Neal, Academy Award-winning actress, finally in her eighties got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Her life had some great setbacks—the death of her oldest child at an early age, three massive strokes, a car accident that almost killed her, a philandering husband, and a divorce. When she got her star, she said: “In the past year I received two very good parts: a new shoulder and a new knee. They both are working beautifully. I am an actress, and I will take any good part as long as I can stand up. And when I can no longer do that, I will take them lying down.”57
Neal illustrates how hope has a pinch of defiance, a Snoopy-like “curse you Red Baron!” pluck and swagger in it. Hope, she also illustrates, employs humor to laugh in spite of and at the facts.
Some of the facts, like economic ones and natural disasters and human cruelty, are grim. But what Matthew Henry and Patricia Neal demonstrate is that facts do not have the last word. Spiritual realities like hope and gratitude do. They trump facts.
Dorothy L. Sayers wrote: “Facts are like cows: if you look them in the face hard enough, they generally run away.”
February 29
I accompanied my wife, in April, 2009, to Denver, Colorado, where “Great Teachers for Urban Schools” had invited her to speak at their annual conference. While she presented and networked, I photographed gorgeous Colorado.
When we arrived on Tuesday, the meteorologists’ forecasts were grim. They warned from Tuesday all the way to midnight Friday: “If you thought our surprise fifteen-inch spring snowfall last week was something, wait till Saturday!” For four days they did everything but guarantee a three to six-inch snow Friday night followed by several inches more on Saturday.
Our flight home departed at 6:20 a.m. Saturday. I lost three hours sleep Thursday night strategizing, sweating (literally) how I would cope with a foot of snow. What if we get stuck in Denver for days? What if I wreck the rental car driving through a foot of ice and snow? What if the car gets stuck and we miss our flight? What if the rental car employees cannot make it to work and shuttle us to the airport? What if the alarm clock fails to go off at 3:30 a.m.?
The apocalyptic forecasts were greatly exaggerated. Denver got a dusting. “Man!” I heard one red-faced weather expert report early Saturday morning, “If that storm hadn’t gone one hundred miles north of where we expected it to go, Denver would be in really big trouble this morning.”
That experience reinforced a life lesson: never put all your eggs in the basket of experts. My wife had said as much all week: “You know, they could all be wrong.”
Concentrating on undesirable possibilities or even probabilities fuels endless worries. The snowstorm-that-never-was taught me what Mark Twain learned: “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
February Notes
1. Shakespeare. Much Ado about Nothing. Act 5. Scene 4.
2. Griffin, “Love the Marigold,” 66–67.
3. Lindbeck, Nature of Doctrine, 117.
4. King, “Loving Your Enemies,” no pages.
5. Waskow, “Sukkah of Shalom,” 107.
6. Toobin, “Real I.R.S. Scandal,” no pages.
7. Peters, Wendell Berry, 8.
8. Hertsgaard, “Green Dream,” 254.
9. Deuteronomy 30:19.
10. Everett, “Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning,” no pages.
11. Browning, Sonnets From the Portuguese, 43.
12. Reed, “James Clyburn,” no pages.
13. Holguin, “Happily Married,” no pages.
14. Gottman Institute, “Research FAQs,” no pages.
15. I Corinthians 9:27.
16. Sakya, “Life of Buddha,” no pages.
17. I Corinthians 13:3.
18. Hyde, “Choose Life,” no pages.
19. Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, 516-517.
20. Biography, “Candy Lightner,” no pages.
21. All writers who use this quotation attribute it to Augustine. I have not been able to find it in Augustine’s body of work. The earliest I find the quotation is in a book written in 1988 by eminent American theologian, the late Robert McAfee Brown. In his Spirituality and Liberation: Overcoming the Great Fallacy, Brown introduces a chapter with the quotation, but does not give his source. Allan Aubrey Boesak in Dare We Speak of Hope: Searching for a Language of Life in Faith and Politics comments on page 43 that the quotation “seems to have come to us via Anselm of Canterbury, who attributes it to Augustine.” Boesak does not give his source for that assertion. Whether Augustine ever said or wrote it is largely immaterial and irrelevant to me. What does matter is that this characterization of hope speaks truth, and I believe it does.
22. Curry-Knight, Top 500 Reviewer, no pages.
23. Popova, “Kurt Vonnegut,” no pages.
24. Wood, “Secret Fears,” 1.
25. Roc, “Enough,” no pages.
26. Matthew 18:3.
27. IMDb, “Schindler’s List Quotes,” no pages.
28. Warner, “Man Behind the Window,” no pages.
29. The Economist, “Van Cliburn,” no pages.
30. Shearer, An Unquiet Life, 346.
March 1
I once received a lovely gift from someone in or around Leavenworth, Indiana. It is a framed piece of embroidery that has one of my favorite Bible verses sewn on it. I only wish I could find out who made it (or had it made) so I could thank her (or him).
Some of life’s greatest gifts—the ones that mean the most—are the anony-mous ones.
Last weekend I listened to two different couples tell of their recent experience in a restaurant. When they asked for the check they were informed by the waiter that someone had already picked up the tab. I have also heard of people at a drive-through restaurant, or in a grocery check-out line, or at a gas station who had a similar experience—some anonymous donor, for whatever reason, had already paid their bill.
My favorite “anonymous gift” story comes from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. He tells of a time as a child, playing in his back yard, when he saw the hand of a little boy or girl come through a hole in the fence. The next time he looked, the hand was gone, but in its place was a little white sheep. Little Pablo spontaneously ran in his house and brought out his own treasure, a pine cone he loved, left it in the same spot, and took the sheep. The two children never met. Years later, in a house fire, the little white sheep perished. Pablo Neruda said that even as a grown man, whenever he passed a toyshop he looked in the window for a little
