Something Dependable

As summer approached, there was increasing discussion on the radio about the condition of my state's electric power supply.  Would it be able to withstand the high demands that would be placed upon it during summer's heat, when more air-conditioners would be run more often?  Had enough steps been taken to strengthen the state's electric grid to prevent the type of massive, extended blackouts that had occurred the winter of the year before -- shutting off furnaces, leaving people shivering inside their houses, some even dying?  The state's public-utility board and the electric grid operators both assured the public that the problems had been fixed.  And the company operating my local electricity ran TV commercials showing smiling people, happy that their electric company "had their back" (as the saying goes).  We could depend on them, we were assured. 

Nevertheless, I was not surprised when I awoke at 5:00 one May morning -- even before summer had begun -- and saw that the power was out in our house.  A glance out the window showed me that the same was true for my neighbors across the street, who are on a separate electric line and set of transformers.  Something on a much larger scale than the line to a single block of houses had been put out of commission.  And the cause had not been any extended period of intense heat, but instead a run-of-the-mill thunderstorm in the night.

Storm in the night

Admittedly, a power disruption for several hours is a modest challenge for most homes.  But it can symbolize the many failures of our human societies that can make them so undependable that sometimes we don't want to get out of bed in the morning.  Such incidents can, unfortunately, lead not merely to frustration (and maybe anger) but to hatred of some people who have not been dependable.  After a few hours in my house without hot coffee and without eggs being fried on my electric stove, I remembered that the power-company employees that were trying to restore the system also depended upon the same vulnerable system when they returned to their homes.  They had their challenges as well.

Fortunately, not too long after getting up in my dark house without power, there came something I know I could depend on: The sun gradually rose in the east.  It did so at the same predictable time it had the morning before.  Its light filtered through the clouds, bringing into my house a gentle but appreciated illumination through the windows.  I was able to set aside the flashlight I had been awkwardly carrying about, trying to do those morning tasks that did not require electricity.

In the New Testament's Gospel of Matthew, Jesus presents to his disciples what must be one of the most difficult of his instructions. Namely, “Love your enemies.” And what does Jesus put forward as an example that might inspire his disciples in such a difficult challenge? Does he point to some very noble person around him? No. Does he point to himself? No, not even that. Instead, what he points to is the reliable rising of the sun every morning, saying that we should be inspired by our “Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good.” (Matt. 5:44a & 45a, NRSV). Thus it is that Jesus encourages his disciples to turn their attention to the non-human sphere that they might widen and deepen their appreciation of God, and thus be inspired -- even while living in human societies that can, at times, be so frustratingly undependable.

Seven hours after I had woken up in a house without electricity, the power was still not back on; and the electric company had given up on making any prediction of when it would be.  I, however, was able to make a prediction with considerable assurance: I knew the sun would set in the west that coming evening.  And I knew it would be dutifully rising the coming morning.  And that would be good.

~ ~ ~

(Is there a way you deal with the ordinary frustrations of life?)

(The picture of lightning is by Vedrin Jeliazkov
and is used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

Being Forgiving about the “Little Things”

It seemed at first like such a little thing.  But as I listened further to the brief segment on radio (and later read the transcript), the seemingly small bit of news grew in significance and importance. The news story's title announced that "New York City's Public Libraries Abolish Fines on Overdue Materials."

The news moderator, inquiring about the mechanics of the new plan, asked the inevitable question:  Aren't fines necessary to get people to bring books back to the library/? The answer was "No."  As Tony Marx, president of the New York Public Library system, explained:

"It turns out late fees for books don't work. They don't bring the books back.
 Almost all the books come back anyway because people respect that if they are treated
 with respect and trust, they respond in kind."

Here, the brief news story about one city's libraries seemed to be turning into a much larger moral lesson.

Not that New York's library system was advocating total suspension of human responsibility:  A person would still have to pay for any books that were lost.  Nevertheless, besides abolishing any future late-fees, all library-card holders' accounts were being cleared of any accumulated late-fees.  That was because the library administrators recognized that accounts that had been blocked because of late-fees "are vastly disproportionately in the poorest neighborhoods.  And that's exactly where we need people using the library."  The news segment now seemed to be turning into a Biblical parable involving the tendency of human societies to become out of balance -- making the rich richer and the poor poorer, unless some correctives in behavior were regularly made.

Dennis Walcott, the president of Queens Public Library (part of New York City's public libraries) added a final comment that shifted the little news story into an even higher gear, turning it into something like a prophetic vision of hope.  Of the library's aim with its new rules to get especially the younger back into libraries, he declared:

"That's the goal, to have our children participate in the American Dream.

And the American Dream is through our libraries."

Not penalizing people so as to hold them responsible for little mistakes can seem "unnatural," as we might say.  But is it really so unnatural?  Is a mother's loving tolerance of her toddler's weaknesses really unnatural? Is it really against her nature?

And what about that larger, non-human realm of Nature that our lives are a part of?  Nature can seem to be totally unforgiving when hurricanes come.  But hurricanes hit a specific area of land only a few days out of the many days of the year.  On most days, Nature displays more regular, sustaining rhythms that could be called "forgiving."

In the Bible's Gospel of Matthew, Jesus presents to his disciples what must be one of the most difficult of his instructions.  He tells them to "love your enemies."  And what does Jesus put forward to inspire his disciples in such a difficult challenge (a challenge even harder than forgiving people's ordinary mistakes)?  Does Jesus point to some very noble person around him?  No. Does he point to himself?  No, not even that.  Instead, he points to the reliable rising of the sun every morning, saying that we should be inspired by our "Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good."  The sun regularly rises, despite all humans' mistakes of the previous day (even if it was just being ashamed to return a late library book).  Thus it is that Jesus encourages his disciples to turn their attention to the non-human sphere -- Nature -- that they might deepen their appreciation of God, and thereby be inspired to be more loving.

~ ~ ~

(Do you see any qualities in Nature that  you think we humans should emulate?)

(Quotations by the librarians are from radio segment "New York City's Public Libraries
 Abolish Fines on Overdue Materials," on National Public Radio's Morning Edition show of Oct. 7, 2021.)
(The Biblical verses cited are Matthew 5:44a & 45a [NRSV].)

Hope during Hard Times

Alexander Pope

When I was growing up, I often heard my mother citing snippets of poetry.  One such snippet was:

"Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

I knew that aphorism by heart long before I learned it was from the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope.

As I grew, finding my own identity, I heard many people expressing ideas that circled around that matter of being hopeful.  Radio and TV hosts frequently ask people, "Are you optimistic about the future?"  But optimism is different from hope (as the wide variety of answers given to that question demonstrates).  Whether or not a person is optimistic depends more upon their individual personality than upon what is actually probable.

Another word that circles around the matter of hope is the word "wish," but it too is different from hope.  The word "wish" often conveys a pie-in-the-sky type of wanting, as in when we speak of "wishful thinking."  Young children, before blowing out the candles on their birthday cakes, are told to "make a wish!"  The adults know, however, that at an early age, a child's wishing can be imagining things that are totally improbable.

The 19th-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote of a "passion for what is possible."  But what is possible in the future?  The better I can predict and even affect what might possibly come about in the future, the less often my hopes will be dashed, and the more often I will have the encouraging satisfaction of my hopes being fulfilled.  To borrow a metaphor sometimes used in the Taoist faith-tradition:  When woodcarvers create sculptures, their efforts will go better if they work with the natural grain of the wood.  Is there similarly a "grain" in the wood of life -- in the nature of things -- that I would be better off working with rather than resisting?

Certainly, if I wish the sun will rise in the sky tomorrow, my wish will be granted -- even if I am no longer alive to see it myself!  Even before modern science, astronomers had mapped out the movements of the sun, moon, and planets more precisely than any clocks they possessed.  The sun's rising tomorrow is not only possible but virtually assured.  That is not the case, however, with what will happen tomorrow in human societies.  There are too many factors involved in any single society to have an absolute assurance about what will happen.  There are even too many factors involved in one individual human life.

These reflections of mine on hope and the future have concentrated mostly upon thinking about the nature of hope by itself.  But in the Bible -- which so frequently exhorts people not to give up hope -- hope is not usually treated as a quality in and of itself.  Hope in the Christian tradition has been considered to be part of a triad of human spiritual qualities:  The other two qualities of the triad are faith and love.  That triad is rooted most explicitly in a New Testament passage in I Corinthians in which Paul writes:

"And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three;

 and the greatest of these is love."

-- 1 Corinthians 13:13 (NRSV)

Hope can become something even further away from wishing when it is blended with love.  When blended with love, hope can become transformed into something much larger than concern about my individual well-being and whether I can control or predict the future to my own advantage.  Blended with love, hope can become an ennobling way of life.

One of the trickiest questions revolving around hope is:  Can our hoping itself actively affect the future? The theologian Jürgen Moltmann (who wrote a book titled Theology of Hope) tackled that question.  He answered "yes" to it in this way:

"Biblical texts understand hope as a positive, divine power of life.

 It is the expectation of a good future....

  Consequently, hope...does not detach the human spirit from the present through delusions,  but rather the opposite;

 it pulls the promised future into the present."

And as I try to become more loving (and not lose hope), maybe a walk in the early morning sun will help me.  Maybe it will help me feel the constancy of a hidden grain in the nature of things.  Maybe even a grain within our human lives.

~ ~ ~

(What do you hope for?)

(The Pope quotation is from An Essay on Man, l. 95.)
(The Kierkegaard quotation is from Fear and Trembling.)
(The Moltmann quotation is from New & Enlarged Handbook of Christian Theology,
 ed. by Donald W. Musser & Joseph L. Price, © 2003, pp. 249-250.)

Creatures of Habit

Each morning, as dawn comes, the birds in my suburban neighborhood begin their calls back and forth, re-establishing contact with others of their species.  Each morning, once it is fully daylight, the squirrels begin their intricate descent to the deck in my backyard, where they will search for breakfast in the leaves or nearby grass.  All those animals have their morning habits, just as I do with my routine of coffee, radio, and reading.  All of our seemingly mechanical behavior is prompted by something even more regular -- the clock-like rising of the sun.  Therein lies a story of the universe, with its complex mixture of order and the unexpected.

Our contemporary U.S. culture, in which new products and discoveries are continually publicized, tends to elevate change.  We are frequently exhorted not to get stuck in a rut. When I was growing up, I often heard people say that we should not be "creatures of habit." The very use of the word "creatures" in that label (rather than saying "people") underscored that habits were something mindless -- something we humans should rise above.  (No one noticed the irony that people were habitually exhorting others not to be creatures of habit.)

The 20th-century Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, a master of tragicomedy, said through one of his characters that "Habit is a great deadener."

Despite habits so often being considered something that we should break, no society could long exist without them.  That insight was made by the late 19th-century psychologist William James, who wrote:

"Habit is... the enormous fly-wheel of society, 

its most precious conservative agent.... 

 It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life 

from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. 

It keeps the fisherman 

and the deck-hand 

at sea through the winter."

The morning routines of the birds, squirrels, and myself were all triggered by the "habitual" rising of the sun. With the rise of Newtonian science in the 17th century, scientists tended to say that bodies such as our sun obeyed "natural laws" with their mathematical regularity. Today, scientists still search for underlying regularities in the world, but much less often use the phrase "laws," which was clearly a term borrowed from human society. We even know that the apparent movement of the old sun through our sky, which once seemed absolutely mechanical in its seeming clock-like movement , is not absolute, because the Earth's rotation is gradually slowing over time. Thus it is that even the sun in our sky cannot be absolutely unchanging in its habits.  It even has unpredictable flares in the fires on its surface.  Even the sun is a complex mixture of order and the unexpected.

We live in a world of both underlying order and underlying novelty.  And, I bet even those birds and squirrels -- with all their alertness along with their regularity -- would also make adjustments in their behavior if something new and potentially significant entered the routine of their day.

~~~

Do you have a routine, intentional or not, that adds something valuable to your life?

(The Beckett quote is from Waiting for Godot, III. © 1952, trans. 1954.)

(The James quote is taken from Psychology, Briefer Course, by William James, © 1892.  p. 143.)

(Both the photo and the illustration are in the public domain because their copyrights have expired.)

The Painted Morning Sky

"You, whose day it is, make it beautiful.

Get out your rainbow colors

so it will be beautiful."

                                 -- A Nootka morning prayer

I think this prayer could be the universal wish of humankind at morning.  Not specifically that the sky at sunrise be beautifully colored, but that the coming day be a good one (especially if yesterday went terrible).

This Nootka prayer seems to me, however, to be a prayer not merely for good fortune in the new day, but actually for a beautifully colored sunrise.  Several decades ago, when I learned some techniques of photography (before today's digital cameras), I learned how sunrises are usually softer in color, and have more pink and blue light, in contrast with the fiery reds and oranges of sunsets.  The Nootka prayer could thus be heard as a wish for a beautiful pastel-colored sky at dawn.

I would like to catch a bit of that pastel softness and harmony and take it into myself for the day.

There also seems to me to be in the Nootka prayer the suggestion that each new day carries within itself new divine promise.

Frequently when I suggest the idea that God can be known through Nature, the response I get from many people is, "But Nature can be violent!"  (I must admit I do have to bite my tongue a bit and avoid responding, "You think Nature can be violent -- did you watch the TV news last night to see what people have been doing?")

However, just as we learn how to discern the Spirit of God at work in human society, so also might we learn to discern things about God as we observe, contemplate, and learn how to interpret what Christianity often called the "book of Nature."

For example, in the Bible's Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus wants to point to some place where we have experienced the most demanding kind of behavior -- the challenge to"Love your enemies" -- Jesus does not turn to any saintly human beings. Instead, Jesus points to our experience of something inanimate in Nature:  the reliable sun, saying, "your Father in heaven... makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous" (Matt. 5: 44-45).  That is an example of discerning a deeper reality, God's faithfulness, in the natural rising of the sun.  Similar to the way the Nootka verse seems to rejoice with its prayer offered to God as the sun rises.

The rising of the sun is the most frequent of the reliable cycles of Nature in which we place the cycles of our own lives.

~~~

What can noticing Nature bring to your day?