Hope’s Daughters. R. Wayne Willis
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pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
Albert Einstein said: “We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.” Maybe we should begin more discussions with a soft “In my humble opinion” and mean it, and then concentrate on understanding the other person’s point of view.
February 20
Kurt Vonnegut was at a party with his friend Joseph Heller, the writer of bestseller Catch-22. The party was being given by a billionaire hedge-fund manager. Vonnegut whispered to Heller: “Joe, how does it make you feel to realize that our host probably makes more money in a single day than you’ve earned in forty years from writing Catch-22?”
“I have something,” Heller said, “that he will never have—the knowledge that I’ve got enough.”50
One study on happiness sought to ascertain if and how happiness is tied to money. An interviewee was heir to an enormous fortune. He testified that what mattered most to him in life was his faith, and that his greatest aspiration was “to love the Lord, my family, and my friends.” As to how much money was enough, he admitted that he personally could never feel truly secure until he had $1 billion in the bank.51
John Bogle, retired CEO of The Vanguard Group, in his book titled Enough, gives his views on this country’s financial system. Bogle says that we have gone from an agricultural economy to a manufacturing one to a service one to what is now a financial one. “We have pinned so much of our collective fortune on extracting value from trading paper,” he insists, “that we are losing our grip on what it means to actually build anything of value, let alone how to serve others.”52
Joseph Heller said that the question he was addressing in Catch-22 was: “What does a sane person do in an insane society?” Einstein gave this as his answer: “There are some things that count that can’t be counted, and some things that can be counted that don’t count.”
How much money do we need? Wendell Berry’s answer is: “To make a living is not to make a killing; it’s to have enough.”
February 21
Decades ago Randy Newman recorded a song named “Short People” that ended up on many greatest-hits albums. The song was a sarcastic poke at all people whose prejudice against others is based on external things like gender or race or size.
A “eureka” moment on the importance of height came early in my professional life. I was invited to participate on a panel with three cancer research scientists and physicians of renown. I had good reason to feel more than a little insecure. As we mounted the stage and prepared to sit in our chairs, in a split second I couldn’t help but make the observation that I was the tallest of the four! Something clicked inside me that day: bigger, faster, and stronger may have ruled in Neanderthal times, but in our day what is between the ears counts more.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., great intellectual, medical reformer, and poet stood “five feet three inches when standing in a pair of substantial boots.” The story is told that once he attended a meeting in which he was the shortest man present. “Dr. Holmes,” one man quipped, “I should think you’d feel rather small among us big fellows.” “I do,” retorted Holmes. “I feel like a dime among a bunch of pennies.”
Lloyd George, orator, champion of the underdog and British Prime Minister during World War I, was once introduced with the remark: “I had expected to find Mr. Lloyd George a big man in every sense, but you see he is quite small in stature.” “In North Wales,” Lloyd George countered at the beginning of his speech, “we measure a man from his chin up. You evidently measure from his chin down.”
Height matters. Experiments show that taller men, like women of beauty, have some advantages in life, especially in making good first impressions. Over the long term, however, thoughts and deeds wear better.
February 22
Where I attend church, there are prayer request cards in the pew racks. Worshipers are invited to write a few words about someone “for whom we are praying” and to sign their own name.
A little seven-year-old girl has filled out three cards over the last few weeks. The first one reads: “Please help the people that need your love and gidens.”
The second: “People whom are in the hospitel and whom are about to die and the ones whom are hurt.”
The third: “Please help the people that do not have any food or something to drink please help the people who are poor! Please help them be safe and helthy.”
That third one ends with the salutation “Love,” followed by her name, followed by her drawing of a heart. On the other side of the card she drew a girl with long hair and a smile on her face who is being followed by a little dog. They are walking toward a body of water with a slide or a ladder going down into it.
Some Sundays she is the only one in church who fills out a prayer request. I suspect that she may be closer to the angels, closer to pure religion than the adults on her pew and in the pulpit. One thing all the great religions of the world teach is compassion for the poor and needy. At the tender age of seven she already has got it—sensitivity to the needs of the dying, the hospitalized, the hungry, and the poor. Her parents should be very proud of her, and they are.
Jesus told the adults, “If you don’t change and become like a child, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.”53 You wonder what he might have meant.
February 23
Humility gets a bad rap in our day. We associate it with low self-esteem, passivity, weakness, Caspar Milquetoast, and humble pie.
Humility and humus come from the same root word. Humus is the good, rich earth beneath us. We buy big bags of it to enrich our gardens. What binds us humans together, the high and the low, as last rites and funerals remind us, is that we all come from humus and to humus we shall return.
When we forget that we are humus, we run the risk of committing what the ancient Greeks considered the greatest sin, the sin of hubris. They defined hubris with stories of individuals who were feeling their oats so much that they forgot they were humus.
Sometimes hubris happens to people who come into political power. If you are the president or a senator, and millions have cast their vote for you and smile at you and applaud you and are deferential toward you, it must be hard not to feel that you, as king of the world, can do as you please. That is hubris.
One of the most poignant moments in the movie Schindler’s List is the one when a drunken Nazi is sitting with Schindler on a balcony. The Nazi, Amon Goeth, is picking off Jews with his high-power rifle, just for sport; gleefully shooting them—they’re just fish in a barrel to him. When Amon comments about the power he has to kill arbitrarily, Schindler corrects him:
Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t . . . . A man steals something, he’s brought in before the Emperor, he throws himself down on the ground. He begs for his life, he knows he’s going to die. And the Emperor pardons him. This worthless man, he lets him go . . . That’s power, Amon. That is power.”54
Hubris uses power to promote self and exploit others. Humility is virtuous because it helps us identify with and stand in solidarity with those who we know, like us, are really humus.
February 24
Two men in a hospital for the incurably ill shared a room. The man in the bed next to the window sat in a chair each afternoon for one hour to keep fluid from building in his lungs. The other man, whose spinal column was fused, had to spend all day flat on his back.
During the hour each day he was sitting up, the man next to the window shared with his roommate the interesting things he saw going on outside. There was a park out there and in the middle of the park a small lake where swans swam, parents and their children sailed toy boats, and visitors fed ducks. From day to day he