Setting Our Sails

The other night Maxine and I watched a film on PBS about a group of fifty Canadian high school girls who were chosen to sail to England in 1953 to take part in the festivities surrounding the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. “Coronation Girls” was surprisingly engaging from beginning to end. What most engaged me was the story of a dozen of them returning to England 70 years later to remember together their extraordinary experience from decades earlier.

The coronation was not all there was to their first trip. They spent seven weeks touring the British Isles, and apparently other parts of Europe as well. How could this not have been life-changing event for them all, the result of a wonderful gift from a visionary benefactor, one Garfield Weston?

As tokens of their journey, they had each received a medallion inscribed with this verse:

’Tis the set of the sails

And not the gales,

That determines the way they go.

Those words struck me as a worthy encouragement and challenge for young women just starting out their life journeys. As several of them were interviewed in 2023, they told the wide variety of life stories you might expect from such a group. What unified them was their experience of that first trip to England, of the history they’d witnessed, of the places they’d been, and of the opening wide of the world they would never forget. The trip had changed them all.

I looked up the entire poem from which that verse—slightly altered—was taken. Its author is the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919).

’Tis The Set of the Sail — Or — One Ship Sails East

But to every mind there openeth,

A way, and way, and away,

A high soul climbs the highway,

And the low soul gropes the low,

And in between on the misty flats,

The rest drift to and fro.

But to every man there openeth, 

A high way and a low,

And every mind decideth,

The way his soul shall go.

One ship sails East,

And another West,

By the self-same winds that blow,

'Tis the set of the sails

And not the gales,

That tells the way we go.

Like the winds of the sea

Are the waves of time,

As we journey along through life,

'Tis the set of the soul,

That determines the goal,

And not the calm or the strife.

The poem strikes me a bit dated, as a sort of moralistic self-help piece, too optimistic to take seriously given the strength of the gales we face. Our age is replete with studies into the storms that push lives this way and that, and too often off-course, so much so that we are excused for finding and defending reasons our lives didn’t turn out as we’d hoped. There are plenty of storms to blame, and we have named them all. Wilcox’s poem sounds like an rah-rah graduation speech that no one today should take seriously

And yet, I hear truth in it—my truth. How often have I succumbed to a challenge or crises that I face with a too-facile resignation? “That’s just the way I am,” and “that’s just the way things are,” and the like. It takes less effort to deny my own agency than it does to allow myself to be pushed by the wind to wherever it might take me. The truth is that I may well have more power to determine how I respond to the realities around me, as well as to those that are within me, than I give myself credit for. Does any of that ring true for you?

As the “Coronation Girls” reflected on their own long lives, I found myself reflecting on mine. I think that’s really the beauty of the film, and I commend it to you. It’s on PBS Passport.

A Government Hand-Out in the Form of a Bribe?

I keep trying to wrap my mind around President Trump's bribe/offer to pay adult Americans $5,000 each if we vote to keep Republican majorities in the House and the Senate.

Never heard anything like it. Can’t process it. (“Nothing like it in all of human history.”)

Frankly, it’s not offering us much to help assure that he can continue to rule at will. $5,000 ain’t chicken feed, but it’s not nearly enough to convince me I should give up on our Constitution. Is it enough to convince you?

Has he made it clear that he will pay people who vote Democratic as well as those who vote Republican? (He’ll probably know who voted how if he gets his way with our elections.)

Whatever, it’s nothing but a government hand-out, if you ask me.

Seriously, how gullible does he think the American electorate is? We will never fall for that kind of thing (or will we?).

I’m so confused.

Held in Trust

 

This post is about our current political morass, but it begins with some background about why I feel so very strongly about it. Stay with me, even if you are not comfortable in church.

I was pastor of several different Presbyterian congregations during my career. Although I often referred to them as “my church,” none of them was ever mine. I tried very hard never to forget that, and even to teach it to those congregations.

In the Presbyterian system of church governance, we often say something like, “authority and power reside in ordered groups of people elected by our membership.” Those groups are ordered so as to be accountable to one another in the exercise of their responsibilities. No one person—no one group of persons—is a law unto themself. What little ultimate power anyone has must be clearly articulated, and even then is never beyond scrutiny.

My position as pastor of a church meant that I was entrusted with an institution that was not mine to use as I wished. In fact, all of us in leadership positions in the Presbyterian church are in effect trustees of the church, holding it in trust so that it not only serves Christ faithfully today but will be strong to do so in the future.

It is a system that demands a lot of working together, often very hard work. A system in which someone or something has ultimate, unquestionable authority seems easier, and can often seem to get things done much more efficiently.

Pastors have been known to game the Presbyterian system, and congregations and other entities have been known to let them do that, at least until the roof falls in. I believe I failed the system sometimes by being unwilling to push to the limits of its constraints upon me, sometimes hiding behind them when things got dicey.

There are very important parallels between how Presbyterians are to govern themselves and how we as a nation are to govern ourselves. In our political system, citizens elect persons to represent them, either as individuals (president, governor, etc.) or as members of a group (congress, legislature, etc.). Those elected individuals and groups are ordered in such a way (ideally) so they there mutual accountability between and among them as they exercise their governing responsibilities. No one person or group is a law unto themself.

Many have said our nation’s founders learned what they wrote into our Constitution from the Presbyterians. I think that’s at least in part true, although there are deeper philosophical roots that meet somewhere to undergird both polities.

All of which is why I have so difficult a time with the presidency of Donald Trump.

It is built into me not to approve of or to accept single, unrestrained authority and power. I simply do not understand how anyone who was raised and educated in this country, or who sought and accepted citizenship here, does not have the same disapproval and resistance built into them.

“How can he do that?” has to be the single most uttered response to most of the things Mr. Trump has done in his second term. From renovating the reflecting pool to rounding up migrants to starting a war he has no idea how to end or to win, millions have thought if not said, “How can he do that?” Amazingly, he and his administration rarely offer answers that make sense, and we drift on to the next unbelievable decision we never thought could be made.

It is hard for me to imagine that there are no Republicans in Congress who struggle with the gift they keep on giving to Donald Trump—the gift of his not having to be accountable to anyone but himself. I sometimes imagine them all lying awake at night wondering how much more of our democratic republic they are willing to compromise so that he can continue unchecked. Would that they’d be brave enough at least to talk to one another about it! My wildest dream is that they are secretly plotting together to invoke constitutional provisions to deal with him.

My fear is that my wild dream is no more than a dream. It is that they really believe him, not because he’s is right, but because they’ve come to believe he is a leader ordained by some “god” who has granted him divine sanction that no one dare counter, even if it means the end of the United States of America as it was founded and as we have known it. They would rather drink poison than break ranks.

It all looks and feels like a cult to me, and only intense deprogramming will free his most ardent followers from blind obedience to him. Maybe getting defeated in November will be the kind of tough love some members of Congress need to start the process. (I am afraid there no similar way to free the Supine Court majority from its attachment to him.)

It comes down to this: the way Donald Trump is conducting his presidency continues to demonstrate that he thinks that our entire government is his private company whose purpose is to serve and gratify him and his needs. He offers no evidence that he understands that the people have entrusted our United States to him to manage in a way that serves all of us together, today and into the future. He gives no evidence that he thinks he is answerable to anyone but himself.

It galls my Presbyterian heart, and my U.S.A. heart as well.