Adopting a new myth to live by, which is really an old one

Just as fish don’t know they live in water, we don’t know we live in a myth. The myth we are living today tells us we are rational  beings with big brains like computers, separate from and superior to our bodies and nature. According to this story, our goal on earth is to maximize personal pleasure and profit. When we do, something magical happens: the hidden hand of the marketplace magically transforms our personal greed into the common good.

Growing up under the spell of this myth, I regarded the Pawtuckaway Boulder Field as merely a bunch of big rocks strewn about from the last ice age. However, the older I get, the more I am mesmerized by this spot. It has become my sacred spot.

Something happens as soon as I pass over the last ridge and descend into the valley of the boulders. I feel the temperature drop and sounds fade, like being ushered into the cool stillness of a great cathedral. Time slows to a crawl, and I find myself being lulled into a deep, meditative trance. Along the way, if I am lucky and the light is right, I come across great, hulking personages, some two stories tall.

Perhaps they are stone guardians, put in place to protect this sacred spot by the Pennacook, a peaceful, indigenous people who once dwelled here until broken and emasculated by the White Man.

The Pennacook, like indigenous people in general, live by a different myth than ours, one grounded not in being the apex species but an interdependent cog, part of a living earth. One can make a strong case that the best hope for the earth and its inhabitants, including us, is to readopt this old indigenous myth as our new myth.

According to historian and mythologist Arther George, a functioning myth must reconnect us to what the ancient world called the center of the world: “a sacred spot where the divine, in the heavens and the underworld, connected with the earthly… at the heart of reality.^⁠1

In more straightforward language, a sacred spot is a temple or sanctuary where we can interact with our deities and experience transcendence. I’m aware this likely sounds like New Age mumbo jumbo, something acknowledged by Gary Snyder, poet, scholar, and Pulitzer Prize winner: “This ancient aspect of religious worship remains virtually incomprehensible to EuropAmericans.”^⁠2 

One aspect of this indigenous worldview comes from reverence for their ancestors, as Chief Seattle made clear in his famous 1854 speech: “Every part of this soil is sacred in the estimation of my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove, has been hallowed by some sad or happy event in days long vanished. Even the rocks, which seem to be dumb and dead as the swelter in the sun along the silent shore, thrill with memories of stirring events connected with the lives of my people, and the very dust upon which you now stand responds more lovingly to their footsteps than yours…”^⁠3

 More insight comes from anthropologists who study aboriginals in Australia, the oldest human race on the planet, many of whom still live as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Their respect for nature comes from a deep connection to the land-based on “inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness.” This practice is the basis of their spiritual expression and, ultimately, their way of life.^⁠4

Rather than being consumed with making progress – competing to see how much each individual can accomplish and how much stuff he can create – they believe that connecting to nature leads to “a deep understanding and knowing [that] can be reached through contemplation and silence.” As a result, their pace of life is slow and measured: “they don’t mind waiting because they want things done with care.”^⁠5

 I practice transitioning back to this ancient way of being at Pawtuckaway: By defocusing my mind, while staying still and relying upon intuition, I can feel myself slipping into the living world of indigenous life. Entering this animate world is like smelling the first spring flower: The oppressive weight of our modern myth starts to dissipate, like throwing away useless gear from a heavy backpack.

xxx

¹ “WillMythology Save Us?” Conversations with Willi Paul and Arthur George. FromPlanetshifter.com Magazine

² Gary Snyder, “The Practice of the Wild.” page 81

³ https://suquamish.nsn.us/home/about-us/chief-seattle-speech/1854 oration, ver. 1

⁴ https://sites.coloradocollege.edu/indigenoustraditions/sacred-lands/3300-2/

⁵ Ibid

America Moves from Churches to Self-Storage

Demolishing St Charles Church in Dover NH
CC Jean Stimmell: 2017

Across our country, churches are being abandoned, demolished, or repurposed into  hip businesses and condominiums. Meanwhile, self-storage units are breeding like the Japanese beetles in my garden because we can no longer shoehorn any more stuff into our homes.  It appears we have forsaken the spiritual goal of becoming one with everything to embrace the consumer creed of having one of everything.

Statistics don’t lie: self-storage facilities have become  a $40 billion-a-year industry with over 49,000 storage facilities nationwide.^⁠1  More than 10% of Americans now rent units, giving each of us 5.9 square feet of storage space if it was divided up equally. 

This trend defies logic. When I was growing up in the 1950s, families were larger than they are now, but our houses were half the size – yet still big enough to hold all our stuff. Why, then, one must ask, do we need off-site storage now. One primary reason is because Madison Avenue, in cahoots with Wallstreet, has conned us into buying ever more stuff. It has been said this corporate advertising campaign is the largest single psychological project ever undertaken by the human race.^⁠2 And one that will have a sorry ending.

 Back in the day, when houses were small, we fixed old stuff when it broke.  It’s empowering to use our ingenuity to restore things to working order. After all, having evolved from tool-using primates, it’s in our genes.  I know the satisfaction I get from fixing things around the house. I get particular pleasure from working on my Farmall Cub tractor that I inherited from my father, who bought it in 1946, after coming home after fighting in WWII.

Things were built to last back then and, because customers did much of their own repair, they were designed to be easy to work on. In the process of ratcheting up the disposable society, we have lost all that, and in the process, stripped away the sense of dignity and integrity that comes from living a simple lifestyle based on self-sufficiency, a way of life fundamental to our forebearerse.

Today we can neither sell nor give away our stuff – that is no longer the newest and coolest on the block – because no one else wants it either. At least we could take those excess possessions to the landfill to give them a proper burial. But no, that would force us  to face up to our mindless addiction. So we do the easy thing and put it in self-storage, out of sight, out of mind. And  then, all too often, in the end, abandon it to the auctioneer’s gavel.

In the big scheme of things, what good is all this stuff? We are born onto this earth without stuff and will leave it without stuff, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That being the case, why do we mindlessly accumulate it?

Paul Wachtel has a compelling answer in his book, The Poverty of Affluence, written back in 1983. He suggests our commitment to consumption is a frantic attempt by us, as individuals, to buy stuff as a substitute for the group solidarity and sense of community that used to give our lives meaning – that is until economic growth tore it apart.

Buying more stuff can be an escape from tedium. But, in the end, our precious possessions will mean nothing, as they lay scattered haphazardly about the landscape, like bones beneath an owl’s nest from what was left of her prey.

xxx

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

¹ https://www.sparefoot.com/self-storage/news/1432-self-storage-industry-statistics/

² Alan Kanner & Mary Gomes, “The All-consuming self” in Ecopsychology, ed. Theodore Roszak, 1995

Moral Injury and the Fate of the World

Sand Dunes at Hampton Beach State Park
CC Jean Stimmell

 

Back in 2019, I wrote a column for the Monitor^⁠⁠1 about “moral injury⁠,” a label first given for a malady afflicting Vietnam vets: the guilt and betrayal they felt(and still feel) for not doing 'what's right.' Moral injury, now recognized as a universal human reaction to war, has been described in history going back to the 8th century BC when Homer wrote the Iliad.


 

Recently I listened to a podcast by Stephanie Kaza, professor emeritus of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, who has extended the concept of moral injury to include the guilt we feel for the part we are playing in the destruction of the natural world.


 

I don't want to discount the seriousness of moral injury: it can cause severe depression and suicide. But Kaza's podcast made me wonder if there might be a silver lining, revealing society's deepening facility to feel the pain of others: We seem to be gaining empathy for life's creatures, large and small. Could it be we are rediscovering the animate world of our indigenous ancestors who saw all of nature as aware and capable of feelings? 


 

During my own life, I've seen a significant shift in that direction. 


 

I grew up in an avid hunting family in the 1950s, competing with each other to see who could shoot the most ducks, grouse, and pheasants each fall. Even as an eager participant, I remember feeling terrible about the suffering I caused when the kill was not clean. Then, in college at Columbia, I was assigned three white rats to use in psychological experiments to test various hypotheses, often using electric shocks as negative reinforcement, resulting in one of my rats going insane. It's hard to believe today that such behavioral research was cutting-edge psychology in 1963. I slink down in my chair as I write this, mortified at how I have treated animals. After that, something even worse happened: my tour in Vietnam. 

 

I have changed over my long life, as has society. Folks treated dogs as canine alarm systems back in the day, often keeping them chained outside, even in winter. Dogs were expendable, having no more legal protections against abuse than slaves had against their plantation owners. Now dogs are revered by their owners, pampered, treated almost like children. And that kind of loving care continues to extend to a wider variety of pets – including a pet chicken friends of mine adore. 


 

All around us, we are waking up to and gaining empathy for, what the ecologist David Abram calls, the more-than-human world. While we have long felt a close connection to certain animals, like the great apes, with whom we share as much as 99% of our DNA, we are now gaining an appreciation for the intelligence of birds like ravens, whom our Maine neighbor, Bernt Heinrich, has written about.

 

A recent piece in the NYT points out similar intelligence in various other birds before discussing species like the cuttlefish, who are closer to insects than humans. Despite having green blood, no bones, and a body like an iridescent football^⁠, they retain "the full portfolio of mental abilities as these birds.”^⁠2   Of course, we can’t leave out the cuttlefish’s star cousin, the octopus, whose extraordinary abilities have been the focus of several recent books. In praise of them, Sy Montgomery, National Book Award finalist, has written, “If I have a soul, and I think I do, an octopus has a soul, too.” 3

 

And that's just scratching the surface: recent books like Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard show how intelligent and relational trees are: She explains how old mother trees connect all the forest trees through a 'jungle of threads and synapses and nodes… 'communicating and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals… identical to our own neurotransmitters.' 'The older trees are able to discern which seedlings are their own kin [and] nurture the young ones and provide them food and water just as we do with our own children."^⁠ 4

 

Shedding our thick rhino-skin myth that we are superior to all others, that we are the only species who can think and feel, is our best hope to survive and flourish in the future.

xxx

 

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

¹https://www.concordmonitor.com/Moral-injury-28573439

 ²https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/09/science/cuttlefish-cognition-cephalopods.html

³“The Soul of an Octopus” by Sy Montgomery.

⁴Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree (p. 5). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Musings

St Pete Beach, 1/12/19
CC Jean Stimmell

This column marks the end of an era in my life that began 28 years ago when I quit stone masonry to get my Master's Degree in counseling psychology. As of the first of this month, I have chosen to retire as a therapist by letting my license expire.

In another milestone, Coco, our plott hound, who had been in-home hospice care, was put to sleep on June 21st. She was laying on the rug, unable to get up when the vet arrived but was able to wag her tail at, who had become her new friend. The vet gave her that final shot while Coco munched on dog treats out of my hand and then dozed off peacefully to join Socrates and Buddha chasing rabbits in another realm.

All of this is a long-winded way of announcing that my byline will be shrinking. This week also brings to a close a recent series of columns, showing how we are interrelated at every level: from biology, psychology, society, ecology, to quantum mechanics.

Our connectedness is something we have most often taken for granted. That's why it is so troubling today how many of us have skidded off the tracks, rejecting our inter-relatedness to celebrate macho individualism and unfettered freedom.

It seems to me to be an adolescent kind of thing. I sure felt that way growing up, craving the freedom to do whatever I wanted. I was wilder and crazier than most. But I internalized the interlocking nature of rights and responsibilities fighting in Vietnam, raising a family, and just growing older.

I wonder what kind of parents could justify pursuing their right to freedom if it was detrimental to their family rather than working together for the common good. Looking outward, local, state, and national governments are extensions of the family, instituted provide essential services and establish common rules so we can all get along together. 

Covid-19 points up the fact that in some areas, our responsibilities are international. As Covid ceaselessly mutates into deadlier variants, none of us will be safe until the whole world is vaccinated. The same goes for nuclear weapons and climate change: the only solutions are global.

But I don't hear much about the common good today. Instead, we are paralyzed at every level of government by a consuming fear of the Other, magnified by social media, dark money, and unscrupulous politicians. What's it going to take to lure us out of our bunkers of identity-based grievances to see the big picture: To marvel and take comfort in what both religion and science are telling us – that we are not separate but one.

To scientists, it is indisputable that we are utterly interconnected. The theoretical physicist, Carlo Rovelli, boils down quantum mechanics to its core that everything in nature is relational: "a photon, a cat, a stone, a clock, a tree, a boy, a village, a rainbow, a planet, a cluster of galaxies . . . These do not exist in splendid isolation. On the contrary, they do nothing but continuously act upon each other."^⁠1 Roveii readily admits the parallels with Buddhism. Over the years, the Dalai Lama has returned the favor by touting the scientific method as our mightiest tool in the pursuit of the truth.^⁠2

The bedrock of Buddhism is well-stated by the scholar Christina Feldman: "The process of dependent origina­tion is sometimes said to be the heart or the essence of all Buddhist teaching…[which says that] everything is interconnected—that there is nothing separate, nothing standing alone. Everything effects everything else. We are part of this sys­tem."^⁠3 

She goes on to say something with which Rovelli would agree. It is a message that freedom-loving patriots today need to take to heart: Freedom is not found by trying to bypass our inter-relatedness:

 "It is not a question of transcending this process to find some other dimension; freedom is found in this very process of which we are a part. And part of that process of understanding what it means to be free depends on understanding inter-con­nectedness, and using this very process, this very grist of our life, for awaken­ing."^⁠4

Let us hope we all wake up before it is too late.

xxx 

¹ Rovelli, Carlo. Helgoland (pp. 74-75). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition

² https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/10/16/dalai-lama-science-spirituality-destructive-emotions/

³ https://www.buddhistinquiry.org/article/dependent-origination/

⁴ Ibid

Wild and crazy thoughts to save the world

Trees embracing in my woods

Wild and crazy thoughts to save the world

Today, we navigate through our lives, autonomous contestants in a national gameshow called free-market capitalism, where winners live in mansions and losers on the street. Community, ethics, and our non-human neighbors don’t matter much. How do we break out of this amusement park before it is too late? Let’s try by thinking outside the box. What if our thoughts and imagination don’t arise in us as individuals. 

What if thoughts are socially constructed. Rather than our thoughts arising out of our brain, what if we are receiving them from outside: From the web of all our acquaintances, books we have read, and websites we click on. Wise gurus have always said this is true:  Jung called our common connection the collective unconsciousness; Emile Durkheim called it social consciousness; neurologists call it mirror cells; Buddhists call it Indra’s Net. Now ecologists are telling us that our thoughts come not just from other humans but the Earth itself!

We need to wake up. At this perilous time, our thoughts, foolishly misunderstood to be our own, are being manipulated by an insidious enemy, the demon of fear. This demon is being used to great advantage by demagogues to pit us one against another. They are successful because we have no overarching cause to rally around. We have nothing bigger than ourselves to believe in. 

David Abram, ecologist and philosopher, tells us that imagination isn’t a separate mental faculty within us but an ability our senses have to cast themselves out to bind with “other lives that surround it, the way the earth couples itself to our thoughts and our dreams.”^⁠1 We have this magical ability because we coevolved with the Earth: “The human eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with the oceans and the air, formed and informed by the shifting patterns of the visible world. Our ears are now tuned, by their very structure, to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese.”^⁠2 Becca Tarnas, scholar and artist, writes about how our imagination extends beyond our daily concerns…allowing us to see our human role in an enchanted cosmos by connecting us to our past and future.^⁠3  

We do this through myth.

Imagination operates through myth to connect us to something bigger than us: the more-than-human world and the Earth itself. Myths are not tall tales and make-believe. As Charlotte Du Cann, author and Director of the Dark Mountain Project tells us, “They exist as a reminder of our place and meaning on the Earth; a reminder of what we have to undergo to become truly human, with a culture where art is the same as knowledge. Old mythologies contain not only stories about our place on the Earth, but have the Earth speaking through them. In other words, as we turn ideas around in our head, we’re not just thinking, but we are getting thought.^⁠4

 “Whatever we are facing now we need to have a root system embedded in weather patterns, the presences of animals, our dreams, and the ones who came before us. Myth is insistent that when there is a crisis, genius lives on the margins not the centre. If we are constantly using the language of politics to combat the language of politics at some point the soul grows weary… We’re not listening to the thoughts of the world. We’re only listening to our own neurosis and our own anxiety.^⁠5”

J.R.R. Tolkien, the English writer and poet, understood all of this. He is best known for writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Far from believing that the imagination dealt with make-believe, he considered it a direct connection to the divine. What we call myth, he named “Faërie,” a world he believed humans never left: “Faërie contains many things besides… dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.^⁠6”

Inspired by what I had learned about this strange, new world, I re-watched Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, keeping in mind what the visionaries, I have quoted, reveal about myth representing a higher truth. Part way through the movie I shivered in recognition about the magnitude of the task we face today as the wizard Gandalf spoke about confronting a similar existential crisis: 

“Middle-earth stands upon the brink of destruction. None can escape it; you will unite or you will fall. Each race is bound to this fate, this one doom. No one wishes for times like these. All we can do is decide what to do with the time that’s given to us.”^⁠7

xxx

¹ The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, page 262

² https://wildethics.org/essay/waking-our-animal-senses/

³ https://beccatarnas.wordpress.com/tag/david-abram/

⁴ http://www.dailygood.org/story/1979/uncolonising-the-imagination-charlotte-du-cann/

⁵ Ibid

⁶ https://beccatarnas.com/tag/david-abram/

⁷ https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/lord-of-the-rings-the-fellowship-of-the-ring-the/quote_32038.html

Hope Lies in Our Entanglements

 

Hope Lies in Our Entanglements

For most of human evolution, the cosmic forces of the universe were magical, beyond our feeble understanding. We were humble and kept our heads down, acutely aware that we were the lowest denominator in a vast galactic mystery. Unfortunately, over the last few hundred years, we humans have become smug and arrogant, thinking we are lords and masters of Planet Earth, which will be our downfall because of the climate crisis we are causing. Today I want to write about four entanglements that give me hope about how we might regain that sense of awe while avoiding environmental doom.

Entanglement #1: Last June The Journal Nature announced that quantum entanglement had been proven: That's the theory that once two objects or particles have interacted with one another, they will be forever joined. From that point forth, whatever happens to one will instantly happen to the other, even if one has traveled to the other side of the universe.^⁠1

To me, this a paradigm-shifting event in the history of science, as influential as discovering gravity or that the earth is round – but, most important, because it reintroduces enchantment back into our small-minded and algorithm-driven world. Perhaps someday soon, we can see the world as it really is – as through the eyes of a child, a mystic, an indigenous person, or an artist. 

As the poet Christian Wiman has written: "If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication."⁠^⁠2

Entanglement #2: Suzanne Simard, in her ground-breaking new book Finding the Mother Tree, introduces us to another example of entanglement: how trees communicate through a tangled underground fungal network. She explains how old mother trees connect all the forest trees together through a 'jungle of threads and synapses and nodes,' 'communicating and responding to one another by emitting chemical signals. Chemicals identical to our own neurotransmitters.’^⁠3 Simard sees entanglement everywhere: in a colony of ants, a grove of trees, and even ourselves: "Our own roots and systems interlace and tangle, grow into and away from one another and back again in a million subtle moments."^⁠4

Entanglement #3: In Robert Mac Farlance's fabulous new book, A Deep Time Journey, we learn that we can no longer view ourselves as a separate apex species, "but rather as an assemblage of entanglements of which we are messily apart. Our bodies are habitats for hundreds of species of which Homo sapiens is only one…we are collaborative compound organisms, ecological units' consisting of trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi that coordinate the task of living together and sharing a common life."^⁠5

And in terms of diversity and a declaration of how little we know: Macfarlane relates a new scientific discovery of a "deep life ecosystem that extends down seven miles into the Earth's crust that is twice the volume of the world's oceans." It "dramatically exceeds the biomass of the entire human population."^⁠6

Entanglement #4: Donna Harraway, a philosopher and feminist scholar, sees our world as a tangled ball of yarn, made up of the innumerable threads of our "deep and entangled relationships with technology, beyond-human kin, and each other.^⁠7 While our future in terms of climate crisis is dire, she rejects the two most popular pundit refrains of either "a comic faith…that technology will somehow come to the rescue of its naughty but very clever children"; or that "the game is over, it's too late, there's no sense trying to make anything better."^⁠8 

Her approach is to pluck out one thread at a time and "make kin' with it by whole-heartedly listening and relating. She believes, "learning to stay with the trouble of living and dying together on a damaged earth" is a road map to more livable futures.”^⁠9  Joanna Macy, a Buddhist writer and activist, embraces a similar approach, calling for a global wakening to band together to create a life-sustaining society. Macy invokes Active Hope as the secret sauce to stiffen our spines  to face this crisis with resistance and creativity.

"Active Hope is not wishful thinking. 

Active Hope is not waiting to be rescued by some savior. 

Active Hope is waking up to the beauty of life on whose behalf we can act. 

We belong to this world. The web of life is calling us forth at this time."^⁠10 

Understanding that we are – each of us – a vital thread in our utterly entangled but achingly gorgeous world, makes me tingle: it gives me hope that we can commit to come together for the common good of all the inhabitants of our precious, blue planet.

xxx

 Postscript: As I step out of my office after writing this, I reflect on how none of what I said would be surprising to indigenous people, who already reside in this more-than-human world. As if in validation of that, I found a beautiful black feather by my door, a present from my neighbor, the trickster Raven.  

.  

¹ https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/science/quantum-satellites-china-spying.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20200616&instance_id=19421&nl=todaysheadlines&regi_id=30753738&segment_id=31004&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

^{2 3} My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman p.33

³ Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree (p. 5). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

⁴ Ibid.      page 179

⁵ Macfarlane, Robert. Underland: A Deep Time Journey (pp. 103-104). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

⁶ https://onbeing.org/programs/robert-macfarlane-the-worlds-beneath-our-feet/#transcript

⁷ https://forthewild.world/listen/donna-haraway-on-staying-with-the-trouble-131

⁸ https://muse.jhu.edu/article/670948/summary

⁹ sympoiesis haraway summary

¹⁰ Active Hope by Joanna Macy & Chris Johnstone

Beyond Politics

 

CC Jean Stimmell: 2017

As Christianity’s hold on America has weakened, many pundits believed our politics would become more ecumenical and rational, less tempestuous and back-biting. But the opposite has happened: We are now more polarized: in danger of being torn apart by two diametrically opposed ideologies about what America represents. One  party I will call ‘Woke;’ the other, ‘Trumpy.’

But this column is not about politics. It’s about an elementary force underlying our political food fight: Religion. And by that, I mean religion in the broadest sense: a belief in something bigger than the individual. As social animals, it is hardwired in us: we have a built-in need to feel a sense of belonging and attachment.

This connection has long been known. Over one hundred  years ago, Abraham Kuyper, a theologian and prime minister of the Netherlands, argued that all strongly held ideologies were really about religion. As our country has become more secular, our political parties have replaced the church because humans can not exist without some ultimate loyalty.^⁠1

Much has been written recently documenting how our basic human needs are not just physical. As Mary Worthen tells us in the NYT, we have “spiritual cravings; a hunger for a sense of control over our destinies and reassurance that we’re on the side of good againt evil.”

And, without doubt, Americans exhibit more religious  zeal than most countries. “It’s rare to hear someone accused of being un-Swedish or un-British—but un-American is a common slur, slung by both left and right against the other.”^⁠2   It’s religiously charged like being accused of  heresy.

Our salvation –whether we are ‘Woke’ or ‘Trumpy,’– is to explore beneath the gridlock of our political food fights to find what we really need: an authentic sense of belonging.

And where do we find it? With our families who love and nurture us,  providing us with a true sense of belonging. And beyond that, we yearn to be embraced by our nation, our extended family, to give our life existential meaning. As with our families, we need to do whatever it takes to preserve our country and make it better. 

But it’s never easy. We have to compromise and negotiate in order to move on together toward the common good: No country, like any family, can long survive if individual members insist on complete freedom, to do whatever they want. 

That’s who we really want to worship and love: our family and our country – not our political parties who tend to be mean-spirited, often in it only for themselves and the corporate lobbyists who now infest our capital.

Luckily, President Biden is hip to this, using religious themes to talk about national unity. Worthen cites examples like, “on Memorial Day, he described the ongoing battle for the ‘soul of America,’ a conflict between ‘our worst instincts — which we’ve seen of late — and our better angels. Between ‘Me first’ and ‘We the people.’ In January, in his Inaugural Address, he quoted St. Augustine: “A people was a multitude defined by the common objects of their love.”^⁠3

Worthen, a historian, emphasizes the importance of taking wise counsel from those who came before us, like St. Augustine, who wrote ‘The City of God’ in the early 5^th century. In it, he “laments the fate of a people who drift from heeding their better angels to obeying their inner demons — like citizens of the Roman Empire, who “declined into… seditions and then to social and civil wars, and so burst asunder or rotted off the bond of concord in which the health of a people consists.”^⁠4

George Santayana’s famous quote takes on a new urgency today: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

xxx

¹ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/america-politics-religion/618072/

² Ibid.

³ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/opinion/god-religion-politics-partisanship.html?campaign_id=2&emc=edit_th_20210612&instance_id=32878&nl=todaysheadlines®i_id=30753738&segment_id=60543&user_id=273ae8c1ede4fde7d59a2b0627accb92

⁴ Ibid.