A writer should concern himself with whatever absorbs his fancy, stirs his heart, and unlimbers his typewriter. I feel no obligation to deal with politics. I do feel a responsibility to society. A writer has the duty to be good, not lousy; true, not false; lively, not dull; accurate, not full of error. He should tend to lift people up, not lower them down.
A writer must reflect and interpret his society, his world; he must also provide inspiration and guidance and challenge. Much writing today strikes me as deprecating, destructive, and angry. There are good reasons for anger, and I have nothing against anger. But I think some writers have lost their sense of proportion, their sense of humor, and their sense of appreciation.
I am often mad, but I would hate to be nothing but mad: one role of the writer today is to sound the alarm. The environment is disintegrating, the hour is late, and not much is being done. Instead of carting rocks from the moon, we should be carting the feces out of Lake Erie. …I think I would lose what little value I may have as a writer if I were to refuse, as a matter of principle, to accept the warming rays of the sun, and to report them, whenever, and if ever, they happen to strike me. ~E.B. White 1969 (on writing)
It is tiresome always feeling angry about what it is happening in the world, feeling that everything has become political.
I’m tired of reading (and writing) words of frustration, but want to rail against the meanness that surrounds us, and push back the bully to seek out a balance of kindness, perspective and insight.
When I need to feel something other than mad, I walk as far as I can go, look up, revel in the gift of rays of light and bask in their warmth and promise.
I will accept what the Sun has to offer and tell about it so that my anger drains away like so much waste flushed down a pipe, never to be seen again.
Lyrics: Even before we call on Your name To ask You, O God, When we seek for the words to glorify You, You hear our prayer; Unceasing love, O unceasing love, Surpassing all we know.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
Even with darkness sealing us in, We breathe Your name, And through all the days that follow so fast, We trust in You; Endless Your grace, O endless Your grace, Beyond all mortal dream.
Both now and forever, And unto ages and ages, Amen.
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Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him,but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs.If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”
But one of them, Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing at all.Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.”
He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation,and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.
So from that day on they made plans to put him to death.
Jesus therefore no longer walked openly among the Jews, but went from there to the region near the wilderness, to a town called Ephraim, and there he stayed with the disciples.
Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and many went up from the country to Jerusalem before the Passover to purifythemselves.
They were looking for Jesus and saying to one another as they stood in the temple, “What do you think? That he will not come to the feast at all?”Now the chief priests and the Pharisees had given orders that if anyone knew where he was, he should let them know, so that they might arrest him. John 11: 45-57
Thy children are gathering home, With joy they are gathering home; From all the divisions in which they were scattered, Thy children are gathering home. ~Charles Naylor from “Thy Children are Gathering Home”
A setting out to find oneself astray, And coming home at dusk a different way. ~Malcolm Guite from “Prayer/Walk”
God is at home, it’s we who have gone out for a walk. ~Meister Eckhart
we who wander, scattered beyond reach
who take wrong turns never ask for directions stumble over the rough roads find ourselves in the ditch distracted by glitter and gold forgetting our ultimate destination
nothing we’ve seen thus far no goal achieved compares to the unity awaiting us
gather us home, O Lord, as you did through your death.
just point the way.
I am reading slowly through the words in the Book of John over the next year alongside my church family. Once a week, I will invite you to “come and see” what those words might mean as we explore His promises together.
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The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away….
Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed. ~Lewis Carroll from Alice in Wonderland
Navigating the U.S. health care system over the last decade or so reminds me of Alice’s dreamscape game of Wonderland croquet.
A physician is given a flamingo mallet and a hedgehog ball and ordered — by the Queen at the risk of having one’s head lopped off — to go play, but the mallet won’t cooperate and the ball keeps unrolling itself and crawling away.
Just like any day in a medical clinic, a doctor’s time is spent trying to manage their flamingo. The patient, tired of waiting for weeks for an appointment, then stuck in an urgent care center or emergency waiting room– gets up and leaves.
At least Alice gets a good giggle out of it, but the reality in health care causes more tears than laughter. We are playing a very difficult game of changing rules and technology.
The flamingo in the doctor’s hands could represent the increasingly time-consuming requirement to search over 70,000 ICD-10 diagnosis codes rather than the previous 14,000 ICD-9 codes.
Or the requirement to search for a 10 digit NDC number for any prescription medicine sent electronically to a pharmacy.
Or the “meaningful use” criteria that regulate mandatory data collection and reportage on patients to the Federal Government in order to receive full payment for Medicare or Medicaid billings.
Or updated HIPAA and HITECH electronic security requirements to ensure privacy and the requirement for patient access to their chart.
Or the obligations to the new Accountable Care Organization that your employer has joined.
Or the Maintenance of Certification hoops to jump through in order to continue to practice medicine.
The exasperated and uncooperative “managed” flamingo keeps curling itself around and looking at us with a puzzled expression:
just what is it you were supposed to be trained to do?
is there actually a patient to pay attention to in all this morass of mandates?
And the poor hapless hedgehog patient is just rolled up in a ball awaiting a contact that never comes – for something, anything that might look like health care is about to happen.
Instead, for the patient, there are many electronic forms to sign: Notice of Patient Privacy, Notice of Patient Rights and Responsibilities, releases to share medical information, agreements to pay today’s co-pay and tomorrow’s deductible and whatever is left unpaid by insurance, agreement to have an AI app record and then transcribe the healthcare interaction, passwords to choose for each electronic patient portal: the chart, insurance, health savings account, lab and X-ray results and healthcare.gov.
It might be easier and less painful to just crawl away and hide from that bumbling health care provider who can’t seem to get their act together.
I wish I were laughing, but I’m not. As a once-practicing physician and now a patient, it’s getting harder and harder to play the game that is no game at all.
There is always a threat to the physician of a professional beheading: losing credentialing in an insurance plan, getting poor ratings on anonymous online physician grading sites, being inexplicably dropped from a provider list, keeping up with 50 hours of approved continuing education annually, being too unproductive to remain in an employer medical group, losing/forgoing board certification.
We keep trying to juggle the flamingo motivated by those threats, all the while ineptly managing the managed care system, knowing the patient might get up and walk away out of sheer frustration.
Thankfully, I didn’t ever see patients in a fee-for-service clinic setting, so I have sympathy for those who have no other option.
I think, at least I hope, I focused on taking care of people, trying to heal their illnesses and help them cope with life if they can’t be healed.
I wanted to provide compassionate care without all the fol-de-rol. These are absurd times for humans and hedgehogs.
It is enough to make a doctor cry. At least we meet our patients over the Kleenex box and compare notes, and maybe, just maybe, we’ll find enough common ground to even share a giggle or two.
Like a piece of rotten meat which not only stinks right on its own surface but also surrounds itself with a stinking molecular cloud of stink, so, too, each island of the archipelago created and supported a zone of stink around itself. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918-1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, Books III-IV
As I’ve written elsewhere, I spend over an hour a day dealing with the excrement of my farm critters.
This is therapeutic time for me as I have deep respect for the necessity to clean up and compost what is smelly/stinky/yucky and biblically objectionable. (Deuteronomy 23:12-14)
None of us, including God, want to take a walk having to pick our way around poop.
As I’m busy picking up manure, I watch our dogs seek out the smelliest, most vile things they can find in the barn or field (preferably dead) and roll themselves around in it one after another until they are just as stinky as the stuff they found. They are clearly joyous about it, especially when they do it together. It is curious throw-back behavior that I’ve assumed, wearing my animal behaviorist hat, was about a wild predator covering up their scent in order to stalk and capture prey more effectively without being detected – except they are really truly so smelly that any prey could sense them coming from a mile away and would learn quickly that a moving creature that smells like poop or a dead carcass is bad news and to be avoided.
This is the main reason our farm dogs live full time outdoors. We prefer to avoid stinky dirty creatures too. So I’ve tried to understand this behavior for what adaptive purpose it may have.
What makes the most sense to me is the “pack mentality” that suggests that once one dog/wolf rolls in something objectionable, that the rest of the pack does too. This is a unifying theme for anxious individuals – they aren’t really on their own if they smell and blend in with the rest of the pack. So they spread the “wealth,” so to speak.
Stink up one, stink up all. Like team spirit, it seems to improve morale – until it doesn’t anymore.
I’ve been feeling covered with stink myself lately as I’ve searched for those sympathetic around me and found myself stuck between shit and syphilis. There are so many divisive opinions right now about a variety of current issues; vile nonsense has been flying right and left on social media as well as face to face. The theory is if all stink the same from rolling in piles of misinformation, we are then no longer alone.
Yet our destiny does not have to include believing, sharing and “flinging” the stuff that stinks to see who it will stick to. I no longer want to be a target.
Time for a bath. Time for soap and cleansing and some serious self-examination. Time to stop joyously rolling around in it. Time to bury the excrement so we’re not staring at the ground, picking our way around the piles and can actually hold our heads up to see where we’re heading.
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‘Regret has to be useless or it’s not really regret.’ ~Simone de Beauvoir
Rescuers did not find my uncle’s body. But they found his axe at an icy altitude impossible to navigate without one.
A little higher up, they found my uncle ’s sleeping bag at an altitude unsurvivable without one.
You likely have a pen in purse or pocket. Take it out and write a list of all you need at your present altitude.
Next, change altitudes. Now, make another list: the two biggest regrets of your life. Take your time. Get it right. Because
here is all you need to know about need: That list of regrets—cross one off. You are going to need that space later. ~Jessica Goodfellow, “Unreachable” from Whiteout
I’ve known people who lost their lives while hiking/climbing in the mountains or due to some other tragedy – the cascade of decisions leading to their death are sources of regret for all who mourn them, even decades later. Somehow regret is a difficult feeling to let go; we cling to it as if it is somehow an essential part of us.
It is easy for me to come up with a long list of regrets in my life. They seem to grow like weeds – useless, unplanned, unwanted and prolific, threatening to take over any good fruit being produced.
Few of us volunteer to share openly about our current guilt or shame unless we are sitting in a therapy group, a confessional booth, or AA. Instead it gives us permission to beat ourselves up, going over and over in our minds how we could have done things differently.
As a physician, I heard about such heart-ache in my clinical encounters – a patient will regret an impulsive sexual encounter that turned out badly, or drinking and drugging too much, or regret an ongoing conflict with a family member, or wish they had decided to get that vaccine before becoming ill with a potentially preventable infection.
Our list of regrets can be endless and life-destroying.
I understand the pain of regret as I too am a flawed and fractured person with an eight-decade history of things done and left undone, words said and unsaid. Even if I think I can somehow manage to cross a regret off my own list – perhaps I apologized and was granted forgiveness, or I tried to make right what I’d messed up — I still know a new regret will occupy its place before long.
I can’t simply fix my own regret list.
No matter what altitude we’re at — down in the pits in the lowest of the low, or up in the highest imaginable, I have come to realize that forgiveness is only possible through a knowledge of God Himself. He came to walk beside us in our low spots and our high spots, no matter where we find ourselves. His work on earth has crossed off our regrets and mistakes and wiped us clean of them.
He did this because He understood our desperate need; thanks to His sacrifice and love, our heart-aches are left at the Cross.
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How easily happiness begins by dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter slithers and swirls across the floor of the sauté pan, especially if its errant path crosses a tiny slick of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.
This could mean soup or risotto or chutney (from the Sanskrit chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions go limp and then nacreous and then what cookbooks call clear, though if they were eyes you could see
clearly the cataracts in them. It’s true it can make you weep to peel them, to unfurl and to tease from the taut ball first the brittle, caramel-colored and decrepit papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion wrapped around its growing body, for there’s nothing to an onion but skin, and it’s true you can go on weeping as you go on in, through the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on in to the core, to the bud-like, acrid, fibrous skins densely clustered there, stalky and in- complete, and these are the most pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare
and rage and murmury animal comfort that infant humans secrete. This is the best domestic perfume. You sit down to eat with a rumor of onions still on your twice-washed hands and lift to your mouth a hint
of a story about loam and usual endurance. It’s there when you clean up and rinse the wine glasses and make a joke, and you leave the minutest whiff of it on the light switch, later, when you climb the stairs. ~William Matthews “Onions”
I don’t mean to make you cry. I mean nothing, but this has not kept you From peeling away my body, layer by layer,
The tears clouding your eyes as the table fills With husks, cut flesh, all the debris of pursuit. Poor deluded human: you seek my heart.
Hunt all you want. Beneath each skin of mine Lies another skin: I am pure onion–pure union Of outside and in, surface and secret core.
…It’s true it can make you weep to peel them, to unfurl and to tease from the taut ball first the brittle, caramel-colored and decrepit papery outside layer, the least
recent the reticent onion wrapped around its growing body, for there’s nothing to an onion but skin, and it’s true you can go on weeping as you go on in, through the moist middle skins, the sweetest
and thickest, and you can go on in to the core, to the bud-like, acrid, fibrous skins densely clustered there, stalky and in- complete, and these are the most pungent… ~William Matthews from “Onions”
…I would never scold the onion for causing tears. It is right that tears fall for something small and forgotten. How at meal, we sit to eat, commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma but never on the translucence of onion, now limp, now divided, or its traditionally honorable career: For the sake of others, disappear. ~Naomi Shihab Nye from “The Traveling Onion” from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems.
Onion, luminous flask, your beauty formed petal by petal, crystal scales expanded you and in the secrecy of the dark earth your belly grew round with dew. Under the earth the miracle happened and when your clumsy green stem appeared, and your leaves were born like swords in the garden, the earth heaped up her power showing your naked transparency…
…You make us cry without hurting us. I have praised everything that exists, but to me, onion, you are more beautiful than a bird of dazzling feathers, heavenly globe, platinum goblet, unmoving dance of the snowy anemone
and the fragrance of the earth lives in your crystalline nature. ~Pablo Neruda from “Ode to the Onion”
Everything smells of “eau de onion” here in the kitchen when the onions are brought in from our garden to be stored or dehydrated and frozen for winter soups and stews.
This is weepy business, but these are good tears like I spill over the whistled Greensleeves theme from the old “Lassie” TV show, or during any childrens’ choir song, or by simply watching videos of our grandchildren who live too far away to visit every day.
It takes almost nothing these days to make me weep, so onions are a handy excuse, allowing my tears to flow without explanation:
I weep over the headlines.
I weep over how messy things can get between people who don’t listen to one another or who misinterpret what they think they hear.
I weep knowing we all have layers and layers of skin that appear tough on the outside, but as you peel gently or even ruthlessly cut them away, the layers get more and more tender until you reach the throbbing heart of us.
We tend to hide our hearts out of fear of being hurt, crying out in pain.
Like an onion, each one of us exists to make the day a bit better, the meal more savory, to enhance the flavors of all who are mixed into this melting pot together, trying to make sad things new.
We aren’t meant to stand alone, but to disappear into the stew, and be sorely missed if we are absent.
So very dish needs an onion, and for the sake of the dish, every onion vanishes in the process.
No, I don’t mean to make you cry as you peel my layers away, gently, one by one, each more tender until you reach my heart. Chop away at me if you must but weep the good tears, the ones that mean we weep for the sake of our meal together: you eating and drinking, and me – consumed.
Lyrics: When the dark wood fell before me And all the paths were overgrown When the priests of pride say there is no other way I tilled the sorrows of stone
I did not believe because I could not see Though you came to me in the night When the dawn seemed forever lost You showed me your love in the light of the stars
Chorus: Cast your eyes on the ocean Cast your soul to the sea When the dark night seems endless Please remember me
Then the mountain rose before me By the deep well of desire From the fountain of forgiveness Beyond the ice and fire
Though we share this humble path, alone How fragile is the heart Oh, give these clay feet wings to fly To touch the face of the stars
Breathe life into this feeble heart Lift this mortal veil of fear Take these crumbled hopes, etched with tears We’ll rise above these earthly cares
Lyrics: Light after darkness, gain after loss Strength after weakness, crown after cross; Sweet after bitter, hope after fears Home after wandering, praise after tears
Alpha and Omega Beginning and the end He is making all things new Springs of living water Shall wash away each tear He is making all things new Sight after mystery, sun after rain Joy after sorrow, peace after pain; Near after distant, gleam after gloom Love aftеr wandering, life after tomb
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There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,
Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone. ~Sara Teasdale “There Will Come Soft Rains”
…one of man’s purposes is to assist God in the work of “hallowing” the things of Creation. By a tremendous heave of the spirit, the devout man frees the divine sparks trapped in the mute things of time; he uplifts the forms and moments of creation, bearing them aloft into the rare air and hallowing fire in which all clays must shatter and burst. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The fire burst the house and let it slam flat down, puffing out skirts of spark and smoke.
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlour. The parlour into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar. Smoke and silence. A great quantity of smoke. Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: “Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…”
It’s the immemorial feelings I like the best: hunger, thirst, their satisfaction; work-weariness, earned rest; the falling again from loneliness to love; the green growth the mind takes from the pastures in March; the gayety in the stride of a good team of Belgian mares that seems to shudder from me through all my ancestry. ~Wendell Berry “Goods”
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
The plow has savaged this sweet field Misshapen clods of earth kicked up Rocks and twisted roots exposed to view Last year’s growth demolished by the blade.
I have plowed my life this way Turned over a whole history Looking for the roots of what went wrong Until my face is ravaged, furrowed, scarred.
Enough. The job is done. Whatever’s been uprooted, let it be Seedbed for the growing that’s to come. I plowed to unearth last year’s reasons—
The farmer plows to plant a greening season. ~Parker Palmer “Harrowing”
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
It’s not likely anyone would say I didn’t work hard enough.
After all, I come from a long line of human work-horses who knew it takes sweat and tears, and sometimes bleeding.
Even so, all those years I know I could have plowed more deeply than I did.
I could have thrown myself more fully into the pull on the tugs, shared the load more effectively, shouldered the yoke with greater enthusiasm, bent my neck down low with unbroken determination.
You could say somewhere I lost the gayety in my stride, and you would be right — toward the end, I was trudging through the furrow, bruised from turning up too many submerged rocks, bumping into immoveable tree stumps, tripping on hidden roots, stuck in the deep mud of long and lonely post-midnight hours.
You might even say the knowledge of a job well-done lay at a depth my plow could ever reach.
I had seen others die in the harness, never able to rest easy.
A few years ago I knew the time had come to shrug off the yoke, shake off the bridle and bit, shudder free of the harness.
On this side of the ground, I find myself wondering and wandering, the blinkers no longer impeding my vision, feeling the morning sun on my unyoked withers.
Yet when I see an untilled field, something in me even now still tries to hold on to the plow —
photo by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waardphoto by Joel De Waard
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It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off too. ~J.R.R. Tolkien – Bilbo to Frodo in Fellowship of the Rings
What if this road, that has held no surprises these many years, decided not to go home after all; what if it could turn left or right with no more ado than a kite-tail? What if its tarry skin were like a long, supple bolt of cloth, that is shaken and rolled out, and takes a new shape from the contours beneath? And if it chose to lay itself down in a new way, around a blind corner, across hills you must climb without knowing what’s on the other side, who would not hanker to be going, at all risks? Who wants to know a story’s end, or where a road will go? ~Sheenagh Pugh “What if This Road?”
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. ~C.S. Lewis from The Great Divorce
We grow accustomed to the Dark — When Light is put away — As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp To witness her Good bye —
A Moment — We Uncertain step For newness of the night — Then — fit our Vision to the Dark — And meet the Road — erect —
And so of larger — Darknesses — Those Evenings of the Brain — When not a Moon disclose a sign — Or Star — come out — within —
The Bravest — grope a little — And sometimes hit a Tree Directly in the Forehead — But as they learn to see —
Either the Darkness alters — Or something in the sight Adjusts itself to Midnight — And Life steps almost straight. ~Emily Dickinson
So few grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
The world asks of us only the strength we have and we give it. Then it asks more, and we give it. ~Jane Hirschfield from “The Weighing”
I admit I stumble if not careful, bearing some bruises and scrapes from hazards hidden in darkness.
My eyes slowly adjust to such bare illumination, when the Lamp is dim and the road unfamiliar.
I’m feeling my way through uncertainty in this time of life.
I suspect there are fellow darkness travelers who also have lost their way and their Light, giving away what they can and sometimes more than they have.
And so, blinded as we each are, we run forehead-first into the Tree which has always been there and always will be, the symbol of our salvation.
Because of who we are and Who loves us, we, now free and forgiven, safely follow a darkened road made nearly straight, all the way Home.
Lyrics: Tell me where is the road I can call my own, That I left, that I lost, so long ago. All these years I have wondered, oh when will I know, There’s a way, there’s a road that will lead me home.
After wind, After rain, when the dark is done, As I wake from a dream, in the gold of day, Through the air there’s a calling from far away, There’s a voice I can hear that will lead me home.
Rise up, follow me, come away is the call With (the) love in your heart as the only song There is no such beauty as where you belong Rise up, follow me, I will lead you home.
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The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army—Let us therefore rely upon the goodness of the Cause, and the aid of the supreme Being, in whose hands Victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble Actions—The Eyes of all our Countrymen are now upon us, and we shall have their blessings, and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the Tyranny meditated against them. Let us therefore animate and encourage each other, and shew the whole world, that a Freeman contending for Liberty on his own ground is superior to any slavish mercenary on earth. ~George Washington to his troops July 2, 1776
The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time: the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them. –Thomas Jefferson, in “A Summary View of the Rights of British America” Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever… ― Thomas Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia on the need for abolition of slavery
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.
We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it.
We — even we here — hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free — honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail.
The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless. ~Abraham Lincoln in his 1862 address to Congress
This country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a good place for all of us to live in. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. ~James Madison
Fifty years ago this week, I was impatiently marking time as a new college graduate awaiting my first day of medical school to commence. I was too self-absorbed to pay much attention to the significance of the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence from British rule.
That changed when two British student friends arrived in my home town on a summer Greyhound Bus tour of the U.S. right before the 4th. They were most gracious watching the extravagant folderol of a community’s traditional Fourth of July patriotism and fireworks. It was a curiosity to them, given their visitor perspective, coming from “historical enemy” territory.
Their perception was: the U.S. as a broiling work in progress, still much unsettled and somewhat unsettling.
I wonder if Thomas Jefferson, architect of the words we celebrate today, would still be trembling for his country?
I believe he would, considering his views were radical in his day, his religious convictions unconventional, and his plantation managed by slaves of African descent. He personally understood the moral quicksand on which he tenuously stood–the conflict he felt was as close as the maintenance of his home and his own mixed-race children. He would mourn the modern abuse of our liberties secured through the blood of our forefathers, our brothers, sisters and children.
Today we are sinking deeply in that same quicksand, having done no better than Jefferson at forging a personal and moral foundation on which to firmly stand. We have squandered our autonomy with selfishness rather than a selflessness borne of gratitude for the gift of freedom.
Some in leadership want to exponentially increase and secure what they consider their personal due, before considering, out of humility, others who have greater needs first. We use up land and animals and water without regard to those who will come after us, failing to be stewards of the garden so generously given to our care.
History as recorded in the Word and elsewhere shows when everyone does as they see fit, there is no immunity from judgment and wrath:
In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes. Judges 17:6
And how well is that working out for us with the attitudes of our current leadership? We continue unsettled and unsettling, a country of paradoxical perspective about what true freedom means.
In Biblical times, it took a true servant King sacrificing Himself to save us from destroying ourselves. Even now, He continues to try, awaiting our sincere repentance and response.
We should be trembling…
partial lyrics: And I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered I don’t have a friend who feels at ease I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered Or driven to its knees
But it’s alright, it’s alright For we lived so well so long Still, when I think of the Road we’re traveling on I wonder what’s gone wrong I can’t help it, I wonder what has gone wrong
Lyrics: This is my song, O God of all the nations, A song of peace for lands afar and mine. This is my home, the country where my heart is, Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine. But other hearts in other lands are beating, With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.
My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean, And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine. But other lands have sunlight too, and clover, And skies are everywhere as blue as mine. This is my song, O God of all the nations, A song of peace for their land and for mine.
So let us raise this melody together, Beneath the stars that guide us through the night; If we choose love, each storm we’ll learn to weather, Until true peace and harmony we find, This is our song, a hymn we raise together; A dream of peace, uniting humankind.
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