to be inclusive of some kinds of people and not of others. [Pastrix: The Cranky, Beautiful Life of a Sinner Saint]

Ideally, we should always want everyone in the tent with us, right? And shouldn’t we be ashamed of the possibility that we really only want to be inclusive of some kinds of people? This is the question of the day–heck, this is the question of the ages. Beyond metaphor, beyond the ideal image of one tribe, one circle of humanity, how does this work? That is, how do we want to be inclusive of those we’d prefer to exclude, particularly–and perhaps most importantly–those whose attitudes and ideologies are so repugnant to us?

Consider this hypothetical scenario: A group of cake lovers and a group of pie lovers have been in conflict for decades. At best, they’ve coexisted in the shared industrial kitchen they call home. At worst, they’ve shunned, shamed, and even persecuted each other. Even after years of bake-offs, new laws, reconciliation efforts and educational campaigns, they’ve become increasingly intolerant of the other’s ideas, and many fear that civil war is brewing:

Cakes can’t sit beside pies on the dessert table, the pie lovers cry. Cake, as everyone knows, is an inferior food choice–at best less tasty, and at worst, seriously unhealthy. Anyone who advocates for their cause is woefully ignorant and potentially dangerous. If cakes are ever to join the dessert table at all, they must first reform the way they think and act (and they must learn to love, not merely accept, crust).

Are you serious? the cake lovers reply. Pie lovers have a history of discriminating against and persecuting cakes. They’ve built a culinary heritage on their refusal to give cake lovers their due rights. If anyone should be excluded from the dessert table, it’s pies. If they ever want a chance at the table, they’ll have to change their ideas and attitudes (and they must learn to love, not merely accept, frosting).

Although there are some cake lovers and some pie lovers who’ve come to accept and understand each other, others in each group argue that some is not enough, some will never be enough. It must be all. All must be welcomed to the dessert table. So how do you get all to agree to a bigger dessert table that includes a diverse smorgasbord of cakes and pies? Consider the following factions in each group:

• those who’ve come to truly understand and embrace the value and cultural necessity of a diverse dessert table
• those who like the idea of a diverse dessert table but who never actually venture down to the opposite end where the “other” desserts are housed
• those who tirelessly campaign for a diverse dessert table, but who ultimately can’t accept the opposing faction who refuses to reform (and conform)
• those who refuse to sample even a taste of the other’s fare, insisting on dessert purity (only cakes OR only pies)
• those who believe the culinary end justifies the means (cake lovers and pie lovers who devote their lives to destroying the opposition through any means available, including organized food fights)

How would you go about unifying all cake and pie factions, so that the dessert table was wholly inclusive? Consider the fact that dessert education has been moderately, but not wholly, successful in bringing more cakes and pies to the table. Culinary campaigns and new laws have had moderate success, too. As have the children and grandchildren of cake and pie lovers who’ve befriended and loved each other and who’ve risen to leadership positions in the dessert world. But nothing has been totally successful. In spite of all efforts, pockets of resistance have grown. And to make matters worse, some cake and pie lovers now confess that they really don’t want the vocal, ignorant faction of the other group on the table at all. Ever.

This is a silly, hypothetical conflict, but I fear that it’s all too reflective of conflict in general. The history of the world reads like a continuous series of conflicts: between nations and regions, tribes and sects, cultures and religions, races and ethnicities, social/economic classes and sexes–the list goes on and on.

According to ACLED ( Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project), there are ten serious conflicts to watch in 2020-21: the Sahel (Chad, Niger, Mauritania, Mali, and Burkina Faso), Yemen, Mexico, India, Somalia, Iran, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Lebanon, and the United States. To see our own nation included in this list is sobering. And this list is by no means exhaustive. There’s the Rohingya crisis and recent military coup in Myanmar, the ongoing oppression in North Korea, the Azerbaijani-Armenian war over Nagorno-Karabakh, the conflict between Turkey and armed Kurdish groups, the Somalian Civil War, the Israeli-Palistinian conflict, the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, the conflict in Ukraine, instability in Egypt and Venezuela, tensions in the East China Sea–just to name a few more. And these are the violent conflicts. When we consider other ideological, social, environmental, and economic conflicts that aren’t generally violent but are contentious nonetheless, we could fill pages.

So, back to the burning question: How do we achieve unity in a world which has been, and continues to be, in serious conflict? For example, how do staunch pro life and pro choice advocates come together in the same metaphorical tent? Pro life advocates defend life, but does this really include all lives, even those of pro choice advocates? Pro choice advocates defend choice, but does this really include all choices, even the choices of pro life advocates?

When individuals and groups are so ideologically different, when they oppose each other so vigorously, when acceptance seems so wrong because the opposing views are so wrong (or perhaps so evil as some have argued), how is unity, even unity in diversity, possible?

Ideologically, could it ever be possible? Could we ever reach consensus on all moral, political, social, economic, educational, spiritual, environmental, and cultural views? Could everyone–and I mean all–be snuggly included in the unity circle?

As I hear calls for unity, I can’t help but wonder what this really means. If I were a cynic, I could easily dismiss any vision of unity as impossibly naive. If I were a zealot, I could summarily condemn a vision of unity that includes any views other than my own. If I were a romantic, I could speak passionately about unity, optimistically choosing to ignore the real world. I’m neither cynic, nor zealot, nor romantic, though. To be honest, I’m not sure what I’d call myself. Maybe I’d call myself a seeker, one who has a whole lot of questions that I leave you with today.

Final disclaimer: For the record, I’d have a hard time excluding either cake or pie from my dessert table. A mile-high lemon meringue pie can certainly live in harmony beside a two-layer chocolate cake with buttercream frosting, right?

photo by Jim Fenster

                                                                
 Outlier

 The white-faced cardinal sits at the edge
 of a gathering of native birds
 who’ve come for black-oiled sunflower seeds.
  
 She’s a stunner, a real beauty among 
 the john and jane does,
 the house finches and dark-eyed juncos. 
  
 That she keeps to herself—
 teetering on the railing, waiting
 as shells litter the deck—
 that her detachment is a rare geography 
 pleases me.
  
 I’ve always loved the outliers:
        the ones who wear their deviations
        like crown jewels,
        whose otherness
        is fine plumage.
  
 While most of us shuffle forward in sensible shoes
 and hold our tongues,
 in the skies above,
 an outlier wings its way towards
 other galaxies.
  
 Can you imagine it,
 streaking across a nameless universe
 where gravity is but a distant memory?
  
 And can you imagine it,
 coming home to all that space undone
 an outlier, a constellation of one? 

Note: I borrowed the photo from another photographer/bird watcher because I couldn’t get close enough to get a good photo of the white-faced female cardinal who visits our bird feeder daily. Her white face is an effect of leucism, a wide variety of conditions that causes a partial loss of pigmentation in birds and animals.

photo by Collyn Ware

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms… ― Henry David Thoreau

Recently, I was talking with a friend, a realtor who specializes in farm land and acreages. When I asked if he’d been busy (thinking he probably hadn’t been since it’s the dead of winter in Iowa), he answered with a resounding yes. Really, I said. At this time of year? He reported that people were buying up land all over southeast Iowa. Even people from out of state, from the coasts, he said. We both speculated on this phenomenon and decided that our Covid year had prompted some to seriously rethink where and how they lived. You’re not going to bump into any stars on any boulevard around here, but you might bump into a white-tail doe and her twins. Literally, if you don’t drive defensively!

I’ve thought about this conversation a lot in the past week. I have a smorgasbord of delights outside my windows: song birds of all sorts and sizes, deer who visit nightly, unblemished snow that blankets the back yard until it winds its way into the timber, sunrises and sunsets to make you weep. For the twenty years I’ve lived on this acreage, I’ve had all these sights and sounds to enjoy, and yet, I’d be lying if I said that I’ve always enjoyed them as I have this past year. I’d be fibbing if I said that I lived deeply and sucked all the marrow out of life, that I lived deliberately, fronting only the essential facts of life. Of course, I haven’t. For too long, I’ve been too busy living–or so I thought–to live.

If Thoreau were my mentor, not my literary but my life mentor, I have no doubts that he’d call me into his office. Do you want to know how many times you looked outside today, how many times you looked up from your book or computer screen? I can count them on one hand. Actually, I can count them on one finger. You’re on probation–indefinitely–until you can improve your life. And this would be fair and kind enough. Averaging my pathetic performance over the past two decades, I would’ve scored low enough to be legitimately expelled. I may have had a smorgasbord of delights all around me, but often I took them for granted just as I took too many other things for granted. Holding a red marking pen and balancing a stack of student papers on my lap, I resigned myself to a life-on-hold.

With far fewer distractions, many of us have come to live more deliberately, driving our lives into corners and reducing them to much lower terms. I can still recall the bliss (and this word doesn’t do it justice) of floating in my above ground pool, orioles, finches, and grosbeaks flying in and out of the oak trees, a cloudless, cobalt sky above me, and sun enough to warm my bones. I remember thinking how blessed I was to have all of this just outside my door. I remember thinking how life didn’t get much better than this.

Throughout history, there have been writers and leaders who celebrated living dearly. They admonished us, cajoled us, shamed and loved us into cultivating better lives. This is nothing new. It may be sadly new for many of us, though, for we’ve lived our lives in the land of conveniences, on the treadmills of production and on the ladders of success. Having learned them in school, we’ve been educated enough to recite Thoreau’s aphorisms. We’ve put them on posters that hung in our classrooms and offices. We’ve used them to introduce speeches and essays. They’ve been our friends:

• I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately . . .
• I learned this, at least, by my experiement: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.
• If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away.

But calling them our friends is clearly not enough. I just finished Charlotte McConaghey’s new novel, Migrations. Her protagonist, Franny Stone, is on a mission to find the world’s last flock of arctic terns on their migration from pole to pole. Some reviewers have called this novel an ode to a threatened world, for readers begin to realize that it’s not only the arctic terns that are endangered. The great schools of fish are gone, leaving the ocean barren. There is no bird song, the birds native to different parts of the world now extinct. Franny drives her life into a precious corner and reduces it to a solitary goal: seek and love the arctic terns. She wants nothing more than to come to the end of her life knowing that she lived deliberately, and thus lived well.

We all have those corners into which we might drive what is most precious to us. And once there, we might come to see that, in doing so, we’ve reduced the clutter of our lives to the lowest and most valuable terms. We don’t need a pandemic to live more deliberately, but for many of us, months of living quite differently than we’ve ever lived before have jump-started this. I don’t want to be out-deliberated by some Californian who jubilantly buys ten acres of Iowa hardwoods, birds, and solitude. I want to see the wealth of my rural world. And not because someone else values it, but because I want to come to the end of my life and say I have lived, that I tasted deeply and sucked all the marrow from my 3.6 acres, my decades of living and loving.

I want my mentor, Henry David Thoreau, to pronounce my probation period over. And I want to hear his parting words: Live deeply, dearly, deliberately, my friend.

 
  
 End Roll
 for my mother on her birthday
  
 It’s a gift from the newspaper office, you say—
 an end roll of newsprint on a spool
 that stands 3 feet tall on its cardboard spine—
 free for the taking. 
  
 All yours, you say,
 and I watch as the center cannot hold,
 as paper begins to unspool itself
 like yarn from a wild skein.
  
 At first, I can’t bring myself to put pencil to paper.
 The white field before me is too dear.
  
 But even at twelve, 
 I understand the invitation before me.
 The furrows of my palms loosen,
 and then I begin to draw what I’ve only imagined—
 tentative at first, but then surer—
  
 until I’ve given form to an acre of possibilities
 until I’ve drawn right up to the cardboard core.
  
 I’m still the one who trembles before paper,
 the one who finds the world on the back of an envelope,
 whose hours are lost and gained 
 when my pen finds its way. 
  
 I was born a fallow field
 where shapeless, wordless things would incubate,
 the loam of my lifetime deeper and richer because
 even before I knew this,
  
 you knew. 

We should remember that there are few pleasures greater than promoting your moral enthusiasms at other people’s expense.
― Theodore Dalrymple, Spoilt Rotten: the Toxic Cult of Sentimentality

English cultural critic, prison physician and psychiatrist, Anthony Malcolm Daniels, also known by the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, understands too well the slippery slope of moral enthusiasm. There’s often nothing more exhilerating than to ride the tide of moral enthusiasm. This is the stuff that cultural–and personal–dreams are made of. Righteous indignation blossoms into full-fledged moral enthusiasm, and the world lies at our feet. Sometimes trembling in anticipation or sometimes in fear, sometimes sleeping, blissfully unware of what’s to come, the world is our playground–or perhaps more aptly, our stomping ground. For when moral enthuiasm comes at other people’s expense, our speech and actions may leave a path of destruction in their wake.

Memes commemorating 2020 will undoubtedly continue into the new year. Most of us were all too eager to ring out the year-from-hell. We joked about the “new normal,” and yet, truthfully we weren’t laughing. Quarantined in our homes, our interactions with the outside world came largely through the internet and television. And what we saw there was anything but normal. Hospitals struggled with the influx of Covid patients, death rates climbed, dire predictions abounded, and authorities debated the best courses of action. And then as the world grappled with the horrors of a pandemic–the likes of which it hadn’t experienced for a century–we took to the airwaves. First in relative solidarity and then increasingly in conflict, we plastered social media with proclamations of what to do, how to think and live in this new age of pandemic.

On the heels of pandemic came nationwide racial, social, and political conflict, the intensity of which harkened back to the 1960s. Again, some of us took to the airwaves, first to comment and then increasingly to shame. Some lived through social media, eager to agree with those who espoused like ideas and equally eager to refute those who didn’t. Moral enthusiasm was the name of the game, and it was the only real game in town.

Clearly, moral enthusiasm isn’t, by nature, a bad thing. We depend upon those who think and act with moral enthusiasm which makes–and has made–our world a better place. We can’t imagine our lives without the thinkers and doers who are so excited by cell biology or artificial intelligence or genomics. Too often, we take for granted those whose moral enthusiasm has led to social, economic, environmental, medical, and political innovations that have changed our world. True, many will argue that these changes haven’t always been good or that their consequences have been dangerous. In the past year as the world’s scientists worked feverishly to develop safe Covid vaccines, many of us questioned the safety and efficacy of their work. But just as many of us applauded the benefits of such work and respected the moral enthusiasm that fueled the countless hours spent in laboratories.

In 2020, I watched as we wielded our moral enthusiasm like machetes. With edges sharpened on the stone of good intent, our words often macerated anything in their ideological paths. We unfriended others on Facebook. Some of us even posted terse announcements that we were taking a break from social media altogether. And some of us held such aggregious views that others canceled us (or we canceled them). Paradoxically, people across political, social, and educational spectrums were equally enthusiastic, equally confident of their moral compulsions: police or no police, face masks or no face masks, vaccine or no vaccine, in-person schooling or no in-person schooling, incumbent president or no incumbent president. We ruminated within the four walls of our homes. Sometimes, our ruminations morphed into alien beings with lives of their own, and like mad scientists, we took pleasure in our creations.

But as we leave 2020 and look forward to 2021, we face a real dilemma: how do we promote and nuture moral enthusiasm that has the power to positively change systems, cultures, and even nations without destroying individuals? It would be foolish to suggest that there is an easy solution to this dilemma. History is a mausoleum of moral enthusiasts and those who suffered under their reigns. Yet, it’s also a memorial of moral enthusiasts and those who prospered under their reigns. What to do, what to do. . .

Dalrymple may not have the solution to our dilemma (who could?), but he offers sage words that seem particularly apt for our future:

The bravest and most noble are not those who take up arms, but those who are decent despite everything; who improve what it is in their power to improve, but do not imagine themselves to be saviors. In their humble struggle is true heroism.

This is a New Year’s resolution worth adopting, I think. To be decent despite everything, to improve what is in my power to improve, to refuse to see myself as a savior, to live humbly in my enthusiasm. For me, it will be a daily (hourly?) struggle, but the fruits of this labor may be the bravest, noblest struggle of all.

the scandal of particularity (theology): the difficulty of regarding a single individual human (Jesus) as being the savior for all humans

Months after we adopted Quinn, I transitioned from full to part-time teaching. Initially, the transition was more brutal than it should’ve been. Whereas I’d once taught a classroom of 75 students in my introduction to literature course, I now faced a classroom (dare I say classroom?) of five students in my night class. I stood transfixed before these five students who sat so close to me that I could literally read the notes they were scribbling in their notebooks and smell the familiar scent of Axe that wafted off of one young man whose eyes grew larger as he thumbed through our 600+ page American Lit anthology. Until then, I realized that the sum total of my teaching experience had been with larger groups. In these classrooms, my eyes would invariably scan a sea of faces, and often enough, I began to regard them as a mass, an abstract whole, a generality. But this? This wasn’t a whole; these were the individual parts, up close and in person. And it was impossible to see these parts as anything but unique and particular.

Today, I teach an audience of two. Working one-on-one with each of my grandchildren has made me acutely aware of how much you can see and understand when your sole focus in on an individual and his or her learning style. No more teaching to the middle. Every lesson, every day is tailored to Gracyn or Griffin’s particular needs and learning styles. As we lean into each other, our heads bent over the same work, this is about as real as it gets.

There’s something truly scandalous about particularity. It narrows our field of vision and closes the gap. It begs to be known more intimately and invades our personal space. If we blink hard, trying to blur the edges and transform it into some shadowy abstraction, it resists. And if we try to cast it out into some nebulous agglomerate, it refuses to be consumed. It remains scandalously particular.

In Chapter 14 of Miracles, Christian author C. S. Lewis writes of such scandal:

To be quite frank, we do not at all like the idea of a “chosen people.” Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert, some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that.

Lewis understood how scandalous these words were, how many would chafe at what they would see as a painfully narrow view of redemption. Indeed, the whole idea of one Jewish girl and her bethrothed, of one baby–both divine and human–is scandalous. Out of centuries of possibilities, countless people and places, God chose this time, this woman, this man, and this humble place for the birth of his son. The degree of this particularity is outrageous. This is what Hebrew scholar Walter Brueggemann would call the scandal of particularity. [The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary, 1984]

As a rule, we don’t do particular very well. My students, like most politicians, preferred to speak and write in sweeping generalizations and abstractions. We’re big scale, grand scheme kind of folk. The world of abstractions can be a world of rainbows and kittens, all irridescence and spun sugar. Too often, we prefer to maintain our distance and look on from afar, for this allows us to turn away if we see something–or someone–that confuses or grieves us. For better, and often for worse, we hide behind our cloaks of generality, so we don’t become overwhelmed.

As tragic and troubling as 2020 has been, it has brought the particular directly into our households. And this isn’t altogether a bad thing. In many ways, it’s a very good thing. The scope of our lives and world seemed to shrink within our own four walls. Though we had access to the world at large through television and media, our immediate worlds were small and relational. The people within our households became our particular worlds. And this was genuinely scandalous in the sense that there were fewer outside distractions, fewer opportunities to generalize, fewer instances in which we could distance ourselves from others in our homes. At times, it was undoubtedly uncomfortable, perhaps even painful. Yet, at other times, it was wondrous and intimate, for we realized that these particulars–those people and shared moments in our own homes–were the very things that mattered most.

Certainly, I can’t speak for God, but I think he revels in this kind of particularity. After all, he gave his son to a particular mother and father, to the very human experience of living and loving and leaving. Lest we generalize and lest we make his love an abstraction, he gave us a baby. What a scandalous particularity.

photo by Collyn Ware

Never be afraid to trust an unknown future to a known God.
― Corrie ten Boom

In the past year, I’ve had several conversations with individuals whose trust in a better world and brighter future was tenuous at best. One admitted that she didn’t feel as though she could bring children into a world like this. Another lamented the status of our political and physical environments, claiming both were woefully inadequate to sustain any promise for the future. As I listened, I imagined the doomsday clock ticking loudly, both the hour and minute hands circling wildly and with great speed. I imagined the end coming like a thief in the night, quick and sure.

As I reflected upon these conversations, I was truly saddened. Even in my darkest moments, I’ve never felt as though things were so bad that I didn’t want to have children or plan my future. Even as wars continued, politicians wrangled for power, and news of environmental disasters grieved the world, I found myself looking forward to better times.

If anyone may have conceded that the doomsday clock was, indeed, ticking, consider Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch resistance worker and concentration camp prisoner. Corrie and her family, members of the Dutch Reformed Church, worked with the Dutch resistance to resist Nazi occupation of the Netherlands and to hide Dutch Jews. For this work, she was arrested by the Gestapo, imprisoned in her own country, and later transferred to Ravensbruck, a female concentration camp in Germany. Clearly, she had cause to regard the future–hers and the world’s–with despair. And yet, she didn’t. When her future was unclear, she clung to the assurance that God was with her. She trusted that the world’s dark night of the soul wouldn’t last forever. After she was released from Ravensbruck in 1944 and reunited with surviving members of her family, she dedicated her life to reconciliation, helping Holocaust victims heal emotionally and spiritually. In spite of the pain she witnessed all around her, she hung on to the promise that God would never forsake his people, and she let go of her pain and fear. She may not have known exactly what the future held, but she did know the God to whom she entrusted it.

In the nativity story, Joseph is often portrayed as a secondary figure: the guy who got Mary into Bethlehem, who found shelter just in time, and who stood around helplessly during the birth. Imagine discovering that your betrothed is pregnant–and not with your child. If anyone had a right to doubt a hopeful future, it might have been Joseph. Faced with what appeared to be no good options, Joseph could’ve cut his losses and slunk away in shame. But in truth, he stepped up to play a leading role when he took Mary as his wife. In Matthew 1: 20-21 and 24, we read:

But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. she will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins . . . When Joseph woke up, he did what the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took Mary home as his wife.

To assume the role of earthly father to God’s son is, perhaps, one of the biggest leading roles of all. When Joseph could only see the future through the glass darkly, God reached out to him in a dream. Joseph grabbed this promise and held on. And then he let go. He released his shame and fear, his uncertainty and pride and stepped up as both husband and father.

Every Christmas, I remember our own trip to Bethlehem in 1992. In the middle of the night, Paul and I loaded our sleeping girls into the van and made our way to the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. There in a few short hours, we would meet our infant son who was being flown in from Georgia. Not flesh of our flesh, nor bone of our bone, but the son we’d already come to love and would soon adopt. Paul would never have a biological son, but he stepped in with both feet to father this baby boy whom we only knew through photos. For in truth, we had a family of five already, and adopting a fourth child came at my urging. He could’ve said no, but he didn’t. Instead, he hung on to the future that I’d imagined–a future we trusted that God would bless–and let go of any uncertainties he’d previously held.

Unquestionably, most of of us have had moments when we looked ahead and could see no light at the end of our tunnels. We may not have been able to even see our hands in front of our faces. To move forward, to embrace the future with courage and hope? Sure, we’ll just step into a tiger’s cage, ride a barrel over Niagra Falls, rappell off a skyscraper and free climb El Capitan. No problem.

None of us knows exactly what our futures hold. We can make predictions, and we can dream. But ultimately, it’s all about what we hang onto and what we let go of. We can hang onto our doubts and fears, as we let go of any hope in a better tomorrow. Or we can reach forward and hang onto God’s promises, as we let go of the pessimism that that threatens to imprison us. Holocaust survivor Corrie ten Boom hung on. Fathers Joseph and Paul hung on. And in doing so, all stepped assuredly into the future.

And then there’s my grandson Griffin, standing atop a sledding hill for the first time in the season. The snow was wet enough to be slick, and at the bottom of the hill stood a forbidding thicket of scrub brush. He hesitated. Then, he hung onto his grandpa as they pushed off and let go with a whoop that sailed through the frosty air.

This is the paradox and challenge of Advent: to hang on and let go. But just ask Griffin, it’s well worth the ride.

for Griffin

I stand at the door, eyes locked
on the ceiling, eyes of a stranger,
and then she cries...
Oh my God, help me!
Where a child would have cried Mama!
Where a child would have believed Mama!
she bit the towel and called on God
and I saw her life stretch out...
I saw her torn in childbirth,
and I saw her, at that moment,
in her own death and I knew that she knew.
--Anne Sexton, "Pain for a Daughter"

In Sexton’s poem, she writes about her daughter who has lost her pony to distemper and, in her loss, consoles herself by visiting the neighbors’ thoroughbred. He inadvertently stands on her foot, and she limps home having lost three toenails, her riding boot filling with blood. She sits on the toilet as her father attempts to clean and disinfect her wounds. At the end of the poem, Sexton, the mother, stands helplessly in the doorway watching the entire ordeal. Clearly, she witnesses genuine pain as her daughter cries out to God for help. But the real pain, she knows, will come later as her child-daughter becomes an adult who will bear a child and ultimately face death. The fact that she sees this very adult awareness in her daughter’s eyes is, perhaps, the most painful moment of all.

The first time I taught this poem in an introductory literature course, I could barely read the final lines aloud. Sexton’s words had literally sucked the life from me. As the young mother of an infant daughter, I hadn’t yet imagined her as a mother and woman who would experience the pain and loss of life. And truthfully, I didn’t want to. Better to think of her swaddled in the pink blanket her grandmother had given her, safe in her crib. Better to believe that, armed with a regulation carseat and up-to-date immunization records, I could protect her from the world at large. Better to believe that I could take her adult pain away as efficiently as I could apply Bandaids and administer teaspoons of Tylenol.

In the season of Advent, I often find myself thinking about what Mary really knew about the life and death of the child she would bear. She may not have known that her son would be scourged and crucified, but she did know that he would be both fully human and fully divine, both her son and God’s. She had to know that the world’s eyes would eventually be on him and that his heavenly father would ask great things of him. This awareness alone is daunting. And as she watched Jesus grow into a full understanding of who he was and what he was destined to do, she must have had moments–like any mother–during which she cried out, “If only I spare him this pain!”

Last week, Griffin and I were working on his daily math lesson. It was a new concept and a challenging one, at that. Finally in desperation, he dropped his pencil and said, “This is too hard! And I know 3rd grade math will be even harder!” Tears had formed in the corners of his eyes, and he blinked hard. So did I. Because in that moment, I knew that he knew. I could see his life stretch out before him, the boy-child becoming a man, the days when all things seemed possible–the world at his fingertips–growing increasingly more tarnished by the realities of the adulthood. I could see that the boy who dressed and talked like a rodeo circuit bull-rider would soon see that this was just a childhood fantasy, the death of which would leave a real and painful scar. It was a small thing, this tough math problem. Still, it took on larger, more significant proportions as we both considered it.

Generally speaking, we look forward to the future, to better days ahead. 2021 has got to be better than 2020, we think. Certainly, we’ll leave the coronavirus behind eventually, and life will return to some kind of normal. And in those moments when we see that pandemic-free future, we rest assured that better days glow brightly along the horizon. Still, as adults, we know what the world knows: that we’ll ultimately immunize the world, open up restaurants, schools, and workplaces, and live maskless days–until the next virus or war or environmental disaster. We know that we know.

This awareness could bury us, or it could be yet another reminder of how broken our world is and how desperately we need a a savior. Sexton hears her daughter cry out to God, when, in the past, she would’ve cried out to her. As Griffin struggled with two-digit subtraction, I could imagine the times when he, too, will cry out to God, for his pain will be greater than that which his mom or grandma can remedy. Today, we cry out to scientists and politicians, to policy makers and academics. We raise our collective voices to the world and hope for better days ahead.

But we would do well to cry out to God. First and foremost, we would do well to remember that we’ll only have days of earthly respite. We need a savior whose comfort and peace offer so much more than this. In this season of Advent, we can see the light of Christ emerging from the darkness. And yet, we know that this light will ultimately be extinguished. We can see Christ’s life and death stretch out before him.

The promise of Advent, however, is the promise of return: the light that reemerges, the resurrection of hope. We know that we know. And this makes all the difference.