Hope’s Daughters. R. Wayne Willis
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and sacrifice for many Christians; a time to discipline self by giving up Twitter, nail-biting, bottled water, The Bachelor, vanilla-spice latte, or something.
Pope John Paul II occasionally flagellated himself with a belt and slept on bare floors to draw himself closer to the sufferings of Christ. For Shiites in Iraq, Muharram is the month of the year to cut themselves with knives and flog themselves with whips made of knotted cords as they mourn the seventh-century death of Prophet Mohammed’s grandson, Imam Hussein. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, slept in a thin shirt on the floor of an unheated room, stood barefoot in the snow, and for meals took only a handful of nuts, a piece of bread, and a cup of water.
I am personally all for self-control, disciplining desires, and eliminating impediments on our way to higher ground. What raises a red flag for me is what Gautama Buddha, in his search for enlightenment, learned from his extreme austerity measures. He lived on fruit, roots, and leaves for six years until only skin and bone remained.43 Excessive self-mortification, he concluded, merely wore out his body and brought a pride and self-righteousness that poisoned any gain he might have got from it.
St. Paul, who disciplined his body, wrote: “What if I gave away all that I owned and let myself be burned alive? I would gain nothing, unless I loved others.”44
February 16
“Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered.”
An economics professor uses this saying to teach his students a lesson. The words have several layers of meaning. The most obvious is that there is nothing wrong with wanting more and providing well for our families, so long as that drive does not lead to “cooking the books,” insider trading, pyramid schemes, or other illegal activities. That could land you in prison, provided you get caught.
Another meaning goes one layer deeper than the fear of getting caught. “Getting fat”—making a good income, acquiring many things, having the accoutrements of success—does not bring personal contentment. The good life in our day, Edwin Searcy writes, has become a matter of “securing the bottom line, building up a good portfolio, bolting the door against trouble, and playing your part as a consumer.”45 We know people who have done all that but lead lives of quiet desperation.
There is another interpretation. Maybe the good life is neither about getting fat nor about getting slaughtered. Maybe it is more about relationships. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian historian, novelist, and Pulitzer Prize winner, spent almost a dozen years in labor camps and in exile because he spoke out against Joseph Stalin. He advised: “Own what you can always carry with you; know languages, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your bag.”46
“Own what you can always carry with you.” Solzhenitsyn does not mean what we can carry in a wallet or backpack or wheelbarrow or U-Haul. He means the bag of memories we have made and always carry in our hearts and minds. If we get slaughtered—swindled out of our life savings or sentenced to a concentration camp or diagnosed with terminal cancer—that bag of memories is the one thing that cannot be taken from us.
February 17
Last fall, on his third birthday, one of our grandsons spent the night with us. We gave him his birthday gift just before bedtime—superhero rubber boots. He quickly put them on and was not easily persuaded to remove them before going to bed.
He and I “camped out” in a tent in our basement that night. Twice as I slept I was aware of a presence looming above me. When I opened my eyes each time there stood a grinning Clark. He spoke not a word. He just stood there smiling, proudly displaying one new boot in each hand.
Yesterday I spent the day grandparenting Clark on his parents’ farm. The day was cloudy and chilly and the ground saturated from recent snows. At one point he asked and I granted him permission to put on his coat and boots to go outside and play.
He came inside less than ten minutes later, clearly a contented boy. I thought nothing more about his time outside until I opened my car door to go home and saw the record of Clark’s whereabouts—muddy boot prints, half a dozen on the driver’s black leather seat and half a dozen on the passenger’s side and another dozen on the back seat.
No, I do not think I would have been amused if his father had done that when he was three. And no, I would not have been happy if it had been our other car with beige fabric instead of easy-to-clean leather seats.
Yes, the thought has crossed my mind that the next time I go to the farm I should lock the car. No, I have not removed the boot prints yet. Maybe this afternoon I will. Or maybe I will not.
I understand why Gore Vidal said, “Never have children, only grandchildren.”
February 18
Candy Lightner, realtor, mother of three, had her world shattered in one second on May 3, 1980. Her thirteen-year-old-daughter Cari, walking down a quiet street, was struck from behind by a car. The impact threw Cari 125 feet, killing her. Clarence Busch, the driver of the car, did not stop. He had been arrested for another hit-and-run accident just two days before hitting Cari. For his four earlier drunk-driving convictions, he had served less than forty-eight hours in jail.
When Lightner learned later that Busch would probably serve little or no jail time, she was furious. In her book Giving Sorrow Words she said that she felt enraged and helpless. Her fury drove her to action. She promised her friends: “I’m going to start an organization, because people need to know about this.”
From her personal tragedy came the birth of MADD, “Mothers Against Drunk Driving.” Within months of Cari’s death, Lightner was testifying before legislatures. Using money from Cari’s insurance and her own savings, she quit her job and began traveling the country giving speeches, rallying volunteers, and lobbying for tougher drunk driving laws. She said, “You kick a few pebbles, you turn a few stones, and eventually you have an avalanche.”47
In 1984, she stood next to President Ronald Reagan as he signed the bill that changed the drinking age from eighteen to twenty-one. There were twenty-six thousand alcohol-related automobile fatalities in 1982. In 2010, the number was twelve thousand.
Anger is a natural, predictable part of grief. After being furious for a time after a personal tragedy, some, like Candy Lightner, throw that fury into constructive action.
Augustine said that hope has two lovely daughters, anger and courage.48 Anger, instead of immobilizing and depressing us, in time can become the fuel that lights a fire within us to stand up and work to make something constructive come for others out of our sorrow.
February 19
“I’ve never had a humble opinion. If you’ve got an opinion, why be humble about it?” —Joan Baez
I find this statement disturbing, not because I disliked Joan Baez or her music, but because those words represent how so many people these days, celebrities and common folk alike, think. If you have a strong opinion, you should shout it from the housetops and ridicule any position that differs. Humility is for wishy-washy, weaker, lesser souls. What need is there for a spirit of meekness or compromise when you have truth all figured out?
One reviewer of Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion wrote:
Whatever favored position you have politically, try to always question what else it is you are missing. After all, very smart and good people are conservatives, liberals, Buddhists, Christians, atheists, and many other things. Is it more likely that your positions are right and everyone else is just missing it (the position of the righteous mind), or that you probably have a grain of truth in a field that contains many other grains? 49
Other great thinkers over the centuries have said as much. Mechthild of Magdeburg, a thirteenth-century mystic, said that our understanding of the workings of the universe is the same as the amount of honey a honeybee can carry away on one foot from an overflowing jar—not much.
Sir Isaac Newton, after discovering the law of gravity, wrote: “I do not know what I may