before one cloud has formed?”
On Wednesday morning we had a record nine-inch snow. This layman, looking at charts and satellite and radar images with his untrained eye, was unable to see a single sign that a big snow was coming.
We are all a little like that. We have a giant blind spot when it comes to future possibilities, just as my untrained eye was unable to read the meteorological evidence for a giant snow.
What is hope? Hope is the mental and spiritual decision always to keep the door cracked a little, to stay at least a little open to a good possibility even though at the time we may not be able to see it.
Victorian poet Christina Rossetti’s prayer says it well: “Lord, grant me eyes to see within the seed a tree, within the glowing egg a bird, within the shroud a butterfly.”
January 6
I attended a lecture on Islam by Imam Yahya Hendi, Muslim chaplain at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. In his opening remarks he told how often people, when they first see him and hear his accent, inquire: “Where are you from?” He answers: “I am from dust. I am a dustian.” Such is his creative attempt to find common ground, to emphasize commonality, to begin with what unites us instead of what divides us, drawing on the words from Genesis: “You were made out of soil, and you will once again turn into soil.”4
The opposite of dustianism is tribalism, the assumption that one’s own tribe is superior to all others. Over forty years ago my wife and I visited London, Paris, and Rome with a tour group. There was a newly-married couple from Connecticut in our group. It soon became clear that their primary agenda was to snap pictures of each other in front of monuments and landmarks to prove to people back home that they had once actually been there. They organized each day around finding a place where they could get real food, which to them was American food—specifically, a cheeseburger, fries, and a carbonated drink. They had no interest in understanding, much less appreciating, what to them were vastly inferior cultures.
My high school classmates and I receive at least one e-mail a week from a former classmate whom I barely knew. She forwards articles that either tout her home state or promote noxious (to me) political views. She ends each preachment with multiple exclamation marks!!!!! Each e-mail exudes the attitude: “Pity the poor fool who doesn’t believe like me.”
Extreme tribalism burns Korans and launches terrorist attacks. The polar opposite of tribalism is a humbler “Come and talk it over”5 approach that is grounded in the reality that others, just like us, are dustians.
January 7
My grandfather, whom I adored and who adored me, was born in 1892. He was eleven years old when the Wright brothers made their flight at Kitty Hawk.
I remember my grandfather describing the thrill of seeing the first airplane fly over, and how children and adults alike were running and screaming and waving at the godlike man in the incredible flying machine. In early 1969, my parents and I marveled that my grandfather got to experience both the first manned flight and would live to see Neil Armstrong walk on the moon. What unbelievable progress he witnessed in his lifetime!
My grandfather died two months before Apollo 11 made it to the moon.
My father worked as a handyman in a printing office in Manchester, Tennessee. There was one sink in the back of the shop for both washing hands and drinking water. There were dippers hanging on the wall on either side of the sink. The one on the right of the sink we all shared. After we drank from it, we would wash it out by swirling a little water in it and then place it back on the hook. The one on the left was for Henry. He swept the floors and took out the trash. Henry was black. I remember people tittering once when I used Henry’s dipper by mistake.
I never knew Henry’s last name.
When I saw all the tears streaming down white and black faces the night Barack Obama was elected president the first time, I remembered Henry and his dipper.
What is the greater marvel, that we moved from the Wright brothers to Neil Armstrong in my grandfather’s lifetime—a brilliant technological feat—or that we moved from Henry the help to Barack Obama the president in my lifetime?
January 8
It is difficult, yea impossible, to exaggerate the power of hope in the scheme of things.
Think of two giant magnets. One is gravity, beneath us, pulling all things down. The other is hope, before us, drawing all things forward. We cannot stop hope any more than we can stop photosynthesis. That strong-as-gravity magnetic power lures all living things into the future.
Look around. See it in the plant kingdom, as the little acorn’s genetic endowment guides it on its way to becoming a majestic oak. See it in March daffodils yellowing the hillside. See it this summer in weeds that thrive in the uncultivated garden. “The violets in the mountains,” Tennessee Williams wrote, “break the rocks.”
See it in the animal kingdom, in the two-inch-long loggerhead turtle that from the day of its birth on the shores of South Carolina navigates by the earth’s magnetic field on an odyssey of eight thousand miles around the Sargasso Sea and back to South Carolina to fulfill the role nature assigned it.
This stupendous force that moves plants and animals forward looks and smells and sounds a lot like what we human animals, when we experience it in ourselves and others, call hope. See it in the sweat of the cardiac rehab patient on the treadmill, in the premature infant exiting the womb squalling and kicking, and in emaciated Sudanese teenagers crossing a desert in search of food.
Rogers Hornsby, one of the best hitters ever in baseball, second only to Ty Cobb, said in an interview: “People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”
Hope is what the prospect of spring is for inveterate baseball players or fans in winter—it keeps them going.
January 9
In the last few years, “distracted driving” has become common parlance. We use the term primarily to refer to people irresponsible and inconsiderate enough to read and write electronic messages while driving.
Now some are witnessing “distracted doctoring” in hospitals. Stories are surfacing of neurosurgeons making personal phone calls while operating on a brain, technicians checking airfares or shopping on e-Bay or Amazon while running a heart bypass machine, anesthesiologists using the operating room computer to check basketball scores during surgery, and surgery nurses reading and writing personal e-mails on an operating room computer during a procedure.
Churches are witnessing what could be called “distracted devotion.” A cartoon in a religious journal, with no caption, depicts about ten congregants who have just shaken the minister’s hand at the end of a service and left the building. There they all are, including the minister, standing on the church lawn, looking not at each other but down at electronic devices, reading and writing text messages and updating Facebook information. No caption was needed.
Thirty years ago in his bestseller Megatrends, John Naisbitt predicted that the more high-tech life becomes, the greater will be our need for high-touch (skin-to-skin, face-to-face) antidotes. Naisbitt, a true prophet, foresaw that problem long before Steve Jobs created iPhones, iPads, and iPods, and Mark Zuckerberg friended us with Facebook.
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