It occurs to me…

Very little brings me the sense of renewal to me as well as opening day of baseball season (yesterday).  Each team opens the season looking at 162 games of possibility.  The grass is green, the uniforms crisp.  Batting helmets are not stained with pine tar.  Each team starts off with the same record and anything can happen – and does.  This year in particular that is more than a saying, a year following the Cubs ending their 108 year drought by winning the World Series.  Opening day, when anything is possible!

Of course, in life, we get 365 Opening Days each year, sometimes 366!  As the hymn (and the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens) notes, each morning, this morning, “has broken, like the first morning.”  Today, it occurs to me more than ever to be open to its possibilities.

“Inherited Responsibility”

Reading from Mary Oliver’s Upstream she reports hearing a phrase spoken By Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.  The last two names are connected to the New York Vanderbilts and  to the namesake Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.  In other words, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was doing alright financially.  Anyway, Oliver wrote of hearing Ms. Whitney use the phrase “inherited responsibility” and notes that she (Oliver) “slipped it from the air and put it into my own pocket.”  I guess I have appropriated it onto my computer screen via Oliver’s pocket and book.

As Oliver notes in Upstream we may not all inherit financial wealth as Ms. Whitney, but all of us inherit something, or perhaps more appropriate, some things.  We may inherit a set of values or a way of thinking.  We may inherit a mess.  If nothing else, we inherit our surroundings, this orb rotating around the sun.  Significantly, though, we all inherit something different.  As Oliver puts it:

“Thus, the great ones (my great ones, who may not be the same as your great ones) have taught me – to observe with passion, to think with patience, to live always caringly.”

In the end, it occurs to me that the issue is less what I have inherited than what I do with what I have inherited.

It was enough to make me stop in my tracks as it caught my eye walking through the office yesterday — the Time magazine cover – “Is Truth Dead?”  That is, of course, what a good magazine cover is supposed to do.  It worked.  I stopped and read the article, and thought about it long enough to look into some commentary on it after I got home.  This is perhaps my favorite commentary from Jacquelynn Floyd:

“Truth isn’t dead. You can’t kill gravity, you can’t kill science. Objective reality exists, whether you choose to believe it or not. The cold universe of facts doesn’t care.

But truth is taking an awful beating. It’s staggering and gasping for breath; its brow is furrowed with dismay that it has turned out to be so easily ignored.”

Floyd is correct.  Truth remains, and it always will be.  Yes, we will, always will, have lively debate about what is and is not true regarding some issues, but that doesn’t diminish the reality that there are truths.  Even if “easily ignored” they remain truths.  I am reminded of something we regularly used to (and still do occasionally) tell our kids – Pretending something is not true doesn’t make it not true.

It occurs to me that the nuns of my youth, though wrong on some things, were correct on this front.  There is value to truth.  There always will be value in truth, even if and when it is ignored.  No, truth is not dead.  But Floyd is correct, it “is taking an awful beating.”  Lord, please help me from becoming one of the perpetrators, the co-conspirators in the death of truth.  And if I may be so bold, help me step in, where appropriate, as appropriate, and give truth some protection.

From the poet Mary Oliver, this beautiful prose (that still somehow feels like poetry) from her most recent book, Upstream.

“It is six a.m., and I am working.  I am absentminded, reckless, headless of social obligations, etc.  It is as it must be.  The tire goes flat, the tooth falls out, there will be hundreds of meals without mustard.  The poem gets written.  I have wrestled with the3 angel and I am stained with light and I have no shame.  Neither do I have guilt.  My responsibility is not to the ordinary, or the timely.  It does not include mustard, or teeth.  It does not extend to the lost button, or the beans in the pot.  My loyalty is to the inner vision, whenever and however it may arrive.  If I have a meeting with you at three o’clock, rejoice if I am late.  Rejoice even more if I do not arrive at all.”

Of course, the first thing that occurs to the cynic in me (we won’t discuss how much of me that is) is that Oliver has no clients or judges to deal with, at least not on that day.  But there goes my cynicism pitching a bucket of water on this bit of enlightenment.  Perhaps I have to put off my “loyalty to the inner vision, whenever and however it may arrive,” until later.  Still, I can at least acknowledge its arrival and place it in a comfortable spot until I can get spend more time with it.

“All human beings are ratios of being and becoming….  Being is something that always involves becoming, and I think that’s really the glory of the human race.  I don’t think anybody should write us off.  We’re not done yet.”  Joy Ladin

I heard this yesterday while listening to an On Being podcast and it settled in as truth.  At any given moment I am this  individual mass of cells, yes, but even those are “being and becoming.” As I type this my body, my cellular makeup, is regenerating and reforming.  (All I need to do is look in the mirror or at old photos to confirm that.)  From a physiological standpoint we are, all of us, constantly “being and becoming” so long as we live and breathe.

It occurs to me that this process of being and becoming applies even more so to the less tangible parts of me, to my thoughts, my views, my attitudes.  I still see and think of some things as I did yesterday, a year ago, a decade or two ago, but in many respects, I see, understand, think of things differently now than I did then.  Indeed – “All human beings are ratios of being and becoming….”  Which of course raises the questions:  “What am I being?  What am I becoming?”

“It is a little embarrassing that, after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give to people is the be a little kinder to each other.”  Aldous Huxley

I have fifteen years on Huxley and still don’t have any better advice.

I ran across this today from Henry Miller, in a book of quotations, under “adventure:”

“In every man’s heart there is anchored a little schooner.”

It occurs to me that enjoyment in life might, at least in part, be measured by how often one pulls up the anchor and sets the sail.

“We come.  We go.  And in between we try to understand.”  Rod Steiger

That pretty much sums it up.  It initially sounds a bit cynical, but in reality, some days, sometimes, in some situations, I see/understand more/better than others.  In this I am reminded of 1 Corinthians 13:12 which speaks of seeing “a poor reflection in a mirror” (NIV) or seeing “through a glass, darkly.”

I see what I see, as I see it through all those self-created filters (my bias, my prejudice, my imperfect understanding…)  It occurs to me that the solace rests in the thought that the key is not the result (the “poor reflection” I see at any given point) but in my continued effort to understand/see more clearly — and in the assurance in that same passage that “then I shall know fully.”

C. S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, refers to pride as “the essential vice” and “the utmost evil.” As compared to pride, he refers to the other vices as “mere fleabites.” He makes a pretty good case for his point:

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.  We say that people are proud of being rich or clever or good-looking, but they are not.  They are proud of being richer or cleverer or better looking than others.  If everyone else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about.  It is the comparison that makes you proud; the pleasure of being above the rest….  Greed may drive man into competition if there is not enough to go round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to get still more….

Lewis has me convinced.