When the World is Too Much With Us

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. John 12:31-33 - KJV

Being a carbon-based bipedal organism with a comparatively short life span has its drawbacks. At birth we are helpless, red-faced, squawking bundles of potential—if we can live long enough to gain a foothold on this third rock from the sun. Most other mammal babies get up and walk within minutes of hitting the ground—we take years. We can't see as keenly as eagles, trot as fast as horses, climb as good as monkeys, or swim like dolphins. Almost everything we've done to overcome these physical deficiencies are through extensions—mechanical devices that give us reach, sharpen our hearing, project our voices, and peel back surfaces to see underneath and beyond. There has to be some payoff for all this vulnerability, and there is—we have imaginations. 

The imagination can lift us out of our everyday reality into another place, even another time. There is no doubt that a vibrant imagination is necessary for a child to try out scenarios, play with images and ideas, and stretch the mind in the process. Somewhere I've read that day-dreaming is part of mental exercise, as important as toughening the muscles and building endurance. 

Our imaginations seem to specialize. For example, architects can visualize their buildings in three dimensions while most of us can’t “see” the structure until it’s built, a disadvantage that is not trifling. Others can spin stories, bring clay to life under their fingers, or discover the beauty in the symmetry of equations. I marvel at those who can leap from intuition to concept to theory like a ninja running up a wall. At times I write like a man trying to thread a needle behind his back: it can be done but it takes a great deal of time and bloodletting is to be expected.  

Blessedly, one form of expression can be triggered by another. When I was a journalism student struggling for a lead to a story I’d often take a break, get myself down to the college library, and spend some time with Communication Arts, a magazine that features some of the best art and design in the country. Something about absorbing all that visual creativity and the possibility of wonder just over the page usually set me free to write my version of the truth. 

So too in my spiritual landscape I’ve found that seeing through another’s creative vision often gives me new eyes to see what was there all along. Through the years I’ve found artists who give me a place to stand and thus change my understanding. Chagall is one, Roualt is another, Picasso, Rothko, Cezanne, Paul Klee—and Dali. One painting of his in particular has been a kind of talisman for me, the function of which is to bring me to a humbling perception of humanity. 

Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951) was based on a drawing by a 16th century monk named St. John of the Cross. Christ hangs suspended on the cross above the world, unbloodied, without nails or wounds. The observer looks down at the top of Christ’s bowed head and simultaneously at a landscape of fisherman and boats. The effect is disconcerting at first as we plunge down vertically past the Christ and immediately level off to a horizontal plane. Dali traced inspiration for the extreme angle back to a dream he had, the vision of which appeared to him in color as the cosmic Christ. The painting was purchased in the early 50s by the Glasgow Corporation for 8, 200 pounds sterling, considered quite extravagant at the time. In 1961 a visitor heaved a brick through the canvas, incensed apparently by the angle that looked down upon Christ instead of up. The painting was restored and hangs in the Kelingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, the curators having stoutly resisted an offer of $127 million by the Spanish government. 

I don’t find the lack of blood or nails theologically upsetting. I know how Jesus suffered, and I don’t need Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ to drive the message home. In Dali’s painting Christ is still on the cross, his sinews twisting, his head bowed, the long shadow of one arm stretching ominously across the open space of the horizontal beam. 

It’s the angle I’m interested in. We see Christ from God’s point of view; His Son, His beloved Son, eternally hanging there above the world, floating in silent and profound dignity, magnificent in death. Down below, the fishermen, oblivious to the Light of the World above them, draw their boat up on the shore. One is standing at the stern in water up to his knees while his companion on the shore drags out the nets to dry. They seem indecisive or perhaps just tired. If they caught any fish we’re not seeing the evidence. They may be heading home, weary from work, wondering how long they can survive without a catch. 

When we see the Christ on the cross from the traditional angle looking upward it provokes our pity. The usual configuration is Mary, weeping on her knees or collapsing into the arms of John, the disciple who stayed to the end. Occasionally, we’ll see John the Baptist, a lamb, and several other well-dressed figures, usually the ones who commissioned the painting and paid the bill. We feel for Mary, her heart torn from her, and for John, whose duty to care for his Lord’s mother overrides his anxiety at being seen as one of the co-conspirators. 

But from the angle that Dali provides we can sense God’s compassion for the world. When the world is too much with us, when we find ourselves loathing humanity, when we feel, with shame, our complicity in the wickedness and suffering of this age, we can be lifted up, free and clear, to look down through Christ and see our tired world from a new perspective—one that through imagination wounds and heals.  

Am I Mything Something?

A mythology is a culture's device for interpreting its reality and acting on it. But what if the reality changes and the mythology does not? — Robert Reich, Tales of a New America

Someone once said—it may have been Joseph Campbell—that there are only six stories in human experience and we keep retelling them with infinite variations. To follow the trail of these stories back to their primal plot lines is like retracing our DNA back through the millenia to what geneticist Bryan Sykes has called the first mothers, the Seven Daughters of Eve.

We're constantly looking for patterns in the restless flow of time. We tell stories to make order out of chaos, to build meaning where there are simply isolated facts and events untethered to a cultural context. Robert Reich says every culture has its definitive parables and the ones America has lived by are four: they are The Mob at the Gates, The Triumphant Individual, The Benevolent Community, and The Rot at the Top. While they are situated in different histories and facts, they interpret and explain reality, they give us a place to stand as individuals and as a people, and they bring coherence to our experience.

Our political rhetoric, says Reich, is not so much pragmatic as prophetic. Our politicians, aided and abetted by the press—which is simultaneously fawning and recalcitrant—speak in tones both messianic and evangelical. We are the land of destiny, the hope of the world, the shining city set on a hill. In the parlance of Christianity, America is the kingdom that is and is yet to come. In its cruder forms all that destiny is reduced to a bumper sticker we used to see in the 60s: America—Love it or Leave it.

One story that has transfixed the press on both sides of the Atlantic is that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (aka DSK), the former head of the International Monetary Fund, forced to resign because of his brutal sexual assault upon a hotel housekeeper in his penthouse suite at the Sofitel New York. Headlines screamed his guilt, the Manhattan District Attorney confidently locked up the case, and a flood of photos showed the accused, grim-faced and dispirited, headed for Rikers Island for a sleepover. It was a classic story of Rot at the Top in which a wealthy, powerful, and arrogant man runs amok and expects to get away with it. The trajectory was predictable, having been played out numerous times in recent years, with resulting profits and losses calculated not only in dollars but in morality lessons. The rich and powerful overstep the bounds, as is their nature, and get caught. They are brought low (remember Martha Stewart and Michael Milken?), suffer the shame and loss they so richly deserve, and later are returned to grace and wealth in a triumphant second act. Well, not every time, but often enough that we were not surprised when they did their time and reemerged on Larry King or Oprah. We loathed them and admired them, despising their crassness and greed while assuming they couldn't be all bad, seeing as how they had worked hard and prospered against the odds. That feral drive to succeed, corrupted though it was, could also be seen as Just the Way Things Are.

In a stunning reversal of fortune, prosecutors in the DSK case announced that the prime witness, the victim, the maid who had been forced into unspeakable sexual acts by this French predator, was a woman of no virtue, a liar and a cheat who had conned her way into the camp with a baseless story of gang rape in a far-off country and with suspicious connections to genuine low-lifes and criminals. Now the tide surges the other direction and we see the Mob at the Gates, desperate, dangerous foreigners of no breeding or class, who will do anything to get into this country and enjoy the benefits reserved for the hard-working American people. DSK, released from house arrest, gets his electronic ball-and-chain removed, gets his $1 million bail money back, and permits himself the barest hint of a smile as he steps outside for the first time in weeks. Will he be restored to his former glory? Ah, but someone else has taken his job, a woman all parties agree will restore the tarnished image of the IMF. And thus DSK is free to pursue his destiny and to quite possibly become the head of France, Inc. someday soon. The balance is restored, the mighty are back on top, and the lowly get what they deserve.

But the story is most assuredly not over, though media attention will no doubt turn its restless gaze elsewhere very soon. In a binary world of black and white, rich and poor, powerful and weak, DSK's circle will see class and power vindicated while others will smell a conspiracy of the first rank. How could it be otherwise when our cultural drug of choice seems to be the "us and them" dichotomy? That perspective turns issues of justice into entertainment. The struggle for truth gets lost in the call-'em-as-we-see-'em political posturing and the only ones who win are the lawyers and the media moguls. Such a story seems to define America at its basest level these days.

On this 4th of July at countless parades, barbecues, and political rallies, America and "what it stands for" will be invoked. Speakers will vilify the opposition and deify their own. There will be vague but inspiring references to the Founding Fathers and the dust bunnies of popular history will be yanked out from under the bed. Lines will be drawn, ultimatums delivered, much air will be heated, and the bands will play. The comforting illusion of a world in which we "win" and current enemies, domestic and foreign, "lose," will play out as the sun sets and the fireworks begin.

And yet, the wonderful thing about America, the characteristic that offers us the best hope in these sharply divisive times, is the willingness to try something new. The new for us would be the finding of stories which enlarge the boundaries of "us" and which quietly dissolve the brittle ramparts of our fearful individualism. The challenge, says Reich, "is to create settings in which obligation and trust can take root, supported by stories that focus our attention on discovering possibilities for joint gain and avoiding the likelihood of mutual loss." So perhaps we could rediscover an old story—E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one)—and add to it something new: "We're one, but we're not the same."

Imagine

There is no greater social evil than religion. It is the cancer in the body of humanity. Human credulity and superstition, and the need for comforting fables, will never be extirpated, so religion will always exist, at least among the uneducated. — A. C. Grayling, The Reason of Things

These words, from one of England's foremost philosophers and social critics, are not unusual in these days of the revival of public atheism from the likes of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. Grayling, author of over twenty books, is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and writes a regular column for the Times. A frequent and prominent theme in his essays and newspaper articles is the imminent demise of organized religion. In an article from 2006 he countered a claim that religion was experiencing a resurgence by asserting that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and American evangelicalism pointed to religion in its death throes.  In a transcript of a broadcast for the Australian Broadcast Corporation in 2010 (http://www.acgrayling.com/) he continued the theme by commenting that religious adherents are feeling anxious and on the defensive and are responding by turning up the volume. He pointed to a recent Pew Forum "Landscape Survey" of American religion (http://religions.pewforum.org/) which finds that mainstream Protestant adherents are aging and that the religiously unaffiliated young have doubled their percentage to 16 percent. One finding from the Pew Report is that Americans are restless, constantly on the move from one religion or religious body to the next. This mobility—and the number of choices available—makes for a fiercely competitive marketplace for American religions. Grayling's belief is that religion will lose its influence but not its life. There are always enough credulous morons around to keep the body just this side of clinically dead.

It's an interesting argument that Grayling and others make: the sheer volume of shouted messages in the public square means that the institution is on the way out. If that were true we could look for an early death for the Tea Party, Wall Street money manipulators, all celebrities and politicians who have affairs, the effects of globalization, those who oppose global warming, and Lady Gaga. Grayling and the Terrible Triumvirate have some legitimate complaints about religion, foremost among them the violence religions have perpetrated on the world for centuries. Behind their outrage and scorn one can hear longing for the believers to live up to their claims to have the truth that will set us free. John Lennon called us to "Imagine there's no heaven," and "no religion too." He envisioned a world free of religion as one in which people lived in peace, unencumbered by the fear of hell or the lure of heaven. I hear all this and I have to agree. . . . and I am almost persuaded. Almost.

There's a lot to be said for Religion (with a capital R). It brings out not only the worst in humans but the best. It has sustained people through the worst kinds of torture, often at the hands of those who claim to be fighting under the banner of Christ, and it has provided care and compassion to those who would have done away with it if they'd had the strength. It has given millions a deeper purpose in life, taught them to respect others, and has provided meaning in the face of chaos.

In conversations and class discussions these days people are sometimes careful to distinguish between "religion" and "spirituality," with the advantage always given to the latter. While there are way too many definitions of religion, "spirituality" is a term that seems as vaporous as the mists of dawn. We know it's there but it has a habit of disappearing when the light hits it. The distinction between the two seems to be in the form, if not the function. Religion is public, institutional, structured, powerful—and therefore corrupted—inhibiting, corrosive, and ultimately disillusioning. Spirituality, on the other hand, is private, personal, unstructured, informal, intuitive, and pure. The fact that American hard-core individualists sometimes fill up that cup with a heady brew of astrology, self-help remedies, a dash of yoga, a dollop of  self-congratulation, and topped off with a vow above all to be good to themselves, does not invalidate spirituality. Some of this is verbal ping-pong but a lot of the uncertainty might also point to a gradual evolution toward a kind of secular spirituality.

Consider William James' definition of religion, offered up in his celebrated Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion and published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience:

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. 

The "divine," James makes clear, is broadly interpreted. "The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest." James is not interested in debating the ontological existence of God at this point; he is much more interested in calling up the vast array of human experiences of the divine and the effect such experiences have on a person. He views religion, generously speaking, as something that ought to make a difference in a person's life, enough that the encounter with the divine will be something that cannot be mistaken for a momentary spike in giddiness or a desire to rule the universe. Among the many variations on the theme that James plays in the lectures, he keeps coming back to a single note of 'solemn joy,' the kind that rides out the storm, looks the Devil in the eye, and isn't swayed by success or failure.

James thought this primal experience of the divine, personal and holy though it was, was the seed from which sprang the secondary plants of institutional religion and their structures in society. The personal preceded the public and the public embodied the personal.

Perhaps spirituality is that desire to stand joyously before God, immersing oneself in the experience of grace, eyes wide open, heart aflame, honest for once and not ashamed to admit one's need. This is necessarily a solitary moment, but it can lead to community. Erasmus wryly noted that, "True piety, which flourishes only when the spirit spontaneously strives to grow in charity, withers when the spirit sluggishly reposes in external ceremonies chosen for it by others."

There's no reason to baptize Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and Grayling as anonymous Christians. They deserve more respect than that. Such fierce striving for understanding, clarity, and honesty is rarely seen today and is often lamentably absent from those of us who call ourselves Christians. While a fanatic of any stripe can rarely admit to being wrong, a genuine seeker for truth can readily do so because what matters most is being honest with oneself. The Countess, in Christopher Fry's play, The Dark is Light Enough says:

Let us say
We are all confused, incomprehensible,
Dangerous, contemptible, corrupt
And in that condition pass the evening
Thankfully and well. In our plain defects
We already know the brotherhood of man.

So this is the thing I wish to imagine, no matter how horrific, contemptible, graceless or cowardly all forms of religion may at times appear, and no matter how resolutely any human may spurn the representations of the divine, what matters most is that any one of us, standing alone before the cosmos, waiting for the light to change on a feverishly hot August afternoon, might say simply and clearly, 'Yes!' to the Truth within.

I'm Already Praying

Whenever this dark begins to fall
Whenever I'm vulnerable and small
Whenever I feel like I could die
Whenever I'm holding back the tears that I cry
Whenever I say your name, whenever I call to mind
your face
I'm already praying — Sting, Whenever I Call Your Name

I have never found it easy to pray as an adult. And it's not that I don't believe I'm not heard. . . I'll rephrase that: I do believe that I'm heard when I pray; it's just that I don't want to be heard by others when I pray. I've sat through too many prayers that were announcements of this event or that coming up, of appeals for money to refurbish the lobby, tuck in reserves for the dry spells of giving, for the new carpet, for the upcoming evangelistic series, for campmeeting, for this radio ministry and that one, and inevitably, "for all those sitting here tonight who are resisting the sweet call of the Holy Spirit to come forward and surrender all to Jesus."

While I do not doubt the sincerity of those who utter such prayers, I nevertheless am not moved by them. If we need to rally round and give for our causes, just tell me and I'll do what I can. If you want me to come to the event on the 15th, print it in the bulletin.  And if you want me to surrender all, I did that years ago and I continue to re-enlist on a daily basis. But we are members of a community of faith, one that opens its arms to all those on the Way, no matter what stage of the journey they are on. So I do not begrudge the offer of salvation to anyone, but I will also politely duck the mighty thunderbolt of guilt hurled by the speaker of the hour. You might call it the jujitsu of faith.

In like manner, I resisted thinly-veiled orders to begin every class I taught with prayer. I understand the intention behind it, I think. It springs from a need to assure the constituents that their college is visibly—and audibly—"religious." There were occasions when I led a class in prayer: when a student was gravely ill, when it seemed we needed assurance or when a tragedy of some magnitude fell upon us all, such as 9/11. Those are the times when a community is walking blind with hands outstretched in the dark, reaching for something familiar. Those are times when the prayers come forth like songs we are hearing for the first time as we sing them. They are not "vain repetitions," they are not sanctified boilerplate nor are they cleverly crafted phrases to close the deal. I think they are God talking to Godself so that we might hear.

In the time-honored tradition of giving a song multiple meanings I have lifted Sting's words off his Sacred Love album, a psalter of songs written as the US and Britain were firing up their weapons of mass destruction, a time of a breathless tightness in the throat before the lightening strikes. They speak for me when all I can do is shake my head mutely, as does Paul, the former terrorist, who stands in all humility whispering that he does not know how to pray but he knows the Spirit hears his groanings and turns them into language that rings through heaven. I have also found comfort in this quote from Ladislaus Boros who says,

As to prayer, people today find it almost impossible to pray. When they shrink from praying, I would say that they are not trying to shrink from God but from themselves in their superficiality, from the hollowness of their own souls. We must make these people understand that waiting in the presence of God, simply being silent in his presence—that is prayer. It is even the deepest thing that one torn apart inside can do in the presence of God. Suffering under the inward incapacity to pray is already prayer.

 That would be me, no question. After the thunder and lightening, the earthquake, wind and fire, there is a voice so deep that it resonates in our bones, not in our ears. In a time when lovers quarrel up and down the bandwidth while standing in a checkout line, when the words fall short of the music, when the surreptitious chirp of a tweet can transfix the fooling class, one longs for a moment of silence. But if silence is no longer golden, a commodity in short supply, we can still find it alone within the crowd, for just a moment—that's all we need. Thus, from moment to moment we learn to pray without ceasing.

Our Buried Life

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go. — Matthew Arnold, The Buried Life

As an only child, raised by grandparents, I lived in a household filled with books, relative calm, and hours of solitude. There were neighbors with children my age and older, no lack of friendship and camaraderie; indeed, I was the adopted little brother of several families. But running to make it for supper on time after spending the day roaming the hills and vineyards near our home with friends, I had the calm assurance of time by myself before sleep. Time to read, to daydream, to imagine, to question, to wade into the stream of our collective memory in solitude but not alone.

I don't remember being lonely. Memory, of course, drops out the also-rans, the near misses, the close seconds, and often replays only the beginnings and endings, the most intense jolts on the emotional Richter scale. I do remember wondering who I was, where I had come from, and if I would be myself had I been born to other parents. Our household was quiet: my British and Canadian grandparents rarely raised their voices and our mealtime conversations were danced out on a metaphorical carpet of manners, not stomped out on a stage of boisterousness. But I often sat in the midst of a swirling tornado of banter, arguments, boasts, bad jokes, insults and adolescent belching contests at my friends' house, where I was not so much a guest as another sibling separated at birth. Being there was a heady mix of belonging and blame: I was always welcomed with a hug from the womenfolk but not spared in the judgement when my friend and I committed our misdemeanors. But at the end of the day, gently shooed out the door toward home, I could be glad for the friendship without envying the tumult.

So I grew, hoping to be in favor with both God and man, but wordlessly realizing I'd always be just beyond the edges of the crowd. On my bedroom wall during high school was a poster that read: "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away"— the closing words of Walden by Thoreau. Whether that shaped my outlook or reflected it I can't be sure, but I know that it is more or less a faithful transcript of my life. Never the heroic type, I have often found myself, nonetheless, on a different path than those around me, not from sheer cussedness, but because I could not do otherwise and know myself. "What we have to be is who we are," says Thomas Merton. His words are to me so completely true that I hesitate to bring them up because similar sentiments have been marketed, advertised, packaged, and sold in the bazaar that is American self-indulgence since the 60s. Yet, as long as there is a context with integrity the imitations are annoying but not fatal.

How is it that an introvert like myself gravitates to the classroom? That I could find a deep satisfaction alone on a country road at night while hitchhiking to Scotland during my college years? That in the midst of a crowd, touching those I love, I can feel alone but not lonely? That there is in me the activist who is suspicious of movements, the pilgrim who resists joining the pilgrimage, the sinner who will not stand for "the call," the observer who nevertheless believes deeply in community? These contradictions pull and tug at us, they wrench us off our feet at times, fill us with vertigo and ultimately define us. It would be so much easier to simply react without reflection.

"The world is too much with us," lamented Wordsworth. "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers/Little we see in Nature that is ours. . . ." Although I do not deify Nature I know that we are deeply estranged from it, even at war with it, and that our very survival on this earth demands that we learn our place. I come from a religious tradition that asks for a lifelong commitment of service to a world which could end tomorrow. Although not incompatible, those two beliefs are frequently at odds. Do we settle down and build for tomorrow, all the while believing that the Lord will come 'like a thief in the night' and that this world will end in fire? How to love the world and leave it?

I find words of wisdom in Thomas Merton's reflections on solitude. A Trappist monk devoted to contemplation, he lived on the blade-edge of activism within a Catholicism that seemed to him to sanction the mad race to nuclear arms. A man who longed for silence and solitude, he kept writing books that brought him world-wide attention. Having taken vows of obedience, he chafed under the rule of superiors who did not understand him. Struggling with ego and pride, he prayed for humility. He was, like all of us, a complicated being, yet he treasured simplicity. One who had stepped back from the world he continued to engage it, taking up the cross of love for the world though it cost him dearly.

"Keep your eyes clean and your ears quiet and your mind serene," he advised. "Breathe God's air. Work, if you can, under His sky. But if you have to live in a city and work among machines and ride in the subways and eat in a place where the radio makes you deaf with spurious news and where the food destroys your life and the sentiments of those around you poison your heart with boredom, do not be impatient, but accept it as the love of God and as a seed of solitude planted in your soul. If you are appalled by those things, you will keep your appetite for the healing silence of recollection. But meanwhile—keep your sense of compassion for the men who have forgotten the very concept of solitude. You, at least, know that it exists, and that it is the source of peace and joy. You can still hope for such joy. They do not even hope for it any more (Seeds, 66-67)."

Years ago, in the backwash of the Vietnam War and the bitterness of the end of the 60s, Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang, "Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice but to carry on." They were right, but we can do more than just endure. Matthew Arnold, in The Buried Life, thought we might find the answer to who we are in the love of another. There was a chance, he surmised, that we could dodge "the thousand nothings of the hour," that "When our world-deafened ear/Is by the tones of a loved voice, caress'd—/A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast/And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again." It is just possible, he believes, that this harried lover can find a lull in our hot race of life. And then in calmness "he thinks he knows/The hills where his life rose/And the sea where it goes." Arnold finds a way to live in the world through love for another; Merton finds it in love for God and the world. I suspect they are both right.

Our Fathers, Ourselves . . .

Let him be whomever you wish. Like a fluttering candle
into a stormlamp, I place myself there inside him.
A glow becomes peaceful. May death
more easily find its way. — Rainier Maria Rilke

What do we know of our fathers? They seem, through a child's eyes, almost as gods, striding purposefully through the world, shouldering aside doubt and uncertainty, magical in their strength, bending down from their great heights to lift us up higher than we could reach, but less than we imagined. At times, later, we think we've outgrown them, that perhaps the large hand on the bicycle we pedaled for the first time alone, that dropped away without us noticing, is not needed anymore. And still later, when we become adults, we may see them as persons, men in their own right, with admirable qualities, homely flaws, and modest hopes.

My father and I were different expressions of the same English-Canadian stock. In fact, we were raised by the same people, his parents, my grandparents. For reasons which do not need explanation for this story, I was taken in by my grandparents three years after my birth and after moving between families and countries and loving intentions until at last I arrived on their doorstep, bewildered but grateful, embraced and welcomed as a second son. I remained—with times away in England—until I graduated from college and left their home in Northern California.

My father left home early, at 18 or maybe 19, as near as I have understood, hitchhiking out of a small college town in Alberta where both his parents were teachers and he was a campus kid. Perhaps the vice-like grip of loving concern in a church community grew unbearable—there were hints of a mistake on his part and harsh judgments rendered—but in any case he lit out for the world. It broke my grandmother's heart and brought a sadness to my grandfather's eyes.

He left, I stayed. He left the church, I am still in it. He became an engineer, thinking through his hands, whip-smart, a man of few words. I became a teacher, given to many words, uneasy around math and at home in the humanities. He was twenty when I was born; I was thirty-five when my son was born. He found his way through the world without a college diploma but helped to develop some of the most intricate technology of the computer age. I couldn't get enough of studying and resolutely worked my way through several degrees. He worked for IBM for many years; my first real computer was a Mac and I have never departed from the Apple orchard.

Thus, when he passed away this week, after a long struggle with brain cancer, I was at a loss to know what to do. I cannot think of another way to put it except to say that my emotions were waiting at the door for permission from my rational nature to enter and be at home. It is typical to feel numb after such a loss and yet, on the contrary, I felt as if my senses were sharpened and enlivened. I saw myself, a man who had lost his father, and I wondered what made that man different from the one who had received the news hours before. The voice of a friend, tender with concern, moved me to tears; as I put down the cell phone it occurred to me that I had not wept until then. Was I moved to tears because another shared my grief? Or was it rather that his care for me called the leviathan Sorrow up from the depths? Was it self-pity I was feeling—see the poor fellow with the tears welling up in his eyes—or pity for my father who suffered in ways that all humans dread but must endure to the end?

Perhaps because I did not live with him as a child and had infrequent but vivid encounters with him as an adult, I lacked the emotional notation for that musical score—I would have to improvise. I was to begin teaching a course that evening at a nearby university, but I canceled. I was wary, not at all sure I wouldn't be koshed from behind by a furtive emotion. This will be a process, so people assured me, and I will emerge from this experience a changed man. That's a fairly safe assumption since most of what we experience in life changes us.

The best counsel came from my sister, a person wise beyond her years and the one who guided her mother through the dark wood of my father's approaching night. She called this experience a 'sacred moment,' a 'luminous experience,' one to be opened by and lived through with all senses alert. I was reminded of Pascal's comment, "The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of," and realized that I had been granted a rare privilege: to view my father first, as a man whom I loved and admired, and secondly, as my father. Whatever our fathers are to us they are always and simply themselves, a glory as mystifying as it is obvious. Tonight, walking home with a wisp of summer breeze, I saw the evening star: brilliant, benevolent, constant—and I was glad.

Good Work or Good Money?

When people ask for education they normally mean something more than mere training, something more than mere knowledge of facts, and something more than mere diversion. . . . I think what they are really looking for is ideas that would make the world, and their own lives, intelligible to them. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

A report published in the Washington Post recently, confirmed that engineering graduates stand to earn the most over the course of a lifetime, and those in education, psychology, and social work will earn the least. Just in time for graduation, the article in the Post cannot be reassuring to those parents whose children find themselves, through temperament and proclivity, drawn to the social sciences and humanities, where, the study tells us, they will flounder in the shallow end of the monetary pool while their smarter and more ambitious colleagues frolic in the deep waters of financial gain.  This is not news, since full professors in the humanities on many research campuses make thousands of dollars less than engineering professors of a lower rank.

What may be of more interest to some is the underlying assumption, rarely questioned, that the sole value of an education is the "return on investment," as one financial advisor to students puts it. Others state the case even more bluntly. The Post article quotes a poet and professor at Florida International University, Campbell McGrath, as saying "You are making a really weird decision if you decide to send your kids off to study philosophy. It would be a better world if we all studied the humanities. But it's not a good dollars-and-cents decision." The article quotes Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.org, who says, "Even in 17-year-olds, we're seeing emphasis on maximizing returns on investment—that is, getting trained in areas that pay better."

In a recent public speaking course that I taught, the final project was a group panel discussion. One group chose to present their individual majors and why a college education was the best way to assure achieving one's goals. Each one related with enthusiasm why they had chosen that profession—the reasons invariably began with the salary range possible—until the last student spoke. He was going into elementary education, he said, and mentioned as an aside that it wasn't for the money. He had worked as a teaching aide in his mother's 6th grade classroom for two years and he knew where his talents and interests lay. He could recall an influential teacher who had changed his life and he wanted to be that kind of teacher for other children. The others on the panel and those in the audience responded to the passion in his presentation much as dinner guests at a formal party would to someone who wondered what to do with all the cutlery at his place setting.

As someone who chose two fields of study—philosophy and communications—that apparently consign me to penury all the days of my life, I remain unrepentant. Given the choice I would do it all again, except I would study modern languages harder and I would take a minor in economics. Like Kurt Vonnegut, who admonished students in the 60s to keep the ROTC on their campuses so that they could understand the militaristic way of thinking, more of us who wallow in the humanities need to understand the monetary mindset. And there is no denying that American education, American politics, American culture, and to an alarming degree, American religion, is all about money. We speak in the metaphors of finance, we negotiate relationships through cost-benefit analyses, and we view our entertainments, our arts, and our sports through the narrowed eyes of the calculating investor. That's probably not going to change, but what we could hope is that we come to see the importance of good work over lots of money.

Studs Terkel once wrote that of the hundreds of people he interviewed for his book, Working (1972), the majority of them hated what they did for a living. Not, "were uncomfortable" or "disliked" or "did not prefer" what they worked at, but "hated." Many of these were people whose salaries were substantial, many of them barely made a living wage. The money is not really the issue, just as this study worked up by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce doesn't mean much either. Here's an endless loop: With the cost of education rising almost faster than any other marker on the index, it's not hard to see that the ability to pay back school loans faster upon graduation is one of the main reasons to get an education for a profession that pays well. . . so that one can pay back the loans that provided the education for the well-paying job . . . ad infinitum.

"All traditional philosophy is an attempt to create an orderly system of ideas by which to live and to interpret the world," said Fritz Schumacher in his groundbreaking book, Small is Beautiful(1973). But philosophy is too important to leave it up to the professional philosophers, which is why the humanities—and philosophy—are still needed in this barren and constricted world of profits and cost-effectiveness. The world of science, of engineering, of information technology, is professionally neutral on questions of value. Give them a problem that can be quantified, measured, and calculated and chances are it will be solved, profitably and responsibly. And if it can't be solved today we know that it will be solved some day. There's nothing that can't be fixed with more of what we needed in the first place. Or so the conventional wisdom would have us believe. The essence of education, suggests Schumacher, "is the transmission of values, but values do not help us to pick our way through life unless they have become our own, a part, so to say, of our mental make-up."

The point is not to create a wider mine-field between the Two Cultures, but to shift the whole focus away from the money to the meaning. 'Know-how', the stuff of science and engineering, is necessary, admits Schumacher. But 'know-why' is even more important, and that's the area of the low-paying professions.  " 'Know-how' is no more a culture than a piano is music," says Schumacher. "Can education help us finish the sentence, to turn the potentiality into a reality to the benefit of man?"

Yes, it can, provided we, the American people, realize that our fortune lies not in constant consumption but in work that satisfies, restores, and renews. The question is raised, says Schumacher, "How do we prepare young people for the future world of work?" He is unequivocal: we have to teach them to distinguish between good work and bad work and "encourage them not to accept the latter. . . . They should be taught that work is the joy of life and is needed for our development, but that meaningless work is an abomination (Good Work, 1979)."

We can have no quarrel at all with those who choose a profession that happens to pay well. But surely the main reason to spend most of your life at work is because it somehow fulfills your deepest sense of who you are and what you can do for good in this world. How many college grads realize about halfway through their first week on the job that this is their life now? If you come to hate your job, the soulless, bitter minutiae of it seeping into your pores every day, your bi-weekly check, docked for taxes, benefits, school loans, and the cost of living, is small recompense.

"The good that I would do, I do not," says Paul in Romans. What we do should be the result of what we are, not the other way around.