Can we help you?

A recent exchange about whether it is a Christian duty to help people who do not want to help themselves reminded me of a favorite section of Norman Maclean’s great book, A River Runs Through It.

It’s the story of a Presbyterian minister’s family in early 20th-century Montana. The minister loves fly fishing almost as much as he loves Jesus, and teaches his two sons the same love. The older, Norman, is a model eldest child, while the younger, Paul, becomes addicted to alcohol and gambling and eventually is killed in a fight. Paul is also clearly the best fisherman of the three.

Here, Norman and his father discuss Paul’s struggles, and whether and how anyone might be able to help him. Norman’s father speaks first:

“You are too young to help anybody and I am too old,” he said. “By help I don’t mean a courtesy like serving chokecherry jelly or giving money.

“Help,” he said, “is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.

“So it is,” he said, using an old homiletic transition, “that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed. It is like the auto-supply shop over town where they always say, ‘Sorry, we are just out of that part.’”

I told him, “You make it too tough. Help doesn’t have to be anything that big.”

He asked me, “Do you think your mother helps him by buttering his rolls?”

“She might,” I told him. “In fact, yes, I think she does.”

“Do you think you help him?” he asked me.

“I try to,” I said. “My trouble is I don’t know him. In fact, one of my troubles is that I don’t even know whether he needs help. I don’t know, that’s my trouble.”

“That should have been my text,” my father said. “We are willing to help, Lord, but what if anything is needed?”

“I still know how to fish,” he concluded. “Tomorrow we will go fishing with him.”

Does the passage cast light on the question that brought it to my mind? Perhaps there’s a clue in the father’s announcement that the three of them will go fishing together the next day, to go where they are free to be most themselves. There, on that common ground/river, the would-be helpers and the one seeming to need help might find what they all really need. It’s a step they have to take, together.

+++++++

Totally unrelated post script that I just found on Wikipedia—

“The following quote from the (1992) film version of A River Runs Through It, which is not present in the novella, is displayed at the base of the statue of Michael Jordan at Chicago’s United Center.” (It is Norman’s reflection on Paul’s expertise as a fly fisherman, I think from that day the three of them fished together.)

At that moment I knew, surely and clearly, that I was witnessing perfection. He stood before us, suspended above the earth, free from all its laws like a work of art, and I knew, just as surely and clearly, that life is not a work of art, and that the moment could not last.

Don’t you dare stand in the middle of the road!

Liberals think problems are solved by government fixing the system.

Conservatives think problems are solved by individuals fixing themselves.

Of course, it’s not that simple. But listen to what people in both camps do not say.

Liberals rarely hold individuals responsible for how their lives are turning out. The last thing a real liberal would dare suggest is that a Black person, or a female person, or any other “category” of person had made a bad choice or chosen a wrong path. To suggest such is to call their own liberal creds into question, to risk the wrath of the left.

Conservatives, on the other hand, rarely hold that “the system” plays a role in how individuals’ lives turn out. The last thing a real conservative would dare suggest is that unregulated capitalism, or systemic racism, or any other “ism” was a factor in the lives of people who suffer or hurt or just don’t make it. To suggest such is to call their own conservative creds into question, to risk the wrath of the right.

Think it’s not that simple?

Try stepping outside your political box to suggest the other side may have a valid point or two. Or even just that some middle-of-the-road, more moderate or centrist, articulation of a problem might be the best way to begin addressing it. Try it, and then be prepared to take heat from outraged partisans from the right and the left. Be prepared to be shot down before you even start.

No wonder we cannot get along, much less craft solutions to what ails us and our beloved nation.

 

Post-pandemic reentry

Reentering public life after 15 months of quarantine is a process. It is as process we are going through, one day at a time. Each day we ask ourselves and one another what full reentry will be like. Each day gives us a new piece of an answer.

My friend, Eric—incarcerated for 28 years—often pondered his reentry into society, and prepared for it, prior to his release in January.

Astronauts, trained and practiced as they are, must nevertheless ask themselves that question as they prepare for about their high-speed, high-risk, earth-ward dive back into our planet’s atmosphere.

Everyone who has been in the thrall of this global pandemic must wonder what it will be like to reenter a world more or less safe from COVID-19. I know I am.

Will I ever be sure the pandemic is fully over? (News that some are saying we will not achieve “herd immunity” may answer that question.) When and how can I safely return to where I hope I still belong? Who will be there and how will we react to seeing one another, maskless? What structures and institutions and schedules that were the scaffolding of daily living will still stand, and will I ever again have the luxury of taking them for granted?

We may be sure things will not be as they were, or feel as they used to feel, nor will we. More than human hesitancy will make everything somehow different and our responses to it all different as well. For how long will everything seem strange—foreign even—including myself as best I know myself?

My wife and I have eaten in two restaurants since pandemic restrictions began, and have ordered out only about a dozen times. But, after a couple of early attempts at online grocery ordering, she decided the risks of in-person, early morning, grocery shopping were worth taking. We last attended a live concert in August of 2020—an outdoor event, socially-distanced, masked, etc. A couple of weeks ago, we were actually excited to walk into Target, not to casually “shop,” but for specific, planned purchases. No wandering the aisles, just looking—something I have never been very good at anyway.

Being a cautious person serves me, if no-one else, quite well. Now the challenge is not to be overly judgmental of those who more easily throw caution to the wind, even if that wind might carry a virus my way. It would best to get through this reentry together, somehow.

We are watching our daughters for clues, just as they have been watching us for the past year, albeit from a distance. Liz’s unvaccinated school-aged children are back to in-person classes, being as careful as children can be. (But when they both had the sniffles over the weekend, they had to be tested, and were back to online learning until their—thankfully—negative test results came back.) Rebecca flew to Miami Monday for her first singing gig with a non Philadelphia-based group in 14 months. Though fully vaccinated, she must now quarantine for a week. We are talking about all getting together this summer, but where and how and under what circumstances must be settled to everyone’s satisfaction, and could always change. We will not rush headlong into family reentry. We are a fairly cautious family, I guess.

We will reenter slowly because we don’t want to be like the deep-sea diver who rises to the surface too fast and gets “the bends,” or like the chunk of rock from outer space that flames out when it hits the atmosphere at many multiple times the speed of sound. We want to make it home safe, and we think we will, given enough time.

But there are unknowns out there. In the one world we all live in, no one can ignore the horrendous toll COVID is taking on far-way India or close-by Latin America. Borders are porous when it comes to diseases, and COVID’s variants scare us. We move forward, slowly.

And then there was that email from our retirement community’s Executive Director late last week telling us that four people—two residents, two staff members—recently tested positive for the virus, and that three of the four of them had been fully vaccinated.

Reentry may be tougher than we’d thought. And slower than we’d hoped. What will reentry be like? How will we know when we are there?

Friendship and the delicate business of composing a self

The following paragraph from Megan O’Grady’s essay, A Shared Devotion, speaks to me. It was published in the April 18, 2021, New York Times Style Magazine as a reflection on the magazine’s theme—how friends who are creative people (or, creative people who are friends) bonded during the pandemic.

“I’ve come to believe that friendship—not the Facebook kind, but the real kind—is a kind of romance, and that its resilience to … unadorned truths is its test of strength. (“Better to be a nettle in the side of your friend, than his echo,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.) At the same time, a real friend can also be counted on to tenderly shelter our idealism in a transactional world: That person who might help us believe, against all odds, in our own consequence as we go about the delicate business of composing a self—an act of imagination in large part, after all. The moral anxiety of any creative practice—standing, as it does, uncredentialed and fiscally insecure, in dubious relation to necessity—can be acute, and it does something to you when someone else believes in you. I think of Margery William’s 1922 children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, in which a young boy’s devotion makes the titular stuffed animal believe itself to be real—despite what the rabbits in the forest, the kind that hop nimbly about on their hind legs, might say. We all know the pain of having our dreams dispelled by pedestrian day jobs, student loans, family obligations and amiable philistines. An artist’s self-conception depends on the durability of our private mythologies, our sense of the possible ignited by those who believe in it, and in us.”

A Prayer

 Last night, as my restless mind was wrestling with one of our world's many challenges, I picked up a little book of "Prayers for Peace," and happened across the following. It is captioned, "Those who frequented the air-raid shelters in Hull, Birmingham and Westminster (England) made wide use of this prayer." It is appropriate in our own time of testing: in seeking shelter, do not forget one another.

Increase, O God, the spirit of neighborliness among us, that in peril we may uphold one another, in calamity serve one another, in suffering tend one another, and in homelessness, loneliness or exile befriend one another. Grant us brave and enduring hearts that we may strengthen one another, till the disciplines and testing of these days be ended, and Thou does give again peace in our time.

Amen.

Guns, guns, guns, I'm so sick of guns

The peace and equilibrium of my home town of Grundy Center, Iowa, were terrifyingly upset last weekend when a 41-year-old man barricaded himself in a house near the center of town and began shooting. He was finally wounded and arrested after several hours.

During the standoff, the man shot and killed Iowa State Patrol Sgt. Jim Smith.

That’s a short summary of a much longer story. I am telling it because you probably didn’t hear about it. I have not seen it in any national news sources, though I am sure it has appeared somewhere.

Who cares about one fatal standoff in a small town in the heart of fly-over country when there are so many other stories of gun violence for us to follow, right up until this very morning, out of Indianapolis? Even if a law enforcement officer was tragically killed? Maybe because both the murderer and the murdered were white, just like when Black people kill Black people? Who cares?

I care. I care deeply, but I fear we are on a train no one can stop.

That train’s engineers are the gun-rights’ crowd that never saw a gun it didn’t adore and thinks everyone has a god-given right to own. Their argument is that the only way to counter the danger posed by all the guns in this country is to have more guns in this country, an argument that flies in the face of facts and common sense.

And it seems quite clear that many law enforcement officers, who should be the best-trained among us in properly handling firearms, mess up with them, too. What confidence can we have a millions of armed civilians getting it right?

The Supreme Court’s (intentional?) misinterpretation of the Second Amendment provides unlimited ammunition for the gun-defenders. Not to mention that former president who encourages them every time he can. Or too many of our representatives, whether in Iowa, or Ohio, or Washington, D.C. Who or what can stop this run-away freight?

Don’t respond by telling me that I don’t know anything about guns, because I already know that. I don’t own one, and never will.

But here’s a thing I know for sure: I felt a lot safer out in the world when there were far fewer gun-toting “patriots” around than there are now. Will I drive home after our trip to the grocery store this afternoon, or will an ambulance take my body, bullet-riddled and bloody, to the morgue? I never used to have to think about that. Now I do, at least somewhere in my subconscious. Hell, I not only felt safer, I was safer.

And we are not a better nation because of it—whether we live in Indianapolis or Minneapolis or Grundy Center.

Republican election "reform"

I have been voting for sixty years, and I am not willing to watch our free, fair, and secure election process get dismantled in pursuit of fixing a problem that does not exist.

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square, an election for which there is no credible evidence of massive voter fraud or election tampering. The Republicans lost the US Senate in the same election. Republicans won many of the House seats they won, and they won or continued control of many state legislatures, through gerrymandering largely engineered by them.

Every single person who claims interest in improving our elections must be willing to publicly articulate their conviction that the ideal election system allows and encourages every single citizen to vote, and that at the same time assures our nation that our elections are as secure and trustworthy as they can be.

Every single person who works to improve our election system must publicly foreswear any partisan interest in any changes to it.

The person, whether a citizen or an official, a Republican or a Democrat and something else, who cannot state and honor those principles should get out of the way and shut up. They have no business involving themselves in this matter. None.

Our democracy is at stake, and you know it. Fight for it.