Your Daily Miracle: Listening to Tonight's Debate with. . .Hope?

"The spectacle.  The reality TV feeling.  I'm not sure I can stomach it.  If I disappear to the piano, you'll know I can't stand it anymore."  This is Martin, when I reminded him to be home at 6 to catch the last debate.

Yesterday, running here and there, I listened to the podcast of Krista Tippet's "On Being," one of my favorites.  She was interviewing Mary Karr, author of The Art of Memoir.  Mary Karr had a horrid childhood and as an adult she was still actively recovering, struggling with alcoholism and with a stint in the "looney bin" as she calls it.

One day her son said, "I want to go to church.  I want to see if God is there."  So she took a latte and a stack of papers to grade and sat in the back of the church, and she met God there.

Like a lot of Catholics, she blends a salty understanding of what it is to be human with an acknowledgment of wonder, mystery, and the reality of God and God's spirit.  So with one breath she'll be talking about wanting to kiss the UPS man and taking communion, and what living in the tension yields.  She has also learned to be more generous with herself:

“Unless you have empathy for yourself and your own suffering and your own peccadilloes, you’re not going to have it for anybody else. So, yeah, I mean, it took me a long time obviously to come to that, and I go in and out of it.

But I have a lot more presence and a lot more joy. I eat a lot more chocolate. I don’t know. I mean, my head is a lot quieter after all of this, you know? The 30 years of prayer, the insobriety, the 20 years of being Catholic. I marvel and wonder a lot. I think I spend a lot of time kind of astonished by the human comedy, the hilarity of it, and the beauty of it, and just the simple nobility of most people trying to get by. It’s a pretty thing to watch.”

Hmm.   It's not always a pretty thing to watch.  I mean, look at the hate speech and vitriol and hurt that our political climate has stoked up recently.  It is hard to retain a sense of humor about the human comedy unfolding around us right now--it seems more like a tragicomedy.  I keep wishing Mark Twain were around to write another book, because what works better in this morass than some sharp satire?  SNL gives a few laughs but I feel as though I'm longing for something deeper, that really grapples with the underlying issues here.  Or maybe it's not satire I want at all, but something else.  Hilarity, yes. Beauty?  Hope?  All three?

I think what Karr is getting at, and what I sense as a part of my faith, is that we are inextricably bound to each other in story (whether we want that or not), and that is and can be a beautiful thing.  Krista Tippet gets at it when she says:

"The last line of The Art of Memoir, you write, “None of us can ever know the value of our lives or how our separate and silent scribbling may add to the amenity of the world if only by how radically it changes us one and by one.”  

Therein lies the key, perhaps: how we, in community with others and enlightened by knowledge, are changed, one by one.  Martin recently shared a Washington Post article with me about Derek Black, the son of Don Black, the creator of Stormfront the largest white nationalist site on the Internet.  David Duke was Derek's godfather, and Derek did him proud as an intelligent zealot for the white nationalist cause: “The Republican Party has to be either demolished or taken over,” he said. “I’m kind of banking on the Republicans staking their claim as the white party.”  

Without summarizing the entire article by Eli Salslow (which is excellent), let me skip to the part where Derek's identity has been uncovered and he has been ostracized by his college community for being a racist.  A former friend of Derek's, Matthew Stevenson, a practicing Jew, has been inviting friends to Shabbat for some time.  He reads over Derek's comments about Jews "worming their way into society. . .they must go." Matthew thinks it over.  He reflects that maybe Derek has never known a Jewish person before.  So he invites him to Shabbat.  And Derek comes, and is welcomed, and shares dinner. . .and comes back again, and begins to engage in conversation. . .and his transformation begins.  What struck me as even more radical is that Derek, changed forever and now a great disappointment to his family, returns to his father with love, wanting to discuss and engage.  The human engagement continues where chasms are wide and gaping and frightening.  And it's as simple, and as wildly risky, as inviting someone to dinner.

Does this not send chills down your spine?!  How easy it is for me to avoid hard topics altogether with people with whom I disagree.  How much easier is it to discard whole groups of people--"people who think that must be crazy, must be horrible, must be raving, racist lunatics."  How much harder to engage in honest conversation; how much harder still to look at myself honestly with searching, honest, compassionate, humorous eyes.  I'm part of all this too, and so are you.  Engagement.  If we are people who dare to hope, then we must engage--engage with each other in this present time, engage with the reality of the world we are creating for our children, engage with the wisdom found in the echoes of history.

Merry, immersed in AP World History, can't stop talking about cultures and events lately.  Gossip from school has been replaced by reflections of Greek government or the Fall of Rome or the spread of Islam. . .I feel quite at loose ends, actually, realizing how wanting my own education is and what a historical dunce I am (I am going to try to start keeping up by reading her materials).  With knowledge, study, and an excellent teacher who encourages discussion comes this growing understanding--a magical kind of comprehension that leads to thoughts like, "Listen, Mommy, I never understood before how history is like a big story, made up of all these small stories, and how much understanding history helps us understand what is going on now. . . ."  Wow.  I mean, I am not making this up.  You should see Merry's eyes while she is talking about history--bright, excited, full of wonder and synergy.  It's wonderful.  It fills me with great hope.

"And it’s much more radical, much more daring, and much more dangerous to hope."

--Mary Karr

Maybe I will dare to keep on hoping.  Maybe even as I sit down with gritted teeth and my glass of wine to tonight's debate, I will choose to remember that good, meaningful connections are still taking place all over this beautiful world of ours.  Maybe I will choose to remember that Hope and Goodness and Love still triumph even when things look grim, and that we are all part of this story, whether we are out fighting for justice in the trenches or simply scribbling away in a library, or learning history in school, or reaching out and shaking hands with someone across the chasm.

Read or listen to Mary Karr and Krista Tippet HERE.

Read that amazing Washington Post article about Derek Black HERE.