The Night Hank Aaron Took a Swing for Racial Justice

“Where have you gone [Hank Aaron], our nation turns its lonely eyes to you….”   --Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, alt.

In the blizzard of news that’s been reported just in the past few weeks, it’s the kind of story easily lost in our 24/7 intense media cycle. What hasn’t happened lately? Our new President takes office issuing a slew of executive orders. The old President will have an impeachment trial come the first week of February. COVID is still such a huge threat and why is it taking so long for our nationwide vaccine program to get up to speed? Then there is the tale of a 43 year-old sports star leading his team to the Super Bowl, leaving us fans here in New England to stew at the fact the team we love just finished a dismal season, all without our terrific Tom Brady.

Here’s the story.

On January 22^nd, Hank Aaron died in his sleep at the age of 86, at his home in Atlanta, Georgia. You are forgiven if the name and the person don’t ring a bell for you.  It’s mostly diehard baseball fans like yours’ truly, who are so saddened by Aaron’s death.  You see, for a short time in the spring of 1974, Aaron was at the center of the media universe, caught up in a whirlwind of unprecedented publicity and press coverage, as he tried to best Babe Ruth’s lifetime career home run record of 714 home runs, a number that stood for almost forty years. 

On April 8^th, 1974, Aaron stood in the batter’s box, to face Los Angeles Dodgers’ pitcher Al Downing. The stands were packed 55,775 raucous fans, pulling for Aaron, on a chilly spring evening in Atlanta.  A future President, Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, was in attendance to watch, and like everyone there, he hoped, and maybe even prayed a bit, that this was the night for history to be made. Just one more home run off the bat of “Hammering Hank” as he was affectionately known.

Coming up to bat in the bottom of the fourth inning, Aaron took the first pitch for a ball and then leaned in, waiting for the next offering from Downing. At 9:07 pm, the ball was delivered and Aaron squarely hit it, sending that little white ball into the night, over the left field fence, for the 715^th time as a major league professional.  He was the home run king.  Play was stopped and Aaron was lauded by the fans and he offered this sobering assessment to spectators about what he’d just accomplished.

“I just thank God it’s all over.”  

What is often forgotten in remembering the triumph of that night, was the ugly and awful racism that followed Aaron, as he chased after the Babe’s record. By the time that evening rolled around, Aaron was under 24/7 law enforcement protection. He’d received hundreds of nasty and terrible racist cards and letters and anonymous phone calls, all threatening to kill him for daring to challenge Ruth’s record.  Recalling that time in an interview, Aaron said, “It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about. My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ball parks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day.”

Yet somehow, Aaron handled it all with courage and grace and humility.  No victory dance or a fist thrust in the air as he rounded the bases. For one who had grown up in the violence of the Deep South, who’d watched as the Ku Klux Klan try to burn his family out of their home, who’d played first in the Negro leagues, because major league baseball waited so long to be racially integrated, Aaron was an exemplar of toughness and commitment.  Later in life, after retirement from the game, he vocally advocated for those who came after him, especially for the hiring of the first Black baseball manager, which remarkably did not happen until 1975. 

At the end of his life, in one final act of being a role model for our nation, he rolled up his sleeve and got a COVID-19 vaccination to, in his words, help spread the word that the vaccine was safe.  Though his life was marked by strife and struggle, Aaron died quietly in his sleep. I wonder if he and the Babe are now comparing swings and talking baseball.

I’m not sure why Aaron’s death has so affected me, in a time when there are so many other seemingly more “important” new stories to follow.  I guess it might be because of the greatness of his character, his bravery in living through the racism of his day and our day too. Maybe it’s because as a lifelong baseball fan, I can still look to that field of dreams and watch as a select few of the players, do more than just swing a bat or catch a ball. In rare cases, players like Aaron transcend the sport and become icons, folks who embody our nation’s struggle to live up to its most noble and hoped for ideals: that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Then again, I also just loved watching him swing a bat and send the ball up towards heaven, flying so far and so high, it is as if it will never come back down to earth.

Thanks Hank.

 

 

  

 

 

The Crucial Work of 2021 Begins: To Have Hope.

 “Ooh, ooh, child, things are gonna get easier. Ooh child, things will get brighter. Someday, yea, we’ll put it together and we’ll get it all undone, some day when the world is much brighter.”

--The Five Stairsteps, 1970

Crucial.

When I was a new writer and penning stories for a now long forgotten employee newspaper at a Massachusetts high tech company, I got into a bad rhetorical habit.  To emphasize what I thought were the most important and pressings aspects of a story, I’d use the word “crucial” to make my point. “Crucial”—as in “decisive or critical, in the success or failure of something” and “of great importance.” 

“Crucial” is a great descriptor to bring home the gravity or immediacy of a given situation.  The problem was that in one particular story I used the word “crucial” something like five or six times, and all within a 500 word article.  My editor read my first draft and then stated the obvious: “You know, John, if use the word ‘crucial’ so many times in a story, it kind of loses its meaning. Everything can’t be crucial, right?”

To avoid a repeat of that linguistic faux pas, I’m trying my best to tamp down my temptation to go overboard in my word choice for this story. Using words multiple times, like “crisis” or “emergency” or “urgency” or “unprecedented.” For you see if I begin to use any of those terms to describe the intensity of what our nation has gone through in just the past two and a half weeks, never mind the past year, I might go overboard. Label everything as in “once in a hundred years!” or “never before in our history!”

I’ll confess as a writer this: I feel like I’ve run out of words to describe the journey America has been on the past 365 days, beginning January 21^st, 2020, when the first confirmed case of the corona virus appeared in Washington state. Since then? Some mighty crucial things have happened.

Crucial.

As in the first attempted violent overthrow of an election and the democratic process in America’s history. As in the second worst pandemic and health crisis in our republic’s many years of existence. As in demonstrations for racial justice in the wake of the killing of so many people of color. As in the collapse of the economy and record numbers of people going jobless and hungry. As in the mental and spiritual health struggles so many of us are going through, isolated from our families, our friends, our past times, like sports and the arts.

As in just trying to remember back to a time when things were “normal”.

I’ve exhausted the English language.  I tried to use the thesaurus function in my word processing software to write this essay, but it finally just broke down, after so much overuse. I know many of you feel this way too: how can anyone put into adequate words that which was and still is 2020-21? I’m liking “dumpster fire”, a phrase that’s been used by many.

And then there’s the anxiety about what next “crucial” event is lurking around the corner.

A volcano popping up in the backyard? Or plagues perhaps, hordes of frogs falling from the sky? How about Tom Brady, marching towards another Super Bowl, but doing so in a uniform that is not the red, white and blue of our New England Patriots? Okay, that last one is actually true, but it still feels kind of apocalyptic.

So, I’m now going to attempt to use only good words to look ahead, as we move into the next chapter in our shared lives.  I’m thinking “hope” might be a great place to start. “Hope”, as in “an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes.” Thanks Wikipedia.  “Hope” as in, “Hope is the thing with feathers, That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops - at all.” Thanks Emily Dickinson. Hope, as in, “Surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off.” Thanks Book of Proverbs.

For in the end, “hope” is a word and a feeling and a commitment that has the power to lean into and overcome anything the world throws our way. “Hope” is actually the most courageous thing we can do right now, an act of defiance, a commitment that each of us has the power to embrace and embody right now.  “Hope” doesn’t deny the bad but instead hope looks at the bad and declares, “We’ve been through the worst, but, by God, I dare to believe that the best is yet to come.”     

Yup. Hope. Unlike “crucial” hope is a word that we can never use too often or too many times. Hope always looks to tomorrow and trusts in better days ahead. I need to hope. I must have hope. It is hope that will save us all.   

And “crucial”? I used it twelve times in this essay. I think I’ll give that word a rest for now.     

 

 

 

         

          

Don't Let The Mob Win. Carry On The Work of Democracy!

 "For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.”           --Hosea 8:7

It’s not the headline I expected to read in the wake of an event that will go down as one of the most tragic and sinister events in the history of American democracy: the storming of the United States Capitol by a violent mob, seeking to overturn a free and fair election.  But on the night of the 6^th, as I surfed the internet trying to glean as much news as I could about that day’s bloody insurrection, I decided to look for any polls, to gauge what I assumed would be American’s overwhelming condemnation of the attack. America’s absolute abhorrence at the reality of armed and dangerous thugs and jackboots seeking to subvert the will of the voters.

And then I found this….       

“One in five voters - including 45% of Republicans - approve of the storming of the Capitol building”

That isn’t a typo. It’s a direct quote from a poll, taken by YouGov.org, that asked 1,345 registered American voters how they viewed what happened on the afternoon and evening of January 6^th.  YouGov is not a fringe polling outfit. Based in London, it is a widely trusted source of information and polling and the most quoted market research source in the United Kingdom.

The question they asked was clear and simple. “Supporters of President Trump have stormed the US Capitol to protest lawmakers certifying Joe Biden’s election victory. Based on what you have read or heard about this, do you support or oppose these actions?” No wiggle room there. 

I suppose the “good” news is that seventy-one percent opposed the insurrection.  But what does that say about the twenty-percent who “somewhat” or “strongly” approved of the storming?  Extrapolate that number out to estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau of the number of registered voters in the United States (153 million people) and that means upwards of 32 million of our fellow citizens are okay, I suppose, with the attempted coup that happened last week.

Consider that chilling and sobering number. It certainly scares the heck out of me, as I wonder and worry about just what is still yet to come, in the post-election parallel universe that we are living in.

Where more than one hundred elected representatives in the U.S. Congress still voted to dispute the election, even as the blood on the floor of the Capitol building had yet to dry. Many of them even sent out fundraising appeals last Wednesday, as the Capitol was still being cleared. Even as reports of vicious attacks on Capitol police officers by the rioters were becoming clear. Even as the family of police officer Brian Sicknick prepared to say goodbye to a veteran and their son, he who was beaten to death by an insurrectionist wielding a fire extinguisher. Even as a life-sized hangman’s noose was erected by the protestors within sight of the center of American democracy.

So, for those among us who might be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief at the failure of the mob to overturn the Presidential election, we might want to think again.  For those who are tempted to  imagine if enough of us just sing “Kumbaya” and then reach out to the folks who led and supported this riot, then there will be peace; we may want to reconsider that pipe dream.

My faith teaches me a simple lesson: humans always reap what they sow. When the seeds of insurrection and outright lies are sown by cynical self-serving leaders and when false narratives about stolen elections are then believed my millions of Americans, at some point, the whirlwind had to explode forth. A whirlwind of chaos and fear and bloodshed and those heartbreaking images of a mob despoiling and vandalizing the heart of our democracy, the seat of our civic religion.

For someone who is the hope business, I confess it has been very hard for me to find any signs of redemption that might still emerge from the ugly events of the first Wednesday in January 2021, a day that will live in infamy. But I still believe in a God who can bring the very best out of the very worst of human behavior, a God who can inspire the good hearted and noble people to stand up for and defend eternal values. Peace and justice. Non-violence and love for neighbor, for all of our neighbors, no one left out, even, especially, the ones with whom we most disagree. Somehow we must get to a place as a nation where “E Pluribus Unum”, “from many, one” means more than just hollow rhetoric printed on a dollar bill. No.   

It is our job as Americans, to summon the courage and sow the seeds of an America yet to be born, one where the sword does not rule but instead the olive branch of peace and the scales of justice finally win the day. One where a mob cannot and will not win. One where the Constitution of the United States, not any human leader, evokes our true loyalty.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. Let’s get to it.

    

 

                  

2020: Goodbye, Adios, Farewell--We Won't Soon Forget You

 "Hope...Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering 'it will be happier'...”

― Alfred Lord Tennyson

2020.

Don’t let the door hit you in the fanny on the way out.  All’s well that ends well…or that ends not so well.  Should auld acquaintance be forgot? I’ve no idea what “auld” means but should 2020 be forgot? Yup. HAPPY NEW YEAR! Awful old year. The best is yet to come for the worst is almost done. (Made that one up myself!) New Year’s Eve! Old Year Leave!

I’m trying to come with up with as many New Year’s cliches as I can, then adapt them for this eve of 2020, when this year, this YEAR, finally, thankfully, comes to a close on the 31^st at just after 11:59:59 pm. Can’t come soon enough.

On a “normal” New Year’s Eve, I’d be in Florida with my beloved relatives: eating way too much of my Aunt Donna’s good cooking and getting a big steak out at a restaurant and going to the movies three or four times and treating my two cousins to brand new books at Barnes & Noble and reveling in the Christmas lights as they glow, dance, and blink, all strung from the palm trees.

But thanks to COVID there’s no chance I’ll get on a plane and I may just stay home. If I do decide to drive north and be with my “pod” friends, it will be in a very chilly place, as far from “highs in the seventies and sunny” as you can get. The love I’ll experience with them will absolutely be warm but it will be wicked cold outside. First time in 17 years I’m not heading south.

Thanks, COVID.          

There are so, so many other things from 2020 I just want to leave behind. Lockdowns. No attending a live baseball game in summer, for the first time in my adult life.  Zoom meetings and watching in shock and awe as family and friends and co-workers freeze up on the screen, like latter day Max Headrooms. When this is all finally over I won’t miss spending the majority of my time at my home office dining room table. Never thought I’d say it but I miss my real office. I will be so excited for the day when hugs are allowed again.  Can’t wait to stand in the receiving line at church after worship and shake as many hands as I want. Remember handshaking? I won’t miss being shocked at how many pages the obituaries take up in the Sunday newspaper, or hearing from friends that their parent or grandparent was taken by the virus. Won’t miss the worry I have for my eighty-something year old Mom and my immuno-compromised sister. God, please keep them safe.

But if I’m really, really honest with myself, there are actually things I want to hang onto from 2020. Lessons I want to keep, that have made me spiritually grow, because I walked through such an intense year and am almost at the end. My faith teaches me that redemption can be found even in the worst of times, that everything can be redeemed, found to have some good, some blessing.

So, post 2020, I want to never, ever want to take for granted the folks who love me in this life and the folks I love so much. My renewed connections this year with family and friends, though mostly virtual, have been a revelation. Who’d have thought a pandemic would deepen our human bonds?

My oldest and best friends in the world? We’ve met every single Thursday night since early spring and that weekly Zoom session has been a lifeline for me. Corny jokes and remembering when and burdens shared. What a gift. My brother somehow found a way in early November to throw me a COVID safe surprise birthday party. Thanks Ed. Best birthday ever! In the church I serve I’ve led a group of seniors in Zoom Bible study, almost every single Wednesday morning since March. God always shows up too. My choir friends and I mourn this life without in person singing, but still we faithfully gather virtually and have even recorded some songs. Amazing. And there’s my friend Jill. Since COVID broke out we’ve walked the many cul-de-sacs in my neighborhood on so many afternoons. With each step we listen and we complain and we laugh and we check in and we remember what it is to just be human and to support one other person in the walk called life. 

Goodbye 2020.  I will never, ever forget you. None of us will. You’ve broken our collective hearts but out of that heartache, we’ve actually been able to find some good too.

Farewell. Adieu. Adios. Aloha. See ya later alligator. Not.

That’s all folks. Thank God.

 

 

      

       

 

Washing the Dishes: How the Ordinary In Life Will Save Us

“In extraordinary times, the ordinary takes on a glow and wonder all of its own.”   

--Mike Lancaster, American author

The extraordinary. The ordinary.

Wash the pots and pans and pile them up on the counter to dry. Bake rye bread. Boy, does that taste so good, toasted and with peanut butter! Write my weekly newspaper column. What will this week’s topic be? Sing and record the bass parts for my virtual choir. Snow blow the end of the driveway so the ice doesn’t build up. Take a walk on a chilly afternoon and listen to the crunch of snow underfoot. Write a letter to my friend Eric in Minnesota. I loved the birthday note he sent to me. And don’t forget to make a dentist appointment.

Pretty ordinary things to do on a pretty ordinary Monday in the ordinary month of  December. Thank you God, just today, for the ordinary.

Ordinary tasks calling out to me, the mundane and seemingly ho-hum activities that make up my life and that take up all human lives. Grocery shopping and fixing dinner and helping with homework. Little things we accomplish, the to-do list with activities that are not earth shattering or unprecedented, that don’t have much at stake and are absolutely not extraordinary.

The ordinary: it makes up most of the time we are allotted on this earth. That’s a truth I need to hang onto for dear life and sanity in these extraordinary days.

For along with COVID fatigue, I am also struggling with an affliction I call “extraordinary fatigue.” Being bombarded on a daily basis with the extraordinary, the unprecedented, the intense. Life in a year unlike any other year I’ve ever experienced. I’m getting sick of it. Feeling that life’s volume is turned up to eleven and I can never turn it down, or mute the incessant chatter of doom and gloom, or just turn off the ferocity of living. I’m wrung out by it all, emotionally exhausted and I’m ready to move on to the normal, the predictable, the boring even!

But the extraordinary: we all face it. Days and nights of lockdowns and fear of lockdowns and cancelled holidays and remote schooling and economic angst and becoming a “zoombie” with all those hours staring at a screen. But wait—there’s more! An election that’s over but apparently it’s not over for tens of millions of my fellow citizens. Hope for a vaccine as soon as possible but ominous warnings too about the dark days of winter yet to come. Wondering when I will once again be free to actually be with people, closer than six feet and for longer than one hour and without a blasted mask covering my face!

So, my prayer this day is pretty simple: God, wake me up to the ordinary details of life that I need to do, to think about, to plan for, to tackle, and most important to be thankful for.

I have a feeling that the ordinary is what will get me, get all of us, through to the other side of these extraordinary days. The ordinary is what will keep our paths straight and our thoughts sane and our hearts full and our souls serene. The ordinary. The woodworking projects I have planned out for the months ahead: building blanket chests for my three nieces. The recipes I will experiment with in my slow cooker and the loaves of bread I will bake and then share with my friends as a way to say, “I love you.”       

One of my favorite religious icons is a drawing of Saint Therese of Lisieux, standing at a sink and doing the dishes, as the steam rises up, like incense, like a prayer, to heaven. As her fellow saint, Saint Teresa of Avila, noted, “God walks among the pots and pans.”  God walks among the ordinary things of life. In a saints’ past and in the right now too. 

God help us all to embrace the ordinary, as we continue to walk through these extraordinary times. For the divine is right here, right with us, right now. The holy. The eternal.  That which saves us. May we all remember this small miracle the next time we wash the pots and pans.

The ordinary? It is extraordinary.

 

 

       

   

   

 

 

 

 

For Real Happiness? Let Go of Expectations. Let Life Unfold.

“My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.”                        --Michael J. Fox, actor and activist, with Parkinson’s disease

A sixteen pound turkey, hot out of the oven.  A house filled with overnight holiday guests, friends and family gathered for a multi-day celebration.  Watching my favorite Thanksgiving movie, “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”, with my Godson, and laughing at the same goofy jokes every year. Twelve sets of hands connected around the table, each of us saying what we were most thankful for on that fourth Thursday of November.

That is not what happened last week at my home, not even close.

Instead almost every single cherished holiday tradition I was so ready to mark and carry out in 2020—none occurred. All the typical hopes I usually have for my favorite holiday of the year? None came true, not even one. The rituals I was so used to: these could not be practiced either, not in these strange days. 

Instead, I cooked a big steak on the grill, and baked a potato and steamed some asparagus, for my Turkey day meal, and then watched solo, a favorite movie. I hung out with loved ones, not in person, but over Zoom. I made my first ever pumpkin pie, with a crust from scratch, because there was no one else to bake. I spent two hours with friends in my COVID pod, in person, for pie and football, but not for too long, to keep it safe. I spoke by phone with all of the folks I’d have usually given a big hug too.

And it was still a great Thanksgiving, one I will never, ever forget, that’s for sure.

But in order for me to experience that day in a brand new way, to be open to the surprises and gifts that life sent my way, I had to let go of something I often hang on to so tightly, for dear life even. My expectations: what I believed that day should have been like. My expectations of how everything was supposed to unfold. My stubborn insistence that this day had to be just like all of my other Thanksgivings in years past.

Here’s the miracle.

When I let go, life unfolded before me in ways I could never have predicted and for that, I am truly thankful. When I decided to jettison expectations, my heart opened and my mind opened. I was ready to experience this sometimes weird and unpredictable life in wholly new ways. That was my best holiday gift so in 2020, by far. Good spiritual practice, too, for year-end holy days and holidays, less than a month away. Good spiritual outlook to embrace for the rest of life too. 

To expect less. To temper expectations. To accept life more. To be ready and even excited about just what might happen, but only if we are willing to give up our need to control circumstances that are finally beyond our control.  Like a pandemic.

The first time I was introduced to this discipline of letting go was through one of the best loved prayers in the world, “The Serenity Prayer”, written by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and first publicly prayed in 1943, at a church in the small town of Heath, Massachusetts.  It’s since been adopted by millions of people, especially folks in recovery from addiction, but its philosophy holds true for all of life.

He wrote, “God, grant me the serenity, to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” That’s the line many of us already know by heart, wise advice, absolutely. But it’s a line in the original long version of the prayer that really challenges me to examine everything I expect in life, even demand, sometimes. 

“Living one day at a time. Enjoying one moment at a time….Taking this…world as it is, and not as I would have it, that I may be reasonably happy in this life….”

Reasonably happy!

When I approach life, with all of its unpredictability and all of its pain and all of its joy, with that one hope—reasonable happiness--life rarely disappoints me. For every day, even in the struggles, as with COVID, we can always find something beautiful, some grace, some blessing, some relationship, to be grateful for.  And some expectation to let go of.

So, this December, in 2020 and beyond…may God, may whatever higher power holds the universe together: may this spirit grant us wisdom, grant us acceptance and grant us courage, for the living of these remarkable days.

 

 

    

  

         

 

. 

             

 

 

2020: The Year With and The Year Without

 I had a dream, which was not all a dream. 

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars 

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day

--Lord Byron, 1816

The year without….

With a little more than forty days left, mercifully, in the year 2020, I’ve begun to think about how future historians might look back on this oddest and hardest and cruelest of years. How they might name it, portray 2020. To fully understand a given time in history, two things have to happen: we have to be well past it and I’d say by at least a decade. And we have to name it, capture it somehow, with a pithy or easy to remember catchphrase, that somehow perfectly reflects the times we lived in.

Think the roaring twenties, a decade of radical change in the United States. The Great Depression, a term that captures ten years of the worst ever economic downturn in the industrialized world. We remember specific days when history turned and everything changed. December 7, 1941: Pearl Harbor is attacked and the United States roars into the Second World War. November 22, 1963: President John F. Kennedy is gunned down in Dallas, Texas and that most violent and fractious of decades, the sixties, really begin.

But years?

Individual years that marked a pivot point, a macro shift? 1776: a nation is born. 1865: a nation torn in two by its bloodiest war ever, lays down its arms. All good, but I wanted to find an actual named year, a year clearly and dramatically described in just one elegant phrase and I found it, tucked away in America’s attic.

1816: the year without a summer.

It’s mostly forgotten now, but in 1816, because of a massive volcanic eruption in what is now Indonesia, the world’s atmosphere was choked by huge amounts of dust, lowering the temperature worldwide and blotting out the sun and its warmth for millions of people around the globe. It led to massive crop failures and starvation. New England was plunged into the dark and cold as it had never, ever been, in what was supposed to be summertime. One Massachusetts historian wrote: “Severe frosts occurred every month; June 7th and 8th snow fell, and it was so cold that crops were cut down, even freezing the roots....Breadstuffs were scarce and prices high and the poorer class of people were often in straits for want of food.”

1816: the year without.

Maybe tomorrow’s historians will also call 2020 a “year without”, as well. When I think of this year that’s what most strikes me. All of the things, all of the rituals, all of the norms, all of the activities that were curtailed or just cancelled. The year without Thanksgiving or Christmas. The year without crowds. The year without live theater or live music or choirs or going to the movies. The year without human touch. The year without going to church or mosque or synagogue. The year without crowded malls or full school buses or packed restaurants and bars.

It has been a year without, absolutely.

But being a person of faith who needs to find some good, some hope, history redeemed, I also see that its been a “year of”, too, in 2020. A year of record breaking voter turnout, the most active and robust exercise of our right to vote since 1908. The year with amazing human adaptation, millions of us learning new ways to live and work, being forced by circumstances to adapt and then doing so amazingly well. The year of courage and wisdom: from doctors and nurses and teachers and store clerks, first responders and scientists and researchers. The year we remembered the importance of all of the intimate and social connections in our lives: how easy it is to take these for granted. How much these face to face relationships are missed right now. Remember hugs?

No matter how we remember it in the days and years to come, 2020 will always be a year. A YEAR. The year, at least in our times and in our memories. Of that there is absolutely no doubt. 

2020. The year with and the year without.

That works.