located well above the one-hundred-year flood plain. Those homeowners had no reason to think there was a good reason to carry flood insurance.
When will lifting ourselves out of the economic tsunami that hit this country be over? No one knows.
Remember the indomitable spirits of our foremothers and forefathers who kept overcoming humongous obstacles to improve this country. Remember the Dutch who keep on reclaiming Kinderdijk from the sea.
Remember the hope goat.
January 27
“How can we learn to know ourselves? Never by reflection, but by action. Try to do your duty and you will soon find out what you are. But what is your duty? The demands of each day”— Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Marian Stoltzfus Fisher had no idea what life would demand of her that Monday morning in 2006 when she checked into her little Amish schoolhouse. But when Carl Roberts, a deeply disturbed man, burst into the school and lined the little girls against the blackboard and told them he was going to shoot them all, thirteen-year-old Marian, the oldest, stepped forward and asked him to shoot her first.
Perhaps she thought her sacrifice might sate the gunman’s bloodlust so that he would spare the other girls, or that it might buy her classmates opportunity to run, or incentive to run, or enough time for help to arrive. Regardless, five girls beginning with Marian died that day and five were injured. The killer then killed himself.18
Marian lived the faith transmitted to her from her Amish mothers and fathers. They had taught her the saying of Jesus: “The greatest way to show love for friends is to die for them.”19
The Amish grandfather of one of the murdered girls, on the very day of the murders, said of the gunman: “We must not think evil of this man.”20 The Amish set up a charitable fund for the family of the killer. They attended his funeral, explaining: “The Bible teaches us to forgive those who trespass against us, and to mourn with those who mourn.”
The Amish tore down the desecrated schoolhouse. Six months later they opened New Hope School, where their children are learning to live in hope, love each other, love their enemies, and forgive those who sin against them.
January 28
I cannot forget the first time I saw the face of William Niehous. He was on the evening network news, having stumbling out of a Venezuelan jungle, looking like warmed-over death. His hair fell down below his shoulders and he had a Rip Van Winkle beard.
More than three years earlier terrorists had kidnapped him, ending the comfortable lifestyle he had enjoyed with his family as the executive of a glass company. The terrorists ripped him from his wife and three kids and held him for millions of dollars ransom. In those three years, living with snakes and mud and the likelihood of execution, Niehous saw not one human face. His captors kept him blindfolded the entire time. Whenever they did remove his blindfold, they were all wearing masks.
One day, in a crude hut, listening to the plaintive cry of a jungle bird, he glanced down and noticed an ant on the floor. It had found a crumb from Niehous’s last meal and was carrying it away. He couldn’t get out of his mind the enormous weight the insect could carry compared to its size. The ant made him think that God probably had built tremendous resources into all creatures, including himself.21
One of the most common comments I have heard from people like William Niehous, whose stable and comfortable lives got suddenly blown apart by an accident or illness, is: “I never would have believed, before it happened, that I could survive a body blow like that.”
Ants can move a rubber tree plant. One ant can carry a crumb several times its weight. We, like the ant, have powers within us that we may not know until we are put to the test.
January 29
How realistic is the advice to “forget the past?” Selective amnesia is virtually impossible and I am not convinced—even if we could forget—that it would help much. All our past, for better and worse, got us here. You have to dance, as legendary University of Texas football coach Darrell Royal put it, “with what brung ya.”
Charles Dickens, whose past was very painful, at age forty eight went behind his Gad’s Hill house with two of his young sons and burned, basketful after basketful, all his private letters. He threw on the bonfire every letter from friends and family—words historians and journalists, then and now, would die for. Dickens wished to be judged on his literature, not on his personal life. He did not want to worry about an unguarded word, privately committed to paper in the heat of the moment years earlier coming back to be held against him or his family.22
Frank McCourt, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, begins his book Teacher Man with a blanket pardon of those who helped make his childhood in Ireland miserable. He singles out Pope Pius XII, “the English in general and King George VI in particular,” bullying schoolmasters who hit him regularly with a stick, his alcoholic father, and assorted others.23 Let us hope that trumpeting his forgiveness to the world helped him forgive at a deeper level.
Each of us decides how to deal with past emotional pain. One person I know wrote her five worst memories on a paper towel and flushed it. There may be some power in ritualizing a resolution so that we do not allow traumatic events to dominate our lives.
Alice Roosevelt Longfellow advised: “Fill what’s empty. Empty what’s full. Scratch where it itches.” Any time is the right time to burn up coddled grudges and dated emotions, or flush them, and move on.
January 30
Some call it Celtic spirituality. These days the term largely refers to the ancient Irish belief that there are certain places where the curtain separating this world from the other world is very thin, even sheer; places where the membrane separating secular from sacred, the ordinary from the numinous, is porous or permeable; thin places that are thick with the mysterious presence of God. It is as if the door between this world (time) and the next world (eternity) cracks open for a moment, enough to permit us to see the other side.
A friend told me about a trip he and his wife and their children and grandchildren made over the Christmas holidays to an island. At one point the family held something like a tribal council to discuss how they would celebrate Christmas in a tropical paradise. They decided they would send a message, not in a bottle released to the outgoing tide, but written in the sand in big, bold letters.
What message would they send to the universe, to God, to an airplane flying over? They settled on three words: joy, peace, and love. I saw a picture made of the kids standing in the O of JOY. The letters were probably big enough to be read from thirty-thousand feet without glasses.
Methinks when those kids are old and gray they will remember that island and that beach and those grandparents and that Christmas as a thin place where they experienced something bigger than themselves, bigger than life, something mysteriously better felt than told, what Rudolph Otto termed mysterium tremendum et fascinans, “the tremendous and fascinating mystery.”24
One of our primal needs is to spring ourselves occasionally from the humdrum—out of the rat race—and off to a thin place. Taking our little ones to a thin place may be the greatest gift parents and grandparents have to offer, far more precious and lasting than a gift card to an all-you-can-eat pizza place or one more video game.
January 31
The magazine Mother Jones made
