Feeling Fragile In This Life and On This Planet? Join the Club.

“To live is to be vulnerable. A thin membrane of a soap bubble separates one from impenetrable hell. Ice on the road. The unlucky division of an aging cell.” --Marina Dyachenko, Ukrainian author

Ok. I’ll confess. Tell the truth.

I’ve been feeling vulnerable lately, fragile even.  Like I’m coming to realize that more and more, my body is fragile and the world I inhabit, that we inhabit—that’s fragile too. In a real way, to be alive is to be breakable and that’s a good thing and that’s a not so good thing.

So, at age 62, the birthday I just celebrated, I’m very aware that there is more life behind me than in front of me. Folks my age who claim to be middle aged? If I was middle aged, I’d hope to live to 124 I suppose. Nice try. Unless we live to be a record setting age, people at and above my time in life are definitely on the back nine. It’s the seventh inning. You know, the fourth quarter. The autumn of life. Standing in that place on the human timeline absolutely makes me feel vulnerable. Makes me want to appreciate more deeply the time that I have right now and the days that I am living right now. I want to be more grateful for this moment. It never was before and never will be again.  

Time is fragile too. There’s only today. It’s gone before we know it. So, how well are we living? Through the good times and the bad times and the times in between? Vulnerability pushes me to ask those questions.

We are all fragile.   

Take my still much of the time healthy, but sometimes creaky, body. I think my physical slippery slope started when I found out I needed a new hip, a little more than three years ago. From that fateful November morning when I awoke with a pain that I’d never felt before, well, things began to malfunction more and more, body wise. Weird aches in the morning. “What is THAT!” Where once long ago the party was just starting at midnight, now that’s when I am fast asleep or visiting the bathroom. It’s all the stuff that begins to happen when you hit your seventh decade.

Thank goodness I received a replacement hip in June of 2020. Doc told me the old one just wore out. The warranty on it from God expired. Now I now have a piece of hardware in my body that absolutely will outlive me. The great news is I can now walk and bike and jump and run without pain. The amazing fact is that while my body will take something like twenty years to fully go back into the earth after my death, that piece of titanium nested in my fragile body can theoretically last forever. It never rusts.  

Maybe God should have made us out of titanium. Just a thought.

I’m feeling vulnerable about the vulnerability of the natural world in global and local ways too. A week ago, a deer rushed out of the woods and ran in front of my car as I was driving at dusk and I struck it, really hard. It ran off, injured, I am sure. I’ve no idea what happened to that poor animal, but it was definitely fragile, like all things flesh and blood are.

Then there was that string of seventy degree plus days we recently “enjoyed” in early November. For upwards of a week the weather felt more like mid-spring or late summer, not the cusp of winter. I know lots of folks who liked that blast of balmy air, but me? It kind of freaked me out, reminded me that our fragile climate is starting to go haywire.  If it was thirty-two degrees in June for a week or so I’d also freak out. It’s not supposed to be t-shirt weather right now. 

Poor mother earth. She’s so fragile.

I wonder if the spiritual key to facing into this reality is to make peace with our fragility, our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities as children of God, and as a planet. I can’t change the state of my body for the most part. Yes, I can eat lots more vegetables and walk more than 7,000 steps a day and keep riding my bike long distances and get enough sleep. Those things will probably help my longevity, my physical humanity. 

But the hard truth is that every day is finally a gift from God, from the universe, with no guarantees that we are going to get another day. Stuff happens. Deer run out in front of cars. Hearts skip a beat. A cell splits one way instead of the other and it is cancer. All the things we cannot predict or prevent. So, what I need to remember is that the most important time in the fragile place called my one life is right now. NOW.

Not a past I regret nor a future I fear. No. NOW.  

The way I live on this fragile earth matters too, right now. How all of us live. Climate scientists report in we have crossed a line and there’s no turning back. Seventy degree fall days will become “normal”. But we’ve also backed away from a doomsday apocalyptic scenario for the planet by beginning to make healthy and wise lifestyle changes. Making different choices about the energy we consume. Maybe we are starting to better respect the vulnerability of our God given natural home.

I hope so.

Fragility—it is who we are. It is hardwired into creation.  God made us this way for a reason and our job is to figure out why. Our job is to live into fragility without fear. Our job is to live with joy and thanksgiving even as the clock keeps ticking away and our planetary home struggles so.

Fragile. Handle with Care. Yourself. Others. The earth.

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.

     

 

     

   

 

  

      

Is It Too Much to Ask That We Elect Decent Human Beings?

“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” --Joseph Welch, United States Senate Hearings, 1954

Truth be told he was kind of a nerd. 

Black rim glasses framed an unremarkable face and a head topped with a shock of shaggy white hair, and ears that stood out.  He spoke with an earnestness that today might be mocked as pollyannish. But he was one of the most decent, honest, and competent public servants I’d ever met and heard speak and so I cast my vote for him in my very first presidential election, in November of 1980.

His name was John Anderson, a name, and a man whose story is now mostly lost to history.

In 1980 many Democrats and political liberals and moderates just could not get excited about a second term for President Jimmy Carter nor a first term for Ronald Regan. As the pundits exclaimed then, who’d elect an ex-actor President? Anderson ran in the Republican primaries but didn’t gain traction. Yet he so wanted to serve his country with his mixture of homespun Midwest politics, pragmatic ideology, and a college professor persona. Hence the nerdiness. He was also known as incorruptible and a person of character and integrity.  Back then that actually meant something when it came to running for office. 

Candidates were at least expected to be, or at least act, like decent human beings.

As an idealistic nineteen-year-old and political science major at the University of Massachusetts, I so wanted to find a candidate I could believe in, whose campaign I could volunteer for. That’s why I fell for John Anderson. I helped to organize his fall 1980 visit to our campus and on the first Tuesday in November of that year I walked into a voting booth in Amherst and cast “yes” for the first time for a commander in chief. 

Anderson lost, coming in third and garnering 6.6 percent of the national vote. Later analysis showed he’d taken votes away equally from both major party candidates.  Anderson then went on to teach political science and American studies at many colleges and universities, including my alma mater.  He continued to work for civic engagement and as a public servant until his death in 2017 at 95.

I wonder if Anderson would have been even a blip on the current political stage if a person like him decided to run for President or Congress or local office in 2022.  His credentials as an essentially decent human, one not in politics for self alone, nor a rabid ideologue; these days, that does not seem to be important to many of my fellow Americans. And that is a real shame.

Instead, we elected an ego driven, philandering, failed casino mogul, reality TV star and real estate developer and we may do so again. We run candidates that lie and then lie about lying and then lie about lying about lying.  The nastier the rhetoric of a candidate in many places the better it would seem, for more votes. Or consider the many candidates in this election who outright deny that the 2020 election was fair and square and legitimate. These election deniers who continue to believe their own delusional rhetoric have already won 161 races nationwide.  What other truths will they deny? The roundness of the earth?

Where have you gone John Anderson?

Or Charlie Baker—there’s someone I will absolutely miss as will millions of other folks in the Bay State. Charlie was not perfect as a governor, made his mistakes, but he never an ideologue. He was not in the work of government for his own power or ego or for the money. He was a policy nerd.  Wanted to get things done. Watching him campaign he looked like he was suffering through a root canal. During the worst of COVID Baker stood up every day before the cameras and answered all the questions with calm, competence, and steady leadership. 

He was a decent human being, a person of character who stepped up to lead and now he returns to the life of an ordinary citizen.  If only we could get our reps and senators in Washington to do the same. They get elected and never leave. At present members of the House of Representatives have served on average for 8.9 years and counting, with Senators clocking in at 11 years and counting. That’s the highest number ever since 1789. And when most of them finally do leave Congress, they slide right into even more lucrative work as lobbyists or corporate board members or overpaid public speakers.

Here's one truth we can’t deny. The essential decency of the people who lead us (or the lack of essential decency) reflect who we have become as a country. I know as a person of faith, I want the person who speaks for me to be kind and merciful, to seek to understand others and be open to working with the opponent across the aisle. I’d like a leader who I trust to be honest and moral.  

Is that too much to ask? In 2022, maybe. Or perhaps it is time for more and more of us to demand decency in our politicians or maybe even have the courage to run for office ourselves.

Have we no decency? God, I hope we still do. I really, really do.

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.

 

  

 

Make Life Great Again? The Past Isn't What It Used to Be.

“Those were the days my friend,  we thought they'd never end, we'd sing and dance forever and a day, we’d live the life we choose, we'd fight and never lose, For we were young and sure to have our way.”   --sung by Mary Hopkin, 1968

Those were the days. Those were the good old days. Right?

From the ages of 12 to 16, I was a newspaper boy. That’s a long since mostly forgotten job for young boys and girls to make spending money before they got to have a real grown-up job.  How I remember those many mornings. I folded and then loaded upwards of 60 copies of the Springfield Morning Union into a canvas bag slung around my neck, and then I set out on my trusty bike in the hours before dawn.

I get nostalgic when I remember that first job.

Arising at 4 am before anyone else in the house and neighborhood and how I loved that feeling of independence and the quiet of the world at that hour. How I rode along the still sleepy  suburban streets, watched the sun begin to peak above the horizon, while I tossed papers up onto stoops and porches and driveways.  I remember Christmas mornings when I would be on my paper route and how I could see lit up trees and colored lights in the windows, how I imagined those families being so excited for the day to come.  I remember coming home and on warm days, sitting in the driveway, leaning against the garage door, and reading the paper, cover to cover. It was then I fell in love with journalism and newspapers.

Those were the days. Or maybe not so much.

Because I also recall many mornings when I would keep hitting the snooze control on the old clock radio and then roll over, five, ten times, willing myself to sleep just a few more minutes.  I didn’t want to get up because I knew how cold out it was on frigid February mornings, or I heard the slap of heavy raindrops against my bedroom window and who wants to deliver papers in the rain? I remember that at 7:30 am or so, the phone would start ringing and Dad would take that call from a cranky customer of mine. “Where’s my paper! It’s not here!!” And then I heard Dad’s angry footsteps echoing up the staircase. He’d swing the bedroom door open and bark at me. “Hey. HEY! Outta bed. You’re late again.  GO! I don’t want any more phone calls.” SLAM! And then I’d struggle into wrinkled clothes picked up off the floor, mope downstairs, get on my bike and do my job, for $7.50, on a good week.

Yup. Those were the days.

Sometimes good. Sometimes bad.  Most of the time somewhere in between. Yet when I fall I to the trap of getting all nostalgic and misty-eyed about the magical past, I forget one truth about days. About a life. About all human lives.  About our country and world.

The past isn’t what it used to be. The past wasn’t ever actually how we remember it.  That’s the thing about memory and nostalgia and reminiscing. How tempting it is to recall the old days as always the good days and the better days.  As I age and enter my later years that’s my sin: I often sugarcoat all things yesterday. 

For when we humans remember something, some time, some event, some feeling, some emotion, some episode that happened to us in the past, we often edit or just leave out the parts that aren’t so idyllic or happy.  That were instead messy or bumpy or difficult or sad or complicated. 

It’s a very common thing to do.  To idealize and idolize, even worship the past. 

It’s not just individuals that do this.  Leaders and politicians and houses of worship and communities can do it too.  Fall in love with the notion that only if we go back, if only we could turn back the hands of time, if only things were what they once were, well, then life would be great again. Right? America would be great again.  For so many the future lies not in tomorrow but instead, in yesterday.   

I don’t think so.

For me the truth is that the past, when viewed with clear eyes and looked at objectively: it was great, and it was awful. The past was filled with good times and great leaders and the past was filled with hard times and terrible leaders. 

I’d love to get all nostalgic and recall just how wonderful my newspaper boy childhood and budding adolescence was, but along with delivering the morning news and playing youth football and having what seemed like endless summer days to play was this. I was also bullied all through middle school.  We had to move because my father lost his job. I had no best friend until finally I went to high school church youth group and thank God, I made friends.

I look back with fondness to those years. I look back with sadness too.

This life that God gifts to us is always a mixed experience.  We don’t live in fairy tales. Only fictional characters do. In real life, children of God like you and me have days when we feel so blessed and we have days when we feel so crushed, and we have days when we feel so ho hum. 

I think Charles Dickens was right when he wrote, as the opening lines to “A Tale of Two Cities”, “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” Those were the days. These are the days. Don’t forget the days to come too.

Thank you, God, for all the days. Every single one.

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.