![\"giotto](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2017\/08\/giotto-angel-2.jpg\")
<\/p>\nAre there reasons to be hopeful even \u00a0on those days that Nazis, white supremacists, racists, and unhinged politicians\u00a0are sucking the air out of the room? Yes\u2013but we need to know where to look.<\/p>\n
I have been blogging for five years; one of the many things I\u2019ve learned over that time is that I should generally resist the temptation to immediately post something in response to the latest news cycle. Blogging for me is an expression of thinking in writing\u2014and thinking almost always requires a bit of time. I\u2019ve found Twitter to be useful for quick, off-the-cuff, sometimes knee-jerk responses to things\u2014perhaps that\u2019s why the President likes it so much\u2014but I want my blog to do something more than react. Especially when my emotional self is urging me to throw any number of \u201cWTF\u2019s\u201d unfiltered out into the blogosphere in reaction to the latest idiocy, I do well to remember to breathe, think, and write about it a day or two later (maybe).<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Last Tuesday\u00a0was a case in point. I think millions of Americans already knew that Donald Trump has an acute case of what Kurt Anderson, in the cover article of the latest issue of The Atlantic<\/em>, calls \u201cKids R Us syndrome\u201d: the President is a spoiled, impulsive, moody 71-year-old brat and bully\u2014with all that entails. What we found out on Tuesday, after Trump robotically read a statement on Monday\u201448 hours after the events in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend\u2014is what he really<\/strong> thinks. By refusing to take the easiest layup in American politics and simply say unequivocally that Nazism, white nationalism, the KKK, and similar ideologies are evil and have no place in America, he left little doubt concerning his moral compass. He doesn\u2019t have one. Neither is he capable of fulfilling the role of President and representing this great country. Against all odds, the American people chose to follow electing the first African-American President in our history (twice, no less) with electing a narcissistic, uninformed, frequently unhinged racist to the highest office in the land and as the most powerful person in the world. This is not good news.<\/p>\n As if that wasn\u2019t enough, Jeanne and I\u2014apparently due to a previously undetected masochistic streak in both of us\u2014chose Tuesday evening to see the new Al Gore movie, An Inconvenient Sequel<\/em>. I\u2019ll have more to say about that in my next post on Sunday\u2014suffice it to say that observing the work that 150+ heads of state, in addition to the monumental efforts of \u00a0people like Gore behind the scenes in Paris, put into the Paris Climate Accord being successfully negotiated and signed, all the time knowing that a few months later our current Idiot-in-Chief would withdraw the U. S. from the agreement, did little to raise our spirits. Where is one to find hope for our country, perhaps even for our survival, in times like these? As is frequently the case, I find myself looking to familiar texts and experiences that might speak to what seems so \u00a0overwhelming.<\/p>\n Of the many varieties of liturgical celebration I have encountered over the past several years, including a number of them at St. John\u2019s Abbey in Minnesota (the Benedictines know how to do liturgy better than anyone), the most striking is the Good Friday morning prayer service I have experienced twice with the monks at the Abbey. At 7:00 in the morning, the service sets the tone for the most somber day in the Christian calendar as a solitary monk chants the entire book of Lamentations from the Jewish scriptures.\u00a0Lamentations is the most depressing book in the Bible, perhaps anywhere, a litany of five poetic dirges over the destruction of Jerusalem. Traditionally attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, the tone of the poems is bleak: God does not speak, the degree of suffering is presented as undeserved, and expectations of future redemption are minimal. In Psalm 129 the Psalmist writes \u201cPlowmen have plowed my back and made their furrows long\u201d\u2014Lamentations is page after page of that sentiment.<\/p>\n But just about half way through the poems, Jeremiah comes up briefly for air.<\/p>\n I will call this to mind, as my reason to hope:<\/strong><\/p>\n The favors of the Lord are not exhausted, his mercies are not spent;<\/strong><\/p>\n They are renewed each morning, so great is his faithfulness.<\/strong><\/p>\n My portion is the Lord, therefore will I hope in him.<\/strong><\/p>\n Good is the Lord to one who waits for him, to the soul that seeks him;<\/strong><\/p>\n It is good to hope in silence for the saving help of the Lord.<\/strong><\/p>\n The favors of the Lord are renewed every morning (sort of like Donald Trump\u2019s tweets)\u2014but we have to practice identifying and relying on them. Here are a couple from my past week\u2014new life and beauty\u2014reasons to hope that remind me, once I stop yelling WTF!!! at the television screen, that while the news cycle comes and goes, the divine is always present.<\/p>\n As Eliot led Anita through his daily routine of sleeping, eating, smiling, crying, and checking out the world that is still new to him, she occasionally asked me if having Eliot around brought back memories. To be honest, it really didn\u2019t\u2014my sons are in their middle thirties and my sixty-plus year old memory banks have not preserved a lot of the daily routine of when they were Eliot\u2019s age. But what Eliot\u2019s visit did put me in mind of was exactly the sort of thing Jeremiah wrote about. The mystery of new life, the wonder and expectations that are attached to a new human being, the miracle of a baby\u2019s smile lighting up the room moments after the same baby\u2019s crying had everyone scrambling for solutions\u2014these are the divine favors that are renewed every morning. There is nothing more full of hope and promise than a new human being.<\/p>\n The wonder of new life. The gratuitous beauty of the natural world. These are some of the \u00a0places to encounter divine favors every day\u2014even on those days that Nazis, white supremacists, racists, and unhinged politicians seek to dominate with their noise and vitriol. These are reasons to be hopeful.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are reasons to be hopeful–even on those days that Nazis, white supremacists, racists, and unhinged politicians seek to dominate.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2938,"featured_media":10654,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,8,10,11,21,23,36,40,47,48,56,62,65,75,86,104],"tags":[169,268,287,369,388,448],"class_list":["post-10646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-angels-2","category-beauty","category-benedictines","category-bible","category-christianity","category-collegeville","category-family","category-god","category-hope","category-human-nature","category-jeanne","category-liturgy","category-miracles","category-politics","category-silence","category-writing","tag-christianity","tag-hope","tag-jeanne","tag-old-testament","tag-politics","tag-st-johns-abbey"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"Anita](\"http:\/\/wp.production.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/files\/2017\/08\/Anita-and-Eliot-279x213.jpg\")
A friend from Canada visited Jeanne and me over the past week with her seven-month-old son in tow. Jeanne and I are grandchild-less (although we do have grand-dogs), and there is little sign of grandkids in the near (or even distant) future. Jeanne has visited Anita and Eliot in Toronto twice and is unofficially Eliot\u2019s surrogate grandmother (\u201cGigi,\u201d Jeanne insists), but this was their first visit to Providence (and the first less-than-a-year-old human being\u2019s extended visit to our house ever, to my recollection). Our dachshunds had never encountered a baby and were not quite sure whether Eliot was a noisy visitor from another planet or the strangest looking dog they ever saw.![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2017\/08\/Eliot-and-us-279x213.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/wp.production.patheos.com\/blogs\/freelancechristianity\/files\/2017\/08\/butterfly-1-150x150.jpg\")
![\"butterfly](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2017\/08\/butterfly-2-150x150.jpg\")
Jeanne had several things planned to do with our guests during their visit (people don\u2019t visit us much)\u2014one was going to \u201cThe Butterfly Place,\u201d a butterfly conservatory a bit over an hour away in southern Massachusetts. Jeanne and I had been there once before several years ago\u2014this time there were more butterflies of more varieties than we remembered. The Butterfly Place was filled both with brightly colored flying insects and a remarkably diverse collection of human beings, all of whom were enthralled by the little instances of gratuitous beauty flying around.<\/p>\n![\"butterfly](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/766\/2017\/08\/butterfly-me-2-165x300.jpg\")
Each of us was gifted with a butterfly landing on us; the Darwin-lover in me reveled in the spectacular patterns and colors on display which, as is so often the case in the natural world, seem far beyond what any reasonable or rational artist would ever have thought up. In answer to my question \u201cWhat ecological role do butterflies play?\u201d, which was a fancy way of asking \u201cWhat are they for?\u201d, one of the knowledgeable people on staff essentially said that other than food for birds (their bright colors are a warning to birds that \u201cI don\u2019t taste good\u201d), they don\u2019t have that much of a role. They only live for a couple of weeks, then are gone\u2014the embodiment of gratuitous beauty if there ever was one.<\/p>\n