All my children will be legal adults by the start of next month. This is not sad to me, because, for good or bad, I have been there for every year of their lives. The law is just now recognizing what has been true for a good while: there are not “kids” left to sit at the “kids’ table” this Thanksgiving. Three out of the four can toast the feast legally!
To know who you are, part of which is where you have been, is vital.
Dante found himself lost in Divine Comedy, but whether he plunged down to his roots in Hell or up through Purgatory to Paradise, the poet found people he knew. He lived in a real city and loved real people living and dead. They were capable of inspiriting him, infuriating him, and in the case of the blessed Beatrice, inspiring him.
Sometimes I wonder as I walk our neighborhood if enough of us know each other to have this sort of connectivity. We have no good or bad examples that are real . . . and so our fiction is becoming a shadow of fictions we have seen. If I want to relate to students, I compare a problem to something they have seen on Netflix or in theaters. Even then, the fictions are so diverse that there are few figures that we all have in common.
Facebook helps. I like seeing people’s lives (or some part of them) unfold that otherwise I would only hear about in a Christmas newsletter. Little other’s Grinch, Facebook is not enough, but it is something. The problem is making it the only thing, but my Surface doesn’t make me commit this error.
We need heroes that we know, men and women like my Dad, my pastor, his wife, and so many of our friends. I am blessed to have coworkers who are friends . . . we laugh and work together. They teach me every week as we pursue a nearly impossible dream. They insist that I not be Quixote and ground the dream in reality. Good friends stick by us as we blow it and inspire us to get up and keep going forward. Family is also real: nobody who knows us well thinks we are perfect, but we all love each other even when we disagree. God help me, but all this gives me a center, a stability, that makes navigating these dark times possible.
Oddly enough, we need cautionary tales from people we know. We must love our enemies, but we can also learn from them. We don’t have to preach sermons when we see the speck in our brother’s eye because it reminds us to see the giant plank of wood in our own eyes! Real people irritate us in ways that make sin manifest. Nobody can turn off the local pest, the troll, the difficult co-worker. They are real and there is no remote to speed us through the icky bits. Yet Jesus forces us to acknowledge our pains and use them to do surgery on self.
Rare is the person not in pastoral, psychological, or prophetic ministry called to publicly call out another’s faults. We learn from reality, but too often I retreat from reality to the virtual reality of books, games, or video.
Historical ignorance adds to this problem of disconnectedness.
Dante knew the past of his city, of Italy, and of the classical world. He felt at home with men who were not super heroes. The odd thing about the Divine Comedy written at the height of the Middle Ages is that it is almost prosaic compared to a superhero film. Dante used the best science of his day to write and his miracles are mostly the internal kind we experience daily if we pay attention.
How can we have roots if we purge the ugliness from our history? God is moving in Houston and Houston has a history. The city was named for a great, but flawed man. I should know his story if I am to live in his city. Our heritage is one of greatness, space city, and sorrow, segregation. Both the greatness and the sorrow are still with us.
Whenever I feel lost, and sometimes I do in these exciting if dangerous days, I look to my community, my past, and history. There are no children, for now, in the Reynolds’ house, but there were: I know that story and keep learning more as the grownup children “talk!” We go forward joyfully because we know where we have been: for good and all.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In