4 days Ago
Groucho Marx once said, "I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it." Election evening was a "this wasn’t it" for me.
My candidates lost locally and nationally. That has happened before, of course, to all of us regardless of political leaning. But this time it feels like a greater loss.
A pastor-friend who works in Atlanta wrote the day after the perfectly wonderful evening that wasn't, "Our hearts ache for the America we hoped we were building." She got it. Aging for Amateurs: Elders can help keep the nation together after divisive election She is grieving for her vocation to build community, for struggling people who will not be okay, maybe not even safe, and for Americans who do not care.
We will pretend things are all right and that it’s somehow OK to award our highest office to an individual who operates above the law and beneath decency. My friend is grieving and that is relevant to what theologian Walter Brueggeman said about grief: It is "the visceral announcement that things are not right.” Where did Brueggeman learn about grieving? He got it from the prophets of the Old Testament who were broken-hearted for their soul-sick nation.
He got it from Jesus who taught "Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted." Because tears come from the heart, grief can break open the possibility of a new outlook, even a new way of relating to the world rooted not in "I want more" but in mutual respect, fairness and kindness. Qualities that then mature into compassion.
The health of our nation may depend on our capacity to grieve. Elders learn the hard way how to lose gracefully, grieve thoroughly and move on to a life that has changed. Our horizons change.
We have built up our structures of success, we lay down our structures of success. Most people know more about building up opinions, doctrines, platforms and relationships than about laying them down and finding a way of living that trusts a reality greater than our private reality. But age, “the vexed attrition of a long-lived-in body," Irish writer Niall Williams wrote, is a patient teacher.
Aging for Amateurs: Learning to trust in the age of misinformation and deepfakes The different horizon that becomes more and more real as we age looks remarkably like the conditions of life Jesus spoke of in the Beatitudes. We realize our hearts are full not when haughty and dominant but when poor in spirit, when we are merciful, when we are peacemakers, when we hunger and thirst for mutual respect, fairness and kindness. This language of the Beatitudes may be incomprehensible to some because it springs out of a consciousness radically different from the managed reality of nationalism and power politics.
It sees greatness not in material terms and never as bullying but in terms of interior qualities. This language is counter-cultural today. Yet this is the consciousness and this is the language that are rooted in a greater reality.
You don’t have to grow old to recognize that, but it is a sadness to grow old and not recognize that. Elders have taught me that we are called to the job of becoming artists imagining a better world, a more human future, a community that includes rather than excludes, a health that radiates from the poetry of empathy rather than the instruction-manual prose of officialdom. Our opportunity to become such an artist has never been greater than today, because the job has never been more clearly defined.
I believe that more and more elders will rise to it. Patrick Bringley was a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for 10 years and he authored an extraordinary book called, "All the Beauty in the World." A week ago, he performed passages from it on stage at the Dock Street Theatre in Charleston.
Bringley spoke of his much-admired older brother who was a bio-mathematician — a study that couples the abstract elegance of mathematics with the living messiness of biology. He quoted his brother as saying this: "Pure math is obviously extremely beautiful. It’s elegant.
Physics, too, is elegant. Biology is anything but elegant. It’s an absolute mess.
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Put it this way. If you or I were to build a machine, we’d go about it logically, with the fewest necessary parts moving in clean, efficient ways. But living nature doesn’t work that way at all.
It builds via the most fantastic redundancies and curlicues, millions of little variations around a theme, so that if three-quarters go haywire, life survives." Aging for Amateurs: Elders know what it means to be great in one's time and place Yes, and what’s left of life "after three-quarters go haywire" is the green evolutionary edge, the spiritual fuse, never under control and therefore never quenched, but the quiet, irrepressible heartbeat of greater reality. Bringley, working long shifts in the museum, ponders that heartbeat in the tenderness of Madonna and Child paintings from the Renaissance.
Equally he sees it in the work of hard-pressed quiltmakers in Gee’s Bend, Ala., one of whom told him, “I had to run six beds, children sleeping two in a bed back then sometimes need four and five quilts on a bed, according to the weather.” Those quiltmakers didn’t think of themselves as artists, and I haven’t thought of myself that way either.
But in truth, anyone summoned by the call of life who responds in love is an artist imagining a better world. We must keep on doing that now, and reaching out to neighbors who see things differently, and walking forward as the best citizens we can be. Life survives, nature is not spent, and life is the side we want to be on.
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