am old. Youth could use my experience and wisdom; youth has the vitality and idealism I have lost. We need each other. Together we halves can make a whole.
From Marcus Aurelius comes ancient wisdom on dissing others: “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact; everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Maybe this is why the television show is named “The View” instead of “The Obvious.”
February 3
“Options Unlimited—Closed”
That was the message that just crawled across the bottom of my television screen as outside the snow falls. I laughed out loud at the irony in the message. Are we misleading our children and setting them up for discouragement when we tell them their options are unlimited, that they can do anything they set their mind to, that they can be anything they want to be? I like the way Booker T. Washington framed his rise from slavery to becoming a great scientist: “I have been a slave once in my life—a slave in my body. But I have since resolved that no inducement and no influence would ever make me a slave in soul.” The fact that Washington did it proves that it can be done; it does not, however, mean that everyone who passionately wants to, can or will.
When another crawl announced “Dare to Dream—Closed” I got one more chuckle. I do not know what business that is, but I do know that when our daring to dream shuts down, we are of all people most to be pitied. A few minutes ago I learned that Church of the Open Door was also closed.
I think of Susan Griffin’s account of the behavior of poet Robert Desnos in the concentration camp. When guards and other condemned men were marching to the gas chamber in stony silence, Desnos suddenly grabbed the palm of one of the condemned and read the woman’s palm. He exuberantly told her that she had a very long lifeline and would have many children, grandchildren, great joy, and long life. He moved down the line reading the palms of fellow prisoners and guards alike and saw a great future for all of them. The guards were so taken aback that they loaded the condemned people back into the trucks and drove them back to their barracks. Desnos ultimately died of typhus shortly after the liberation of the camp.29
When churches with names like Resurrection and New Hope and Open Door are marked Closed, we may all be in big trouble.
February 4
This love story is true. It is not about young, sexy, tabloid love, but about the “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health” kind. It is of the marathon, not the sprint, variety
Not that their love story lacked hot-blooded passion. Letters to and from the Pacific theater in World War II yield tender, affectionate pledges of undying devotion. Black and white photos dating back to the early 1940s document hugs and kisses. Several pictures are reminiscent of that iconic shot on Life magazine’s cover of the nurse being bent over and kissed by the sailor celebrating V-J Day on August 14, 1945, in Times Square.
Fast-forward seventy years. One marriage, two children, five grandchildren, and six great grandchildren later, health issues have necessitated their move into an assisted living home.
The sailor boy died on February 2. On February 4, which would have been their seventieth anniversary, he was laid to rest with military honors.
In removing his things from their room, one of their children came across a sealed, bright-yellow envelope with “To Charlie” scrawled on it. Opening it, they discovered a crudely made card that looks like a piece of red, pink, yellow, and white-striped wallpaper folded in half, with little hearts and kisses glued on the front. On the inside, with a cupid and a heart glued alongside, was scribbled a message and signature: “Happy Valentine’s Day! With All My Love, Grace.”
Barely able to walk with a walker, unable to leave the facility that had no gift shop, Grace used materials from the art and craft room to construct a from-the-heart gift for her valentine, knowing it might be their last Valentine’s Day together, and it was.
Charlie was a world-class grandfather to our three sons. And I could not have had a better father-in-law.
February 5
Yale theologian George Lindbeck coined the intriguing phrase “absorb the universe.”30 I resisted it at first because it sounded so grandiose and ridiculous. Since then, it has grown on me. Now I commend it to you.
Everything—nature, history, philosophy, theology, literature, life—can be so overwhelming that we have to reduce it, simplify it, condense it down to something useable. For many of us that means boiling it down to a few sentences or stories that sum up the essence and meaning of things for us, and in that way we “absorb the universe.”
I offer one example. A friend was going through the hardest time of his life. He had flown to New York City to appear before a committee to be examined for a certification that he had spent years and a small fortune seeking—and they turned him down. Rejected and humiliated, he felt like the world’s biggest loser. He spent forty-eight hours walking the streets of Manhattan, distraught over what he was going to do.
Many years later, nearing the end of a successful career, as he told me this story he said that only one thing back then kept him from jumping off a bridge. It was a verse that his high school English teacher made him memorize, sentences from “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley: “It matters not how strait the gate, / how charged with punishments the scroll. / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” He remembers muttering that sentence hundreds of times as he stumbled up and down the island of Manhattan processing his failure and even questioning whether he had a future.
I hope you have a strong default sentence or two to fall back on—to absorb the universe—when the going gets toughest.
February 6
If you can remember when drivers dimmed car lights by stomping the dimmer with their left foot, then you could be a dinosaur like me.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his brother were driving one evening in the mid-1950s from Atlanta to Chattanooga. The oncoming drivers evidently didn’t know to dim their lights when meeting a car, and A.D. King, who was driving, became furious. At one point A.D. said, “The next driver who refuses to dim his lights, I’m going to give it right back to him; I’ll leave mine on bright and blind him and we’ll see how he likes it.” Dr. King said, “Oh no, don’t do that. There’d be too much light on this highway, and it will end up in mutual destruction for all. Somebody’s got to have some sense on this highway.”31
Someone has got to have sense enough to dim the lights.
I teach college seniors the Socratic method of group discussion. They learn to listen respectfully when someone speaks and then respond with civility. Cutting off or drowning out or ridiculing a person with whom they disagree earns an “F” in participation. To see how not to have a group discussion, I tell them to turn on particular television shows where panel members yell at, shout down, and put down each other.
Dr. King also said in the same sermon to his Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery:
Force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.
Another Valentine’s Day can remind us, on this dark, narrow, rancorous highway of life, to lower our voices,
