and cloudy, rainy, icy, or snowy days, and punctuated with too few doses of light. A February face is a long, ground-down face that cries out: “How long, O Lord, how long?”
When we get older, we are more attuned (one would hope) to the impermanence of all things, including Februaries. That may be the hardest part of being young. When we are young and flunk the big test or fail to make the team or get the job or get dropped by the object of our affection or go blank when making a speech and make a total fool of ourselves, it is hard for a while to think we will ever be whole or feel good again. We may even wonder if going on is worth the trouble.
Might you have a February face? If you can hang on just a little longer, change you can believe in—courtesy of Mother Nature—is on the way.
February 2
Diversity in some circles is a dirty word, especially when universities or churches make it the value that dominates all others.
The word stirs positive feelings in me whenever I pass a poster in the foyer of a local elementary school. This is how the poster defines the word: Different Individuals Valuing Each other Regardless of Skin Intellect Talents Years. How could people of good will not value diversity defined this way?
I particularly like the four differences the poster singles out not to be de-valued:
Skin. Please do not disparage me because of my extremely pale, sun-damaged skin. I had no control over the skin my parents’ English and Irish genes passed to me. And please do not be too critical of me for permanently damaging my skin with sunburns when I was young. I did it out of ignorance, just like those today who ignorantly are damaging their skin in tanning booths.
Intellect. Please do not discount me because of my IQ. Most of my intelligence quotient was determined before I was born. I am responsible only for how I play the finite hand I was dealt.
Talents. Please do not dismiss me for not having the skills of professional athletes or mathematicians, sales persons or politicians, electricians or mechanics, artists or musicians. My DNA did not equip me, constitutionally and temperamentally, for those particular skills.
Years. Please do not disregard me because I am old. Youth could use my experience and wisdom; youth has the vitality and idealism I have lost. We need each other. Together we halves can make a whole.
From Marcus Aurelius comes ancient wisdom on dissing others: “Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact; everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” Maybe this is why the television show is named “The View” instead of “The Obvious.”
February 3
“Options Unlimited—Closed”
That was the message that just crawled across the bottom of my television screen as outside the snow falls. I laughed out loud at the irony in the message. Are we misleading our children and setting them up for discouragement when we tell them their options are unlimited, that they can do anything they set their mind to, that they can be anything they want to be? I like the way Booker T. Washington framed his rise from slavery to becoming a great scientist: “I have been a slave once in my life—a slave in my body. But I have since resolved that no inducement and no influence would ever make me a slave in soul.” The fact that Washington did it proves that it can be done; it does not, however, mean that everyone who passionately wants to, can or will.
When another crawl announced “Dare to Dream—Closed” I got one more chuckle. I do not know what business that is, but I do know that when our daring to dream shuts down, we are of all people most to be pitied. A few minutes ago I learned that Church of the Open Door was also closed.
I think of Susan Griffin’s account of the behavior of poet Robert Desnos in the concentration camp. When guards and other condemned men were marching to the gas chamber in stony silence, Desnos suddenly grabbed the palm of one of the condemned and read the woman’s palm. He exuberantly told her that she had a very long lifeline and would have many children, grandchildren, great joy, and long life. He moved down the line reading the palms of fellow prisoners and guards alike and saw a great future for all of them. The guards were so taken aback that they loaded the condemned people back into the trucks and drove them back to their barracks. Desnos ultimately died of typhus shortly after the liberation of the camp.29
When churches with names like Resurrection and New Hope and Open Door are marked Closed, we may all be in big trouble.
February 4
This love story is true. It is not about young, sexy, tabloid love, but about the “for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health” kind. It is of the marathon, not the sprint, variety
Not that their love story lacked hot-blooded passion. Letters to and from the Pacific theater in World War II yield tender, affectionate pledges of undying devotion. Black and white photos dating back to the early 1940s document hugs and kisses. Several pictures are reminiscent of that iconic shot on Life magazine’s cover of the nurse being bent over and kissed by the sailor celebrating V-J Day on August 14, 1945, in Times Square.
Fast-forward seventy years. One marriage, two children, five grandchildren, and six great grandchildren later, health issues have necessitated their move into an assisted living home.
The sailor boy died on February 2. On February 4, which would have been their seventieth anniversary, he was laid to rest with military honors.
In removing his things from their room, one of their children came across a sealed, bright-yellow envelope with “To Charlie” scrawled on it. Opening it, they discovered a crudely made card that looks like a piece of red, pink, yellow, and white-striped wallpaper folded in half, with little hearts and kisses glued on the front. On the inside, with a cupid and a heart glued alongside, was scribbled a message and signature: “Happy Valentine’s Day! With All My Love, Grace.”
Barely able to walk with a walker, unable to leave the facility that had no gift shop, Grace used materials from the art and craft room to construct a from-the-heart gift for her valentine, knowing it might be their last Valentine’s Day together, and it was.
Charlie was a world-class grandfather to our three sons. And I could not have had a better father-in-law.
February 5
Yale theologian George Lindbeck coined the intriguing phrase “absorb the universe.”30 I resisted it at first because it sounded so grandiose and ridiculous. Since then, it has grown on me. Now I commend it to you.
Everything—nature, history, philosophy, theology, literature, life—can be so overwhelming that we have to reduce it, simplify it, condense it down to something useable. For many of us that means boiling it down to a few sentences or stories that sum up the essence and meaning of things for us, and in that way we “absorb the universe.”
I offer one example. A friend was going through the hardest time of his life. He had flown to New York City to appear before a committee to be examined for a certification that he had spent years and a small fortune seeking—and they turned him down. Rejected and humiliated, he felt like the world’s biggest loser. He spent forty-eight hours walking the streets of Manhattan, distraught over what he was going to do.
Many years later, nearing the end of a successful career, as he told me this story he said that only one thing back then kept him from jumping off a bridge. It was a verse that his high school English teacher made him memorize, sentences from “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley: “It matters not how strait the gate, / how charged with punishments the scroll. / I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” He remembers muttering that sentence hundreds of times as he stumbled up and down the island of Manhattan processing his failure and even questioning whether he had a future.
I hope you have a strong default sentence or two to fall back on—to absorb the universe—when the going gets toughest.
February 6
If you can remember