Jimmy Carter: A Humble Hero Who Built a Better World.

“True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”  – Arthur Ashe

I got to meet my greatest hero in person. Up close. I even talked to him.

It was the summer of 1994. I was one of more than 1,500 volunteers from all over the world to descend upon the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, in Eagle Butte, South Dakota, home to more than 8,000 Native Americans. Our collective job that August week was both inspiring and practical. In just seven days we’d come together to build thirty homes for people in need in that part of the country. People whose housing was often substandard. Had big cracks in the wall that allowed chilly Dakota winter winds to blow in. It was housing for families who still used an outhouse in the backyard. Our work was about empowering folks to work on their future homes side by side with volunteers, and at the end of the week, to receive the keys for that new home and an affordable mortgage, at zero percent interest.

If you haven’t guessed yet, ours’ was a Habitat for Humanity project, a blitz-build as it was rightfully called. You have to blitz in order to start with thirty foundation holes in the ground on Sunday afternoon and then people washing dishes in their new homes the following Saturday night. As an enthusiastic Habitat volunteer, before that summer I’d worked on homes throughout the world, everywhere from Guatemala, to New York City, to Hartford, Connecticut.

I was drawn to Habitat because it was begun in 1976 as a Christian ministry. It challenged folks of faith like me to actually put our beliefs to work, to not just profess God’s love but to build it up in the world, in homes, for God’s people in need. From a modest beginning, Habitat is now in 70 countries, all fifty American states and changed for the good the housing hopes of almost 40 million people worldwide.

But what really drew me almost thirty years ago to the small plains town of Eagle Butte was the example and the witness of just one couple, Habitat’s most famous volunteers, former President Jimmy Carter, and his wife Rosalyn. The blitz build was actually called the Jimmy Carter Blitz Build. Carter lent his name and promotion to the work and it helped so much to recruit volunteers like me and to raise the money needed to construct all those houses.

Carter walked the walk of faith in action, did not just talk about helping others. Every day on the worksite I’d walk by the porch that formed the front of a modest two story three bedroom house. That porch’s construction was Carter’s sole territory and project. He’d politely but clearly asked all of us to allow him to work and for us to get to work too, and so we did, never interrupting him as he sawed and hammered and measured and nailed, with quiet precision and focus. But I still could not at least think when I walked by him: “That’s Jimmy Carter!”

He was my hero then and now because he showed me the power of a committed faith to change the world for the good. He showed me the power of humility. He stood in line for a bologna sandwich like the rest of us and got sawdust in his hair and dirt on his work shoes just like everybody else. On the last day I finally got to speak to him and see that big toothy smile up close. Carter and his wife shook each of our hands and thanked us, asked where we were from, and then embraced the new homeowners, giving them a bible and their keys. 

And yes, we all cried tears of joy.

This week the 98 year old Carter went into hospice by his own choosing, perhaps the final dignified and courageous act by one of the most decent, kind, and honorable people our country has ever claimed as President.  A Nobel Peace Prize winner, Carter built houses and was committed to building a better world too. When I think of some of the blowhards and the empty suits and the self-serving politicians who now pass themselves off as political “leaders” I cringe.  They should look to a man like Carter to really understand what it means to serve others and what it means to serve the people. 

He wasn’t perfect. No real hero ever is. His Presidency and its effectiveness are still hotly debated.  But of all the Presidents who have served in my lifetime, he is the one I admire the most. He is and will always be my hero. He is the one who in the days to come will die in the original simple ranch house that he built and then lived in with Rosalyn, for almost all of his adult life. He was born in a small rural town and will die there too. When President Carter finally passes on and makes his way to the next life, to the eternal life my tradition believes in, I imagine the residents of heaven breaking into a standing ovation to meet him.

How else to welcome such good man? A hero to so many. A man of faith and action. And a real-life hero I got to meet and to build with, one amazing hot August week a generation ago. 

Thank you, President Carter. As your teacher might say in welcoming you home, “Well done good and faithful servant.” 

Well done, Jimmy. Godspeed.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

 

 

 

2023. The Year Without Winter? It's Happening. It's Scary.

“Men argue. Nature acts.”     --Voltaire

It just doesn’t seem right somehow. Just not right.

How my snow shovel hangs forlorn in the garage, just above the plastic buckets of sand and salt that sit untouched. Not far from the closet where my favorite navy-blue heavy jacket resides. I’ve yet to don that coat this winter. I’ve owned that vintage piece of clothing (circa 1941) for almost 25 years, and I’ve never ever failed to put it on as a wooly bulwark against the cold.  Until this year. Until this winter.  

Wait—is it really winter?

It doesn’t seem like it. Walking past the shiny red snowblowers, parked in a neat row out in front of Home Depot, prices slashed because you only need such machines when it actually snows. It’s not right. Not for the kids in my church youth group who stay home for long weekends now because there is no snow up north.  Not for the confused birds who must be wondering who’s coming and who’s going. Or for the dogs that now must deal with ticks all year round, no extended cold temperatures to kill off those tiny biting critters.  It’s downright weird that when I went for a walk in the woods this week, I almost had to doff my coat, as I sweat in the 58-degree weather.

On February 14^th. ON FEBRUARY 14^TH!!   

In 1816 New England and much of the world endured what came to be called the “Year Without a Summer.” Climate change caused temperatures around the globe to plummet. In Massachusetts it was referred to as “Eighteen-Hundred and Froze to Death” and the “Summer of Mittens.”  It snowed in June. Crops withered and died. But that climate disaster was caused by natural forces. In 1815, Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, exploded with volcanic fury. It was the largest eruption in recorded history. Tons and tons of ash was ejected up into the atmosphere and then the stratosphere. The suns rays were blocked. Worldwide temperatures fell.

But that was temporary. The following year, summer returned. Will New England winter return?

I know that sounds “chicken-littlish”, but I think this weirdly warm winter is starting to freak me out a bit. The irony is that normally I don’t much like winter. In past Februarys, I’d start whining right about now. About how sick I was of the cold. I’d gleefully kvetch about how much snow we’ve been buried under or how bone-chilling is the cold every day or how I long for spring and baseball and birds chirping again.  But now that seasonal script has been taken away from me. The birds are already chirping weeks too soon, saying to each other, perhaps, “What the heck on God’s green earth is going on?”   

It just feels like cheating to pine and beg for spring if you haven’t had to survive winter.  It’s like we’ve been given a pass from harsh and chilly weather. An exemption. With only two weeks of meteorological winter left, I wonder if we’ll receive any more appreciable snow. Or if we’ll feel temps in the twenties or thirties. I wonder if pond hockey players will ever get to slap the puck outside this year or if golden retrievers will frolic in joy through piles of fluffy new white snow.   Yes, we had that brutal big chill a few weeks ago but even that stuck around for barely a day. It went up to sixty degrees just 48 hours later.

This week we are right back to “enjoying” a string of upper forties and high fifties days.  In February! I know I already wrote that, but I can’t help but be creeped out by the death of winter in 2023. It reminds me that when it comes to human made climate change, what goes around comes around. We may enjoy the wacky warmth of February but what about next summer? What might that bring?

As a long-distance biker who loves to pedal from early spring to late fall, I worry the warm now, means by mid-summer we will be baking in the sun. Frying. Toasting. Each summer for the past 13 years I’ve done a charity ride, the Pan Mass Challenge, for me a single day 90 mile ride, from Wellesley in MetroWest Boston to Bourne, just at the foot of the bridge to Cape Cod. Most of the last several years have been brutal for heat. For last summer’s August 6^th ride my team left at 5:45 am to try and beat the scorching temps but by 1 pm it was 102 degrees in the shade. I felt like a fried egg on two wheels. Almost had to quit for the very first time because the heat plain wrung me out, made me faint and dizzy. Two bottles of water and thirty minutes in air conditioning helped me to get back on the bike and make it all the way but I wonder and worry just how hot it will be this year.

Hotter even!? God help us, no.

I know what you might be thinking. That we are going to get slammed with one big storm before spring. Seems to happen every March. Or it once did. My gut tells me no to snow for the duration. If that comes true it will be a bummer. Snowless is not natural in New England. At least the New England I used to know.

We’ve taken the world God has given to us and are inexorably changing it by our human activity. Whose fault is that winter is missing in action? Mine. Yours’. Humankind’s.

The year without a winter: 2023.  Fact or fiction?  Only time will tell.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.

              

Did ChatGPT Write This Essay? Maybe. Maybe Not.

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." --Ken Olsen, founder Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

Humans are correct about technology and its impact on society until we are not correct. Which I’d say is most of the time. In fact, I’d argue we’ve usually got no idea what effect a given kind of new technology will mean for this world, in a year or five years or a decade or a generation. We may try and be savvy soothsayers about all things technological, and do our homework, research things, but even then, it is a fool’s game, at least for this fool. 

Look at poor Ken Olsen, quoted at the start of this essay. In 1989, he was the founder and CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation, by then the largest private employer in Massachusetts with 34,000 employees in the state. If you lived in Massachusetts then, you definitely knew at least one person who worked at DEC. It was high tech heaven. Olsen was considered a high-tech genius and DEC dominated the mid-size computer industry. But in 1977 he’d also infamously opined about what he saw as the silly notion that anybody would actually ever want a computer in their home.

Olsen of course was very wrong and then some, but to cut him some slack, most of us, even the pundits, the so-called experts, have little or no idea what might happen in the culture because of a new scientific discovery, or a new product or a new process or anything never seen before. 

Like Olsen’s prediction about home computers. I mean what might follow a “home computer?” A computer network that provided anyone anywhere with immediate and free access to more information than ever before in all of human history? No way. Just ask the journalists Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel who had this now comical discussion on NBC’s “The Today Show” morning news program sometime in 1994.

Gumbel: “What is ‘internet’ anyway?”

Couric: “Internet is…ah…that massive computer network, the one that’s becoming really big now.”

Gumbel, clearly exasperated: “What do you write to it, like mail?!”

This trip down technological memory lane is a good lesson for anyone (me included) who is freaking out, or tempted to freak out, about the latest new shiny piece of tech: ChatGPT. What? You’ve never heard of it? Don’t you have….’INTERNET’!

As I understand it, (I think) ChatGPT is, in part, an artificial intelligence program capable of creating original prose, based upon requests from a user, say, like me. Today I asked ChatGPT (found at openai.com where I registered for a demo) to write an opening paragraph for a blog post and opinion piece arguing against ChatGPT as a tool for writing.  Here’s what it gave me: “ChatGPT is a terrible way to write. It encourages poor grammar, spelling, and punctuation. It also promotes lazy thinking.”

Hmmm. Not exactly Pulitzer Prize level prose. Not much like the kind of opening sentence I try to create when I write. ChatGPT’s three sentence polemic kind of reads like the earnest thoughts of a high school sophomore in English Class, and their first draft of a persuasive essay assignment: “Why I Don’t Like ChatGPT.”

So, for now, this is what I know in terms of prognosticating. I do not know what ChatGPT holds for me or for other creative types or for the world we live in. I do not know how it might (or might not) change things like education or professional writing or business writing. But that’s a pretty normal place to be when some new hot cultural bauble or trend or program like ChatGPT first arrives.  It is just beginning to enter into the messy and unpredictable mix of cultures and peoples.

Who knows what lies ahead?

I do not and if someone pretends that they do know where ChatGPT might take us, they are fibbing, showing off, or just blowing smoke. They know much less than they are letting on. Yet this I absolutely know. Technology like ChatGPT is just amazing and I am so grateful that I’ve gotten to live in times when some of the most world changing tech and knowledge has come to be and come to be discovered. Think of it: in my lifetime I’ve seen computers and then home computers and then smartphones, and of course the internet. I’ve seen scientific advancements and care for the very sick improve by leaps and bounds, now seeming like miracles at times. 

God gives us humans, brains and so humans can then use those brains to invent and imagine and make life better for the many. THANK YOU GOD!

Technology like ChatGPT is finally a tool. It is up to us to discern how to best to use that tool for the greatest good and the common good. For God’s good too. As artificial intelligence advances (and it most certainly will) I am excited and yes, I am worried.

But at least for now, I think I’m still able to write a better sentence than ChatGPT. 

For now…

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.