LIFE WITH A CAPITAL 'L' Chapter One, Section FOUR
Lingering, Section FOUR
SOLUTION: A VILLAGE VIEW
When it comes to valuing others, surely it was more easily done when people lived in isolated villages, knew a small community well, and worried only to the edges of a square mile or two. That was enough.
Given the modern situation in which we are virtually forced to be globally aware, I think we must redevelop a village attitude. We must pull in our boundaries and un-people our lives, generally speaking. Then we must tend a sensible space and wisely people our lives, specifically speaking.
Developing a village attitude for the sake of discovering others takes some lingering, a heavy dose of commitment, and some management of involvements and information. There is so much “out there” to do and know. To establish or to reexamine sensible boundaries, try lingering over questions like these:
Whatdo I actually need to know, or know about, in order to be a responsible citizen of my world, country, town, church, etc.? (Who can keep up with the daily onslaught of information?) Limiting input is essential.
Whoshould I hear address subjects that interest me, or that I am responsible to; subjects that bring pleasure, growth, or opportunities for action? (I will learn about the upcoming school board election [ugh]; I want to hear about baseball and American history [yes], but I do not have to give a fig about details of the French Revolution, gourmet cooking, or how film is spliced. It is a big job to limit input.
Where do I waste too much time listening, working, or playing? How well do I balance activities?
Who am I willing to hear that opposes my own views? (As much as I hate it, being real and especially being noble means being stretched and countered.)
Lingering over these questions helps us determine boundaries. Because opportunities are limitless, some deliberateness belongs to deciding which organizations to join or ignore, books to read, experts to hear, programs to take in, games to play, people to share time with, generally speaking.
Real people say ‘no’ to some things in order to say ‘yes’ to better things—like discovering others.
Specifically speaking, discovering others involves abandoning abstractions about them. I am particularly fond of this currently popular abstraction: “Visualize world peace.” My daughter and son-in-law have a bumper sticker that says, “Visualize whirled peas.”
I cannot help but wonder whether either exercise actually affects anything. I cannot help it, perhaps I should even apologize, but when I think of abstracting tendencies, I visualize a television evangelist who gazes from the screen and says to the world, “I love y-oo-u.” I am mystified.
My mind responds, “Excuse me? You do not knowme, let alone love me.” And, concerning the church, even we who are brothers and sisters in it frustrate the life out of one another in congregational meetings. We who do know and love one another can be observed refusing to serve on boards together; we feel good when we beat the other to the last parking place, and not even starlings can rattle their beaks better than we can cluck critical tongues toward the behavior of others’ children.
I know what the TV preacher means. He does notmean, “I love you,” specifically. Rather, it is a general idea. A lovely one, an easy one because abstracted ideas are far easier to maintain than concrete relationships. It happens that, like many Protestant children, I grew up memorizing scripture. John 3:16 came along at about age five. I remember it this way: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life (KJV).
I knew it well. Then, as unexpectedly as grease pops from bacon, one day I suddenly heardthat verse. God so loved the world—this one, as it is not as it ought to be, not as it once was, or as it will be in God’s time, but this as-it-is world. He so loved it that God gaveconcretely to it. No platitudes or abstracted hope did he give. He gave directly, personally, his best. That, probably, is what love ought to cause us to do. But, we are not God. We are not able to value this world admirably as does he.
Perhaps we can at least learn to better measure our language. What do we do with our expansive feelings of care? Globally speaking, we can locate and support any number of organizations that work to aid “the world.” But to discoverothers we must come home.
Here, we need concrete behaviors and attitudes that connect with real people. Here, people have names. People in my village need food; some need comfort; some need to be heard or need to laugh. I can abstract all sorts of solutions for family disintegration occurring around the world, or I can take dinner to a neighbor who suffers the loss of job or a recent tragedy. The noble choice is hardly difficult to identify.
Dostoyevsky nails it in Brothers Karamazov when a doctor says, “I love humanity, but I can’t help being surprised at myself; the more I love humanity in general, the less I love men in particular . . .I mean . . . as separate individuals.”
Only God can actually love globally andparticularly. For us, discovering others means lingering, locally. It means moving past labels. It means uncomplicating life enough to allow the value of a few to affect our attitudes and behaviors. There are a few people, like Mother Teresa, who set great examples of knowing globally but living locally. But she, and those like her, are different. Ahhh, my point, exactly.
LINGERING TO DISCOVER OURSELVES
Our neighbor Karl is a biologist turned professional horticulturist. In a very few years he and his wife, Helen, turned their property into a priceless botanical garden. Often, when my attitude sinks, I cross the drive and stroll through exotic plants, trees, and hothouses. Even Russian and Box turtles live there. How grateful I am for it all.
Karl’s plants come from around the world. One strange African succulent will never have more than the two thick, narrow leaves that now stick straight out of the ground. Only, if this fragile thing lives, in a matter of years its two leaves will stretch and spiral out, till the curl like the horns of a bongo, reaching their way to my house.
Karl’s garden seems nearly perfect. But not everything in our little corner of the world is. He and Helen live in an inadequately small house. They compensate creatively, but like ours, their house is old and needs constant repair. On this side of the drive our forty-some-year-old home has gradually and undeniably resigned to being a ‘fixer-upper.’ Everything cries for renewal, even the struggling fruit trees and the front yard pansies. The massive silk oak, central to that yard, oozes goo and threatens to up and die. Not even Karl wants to treat it.
We do not live in Eden, but the half-acre garden next door makes it seem that way. I touch, smell, stand back and admire rare living things. But Karl? When Karl walks with me, not only does he love the plants, he gives me details, Latin names, origins, histories, potentials, values. I have opinions. Karl has knowledge.
When it comes to being,I hold opinions. There are experts who have knowledge. My geneticist friend explains beingas a unique biological structuring of four simple molecules. By them, we are. Neurological researchers verify human being as a series of excited brain functions, while theologians posit talk about the image of God or a configuration of body, soul, and spirit. I wonder if linguists feel haughty when they calmly claim, that beingis merely a state of existence. Some shove a stick in the spokes of their own discipline by suggesting that being requires conscious or moral awareness. But, hey.
Major league philosophers examine beingthrough ontological questions that belong to the discipline of metaphysics. They run along these lines:
What is real?
What is mere appearance?
Is there reality beyond the things that are experienced thorugh the senses?
Are thoughts real?
Is the mind real?
Is time real?
Some questions about being are asked by heavy-duty thinkers, but the author of this book is not one. I write about being like I walk through Karl’s garden, an appreciator with opinions. I write concerning practical ontology. I hold and enjoy a gloriously naïve opinion that we “are.”
Are what? Are free to commit our selves to the development of noble character, an activity and a privilege only for people.
Dolphins, delightful though they are, cats, cunning though they be, cannot enjoy the high responsibility of developing character. Noble—as a descriptive word, may fit the instinctual manner of a Borzoi, but nobility is not an instinct; it is a choice about character belonging to people. Learned psychiatrists and philosophers can duke it out over why we are who we are, but I say, sincewe are, and since it matters, let us do something noble about it.
Discovering ourselves can mean many things, but on the popular level, at least, self-discovery usually refers to something psychological, romantic, or universally spiritual. Discussion of these subjects wins immediate and rapt attention. I wish my next topic were so generally fascinating. I rarely hear party conversation about it. I know few of my friends stand around addressing it, nor does it seem to play well on daytime TV. Its mention does not bring about astonishment, “OH,my goodness, yes!” or “I never thought about it, but, boy,now that you say that . . .” My topic is a question. “What does it mean to live authentically in a technological society?”
COMING UP: ONE POSSIBLE ANSWER
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