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Exploring the intersection of sacred and secular.
I grew up in construction in the South, which offered so many opportunities to hear an abundance of colorful aphorisms. As a language nerd, I loved quips like, “even a blind squirrel gets a nut once in a while.” In Part 1: Giving COVID a Finger, I used one that’s proven consistently useful as life advice, In life, two rules will never bend: never whittle toward yourself or spit against the wind.
I observed that some life lessons are best learned early, but mostly because so much of life contains knowledge that comes from mistakes that we can only make and learn from later, we learn a fair number of painful lessons the hardest way possible. One of the most painful is the futility of getting even, which led me to end with the question, “I wonder – what could we achieve if we were willing to step forward without needing to even the score?”
OK, so we whittled toward ourselves…
In a world that values loud talking more than careful communication, it’s hard to push past the noise to make an actual connection. It’s therefore no wonder that we’re in the position we’re in now as a nation, as families, and as people. We no longer have the luxury of begging the question of how we got here. That list is far too complex and varied to come to any single answer – mainly because there isn’t any single answer.
And that’s kind of the problem, since human beings tend to over-intellectualize and obsess over finding single, simple answers.
Many folks end up dwelling on possible causes rather than bear the discomfort of doing the hard work of fixing them – not in Sudbury, of course, but in places like Medford. Medfordians and their ilk have so much trouble managing solutions. It’s probably because talking about whose fault it is tends to offer a lot more dopamine than talking about working together to solve the problems we’ve – I mean they’ve – created together!
The trouble is that as long as we’re more concerned with whose fault it is, or why those people didn’t do whatever it is that needs to be done when they had the chance, we’ve not only cut our own hand as we whittle towards it, we’re spitting into the wind even as the knife is still cutting us.
Spitting With the Wind
Lyndon Johnson once quipped that it’s amazing what you can get done when you don’t care who gets the credit. These are wise words, especially for those Medfordites, who tend to remain more focused on blame than solutions. They’re words from a moment when, like ours, there was a sharp divide in what folks wanted to do, despite that their shared ethical obligation to human dignity was clear in light of the growing awareness that civil rights legislation to end segregation must pass, but couldn’t come to terms about how to do it in a way that didn’t upset rich white fol – um, people in general…definitely just people in general.
Ours is a moment similar to the early Twentieth Century. We share the pressing need to dethrone oligarchs whose unfettered greed fetters the levers of our economy. When you get right down to it, both situations hurt the entire population, not just those who are segregated or poor. Oppressors are wounded by their own actions, as they lose the ability to discern right and wrong, good and evil, or human dignity in terms other than whatever any person can do for us.
Common Sense
Benjamin Franklin wrote some of the most foundational thoughts related to the conception of our social contract. Much of it wrestled with balancing civil liberties and civic obligation. Much of it wrestled with what it means to be personally successful in a world in which he, at least, believed that we have obligations to the people around us. One of the main things I carry from his writing is the sense that whatever personal success we may achieve means nothing in a nation where our personal liberty is a matter of someone’s whim and their expectations of us rather than the will of the People and the obligations we bear to make them both self-evident and lasting.
If we can’t take our turn and wrestle in good faith with the most basic self-evident truth that human life has greater value than the rise or fall of any stock, then it’s time admit that we’re a nation who prefers sound and fury to liberty or justice – and not just for all, but for anyone. If oppression can happen to anyone, it can happen to anyone with a simple shift in the winds of fortune.
Living into Our Obligations
We have an opportunity to stand in the hard truth of our time – of every time – that if we aren’t using our voice and vote to provide relief to the vulnerable, we’re using our voice and vote to oppress them. We are what we advocate for. We’re as good a person as we’re willing to be, and that isn’t determined by our intentions or charitable contributions alone, but by how we use the entirety of our lives to feed a rising tide for people we’ll never meet and can’t do anything for us, especially those we may consider the undeserving poor.
The times may change, but wisdom remains constant, as does the fact that people who trample the poor and exploit others for personal gain will never be on the right side of history.
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Eric Wolf is a local Lutheran pastor, and he’d love to buy you a coffee, tea, or beverage of your choice to tell him about your faith, your ideas about meaning, or whatever “sacred stuff” means to you. Reach him at [email protected]! To learn more about Eric and his writing, visit his blog at Love Sees Color.