and setting the bar for parental approval sky-high? What if marriages majored in thoughtfulness and affirmation of each other over acquiring the next thing and rising one more rung on the social ladder? What if teachers were free to fire students’ imaginations and encourage critical, creative thinking over teaching them to memorize answers for the next test? What if preachers majored in lifting up parishioners’ spirits and fortifying them for Monday struggles and inspiring them to serve suffering humanity over indoctrination on parochial niceties and dissing those who disagree?
Hopenomics, simply put, values people over things, integrity over appearances, goodness over rightness, and lifting others up over pulling them down. Hopenomics also requires us to ask, according to the Great Law of the Iroquois, how our actions today will affect the well-being of children seven generations out.
January 16
A friend and I visited Gethsemani Abbey, down in the heart of Kentucky. A mural at the entrance depicted St. Benedict’s face and hands and greeted us with his words: “Let All Guests That Come Be Received Like Christ.”
The monk who met us exuded hospitality. We asked if we could take his picture. “Sure.” We pushed a little more: “What about taking pictures during the prayer service?” “Sure,” he said, “We’re used to cameras flashing and clicking. Doesn’t bother us at all. Fire at will.”
After the prayer service, we walked through the cemetery. There, amidst many white crosses two feet tall, was the grave of Thomas Merton, maybe the most widely read and venerated monk of our times. His white cross was two feet tall. A small brass plaque on the cross simply read: “Fr. Louis Merton, Died Dec. 10, 1968.” Visitors had draped two rosaries around his cross.
We learned that the Trappist monks at Gethsemani rise every morning at 3:00 a. m. and have a cup of coffee before the first of seven prayer services interspersed through the work day. Their primary work that supports the Abbey these days is the production and mail-order sale of homemade foods.
Several years ago an eighty-nine-year-old priest leading visitors on a tour there commented: “This place has no practical value. It’s about as valuable as ballet. Or opera. Or a rainbow. Or a peacock. Or daffodils. What practical value do they have?”
We value most things because of what they can do for us. They are means to an end. We use them. Some things are valuable to us just for being there. Gethsemane stands as a symbol of hospitality and simplicity, especially for the city slickers among us who are preoccupied with getting and spending.
We bought a box of Trappist bourbon fudge and some Trappist cheese and headed back to the bustling city.
January 17
I was having breakfast with a relative who recently had to move into a nursing home. As we ate, he eagerly gave me, in hushed tones, the lowdown on some of the other residents.
“See that woman in the black dress at the next table? I think she’s German, and she finds something critical to say about the food or the service at every meal.”
“Hear that man talking real loud? I think he was a preacher, and he loves to hear the sound of his own voice.”
“That short woman at the table behind you—she’s losing her mind, and at every meal she tells the ladies at her table that her daughter is rummaging through all her papers and that her son dug up her husband and moved him to another place.”
For some strange reason, as I scanned the sample of humanity in that dining room, my mind flashed back to a retaining wall I once saw in Delphi, Greece, on the approach to the Temple of Apollo. Every single stone in the fifteen-feet-tall wall that Delphic masons built to support the temple’s terrace is a different shape and size. Yet all the stones fit together perfectly, like the pieces of a picture puzzle. You could not insert a piece of paper into any seam. For twenty-five hundred years, earthquakes have not been able to bring down this wall of irregular stones surrounded by regular foundations that have all crumbled.
There is something to be said for being mixed up with irregular stones—people not like us. We learn more from people unlike us, people who don’t ditto what we say. Rubber stampers do not enlarge or enrich us; they only reinforce our prejudices.
And sometimes the irregulars among us can help us grow in gratitude, in the awareness that there but for the grace of God go the rest of us.
January 18
Birds do it. Dogs and frogs do it. Snakes and cicadas do it too.
Molting—casting off the outer garment—is more perilous for some animals than for others. Lobsters shed their entire skeleton up to twenty-five times in the first five years of life. Because the lobster’s skeleton is on the outside and is so hard that it has no give in it, if it does not shed its shell regularly, it will not grow up; in fact, it cannot grow at all. All through its life cycle, many times the lobster has to lose weight, crack its old shell, and wiggle free.
A just-molted lobster is as soft as a child’s rubber toy lobster. With no shell, the lobster is easy prey, very vulnerable. The just-molted lobster has to find a hiding place from predators, like a crevice or cave, until its new body armor arrives.
Shedding is for us humans a major part of “wising up.” My wife and I currently are in the process of stuffing many boxes with clothes and books we have decided we will never wear or read again and taking them to Goodwill. We are pulling junk from our storage areas and setting it out for the garbage trucks to haul off. We want to spare our surviving children that unnecessary ordeal.
An essential part of growing up and becoming fully human is shedding masks. Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote: “I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere.”
It is scary to open the visor of our suit of armor and expose ourselves and, like the lobster, make ourselves vulnerable for a time. But it is necessary if, as the Skin Horse told the Velveteen Rabbit, we are ever to become real.
January 19
“Why do you think people leave their bicycle locks here?” I asked three companions as we walked across the Hohenzollern Bridge in Cologne, Germany. Thousands of padlocks had been attached to the chain-link fence separating the pedestrian walkway from one of the world’s busiest train bridges.
A local, standing there reading the inscriptions, explained: “Lovers carve their name on a lock, lock it onto the grille, kiss, and throw the key into the Rhine. It expresses their conviction that their love is a ‘lock’ for life.” One lock read: “Daniel and Nicole 21/12/2009.” “Christiana and Willfried” was scratched crudely on another. One creative person had attached with three locks a polished brass ship under full sail, professionally engraved with two words: “Special RelationSHIP.”
Many of us did something similar in days of yore when we carved initials into a tree, like “WW + PS.”
I like the location. Bridges, like love, connect two separate or isolated entities.
I like the symbolic act of throwing away the key. In our easy-come, easy-go culture, love locks express a desire for something more, a commitment more than a connection, more tenacious than a tryst, more lasting than serial fallings into lust.
I think I can understand the cynicism of those who are disillusioned with love, even those who have taken wire cutters to the padlock. And I can understand those who argue that humans are not wired to be monogamous, or that it is a holy calling to stay celibate, or that it is morally acceptable, even superior, to choose a life devoid of romantic entanglements.
But there is also a place for love-locked souls on the Hohenzollern Bridge who resonate to Shakespeare: “Love is not love / which alters when it alteration finds / or bends with the remover to remove.”12
January 20
In 1986, The United Church of Canada formally apologized