The fear, the weight of the new reality we live in, sits heavy in my pocket. It's the rubble of hillsides and homes that have been blown up by the enemy. The Enemy, which we rush fast to name and sentence to death.
It isn't fear as much as it is despair that drowns us, I think. The feeling of hopelessness, complete loss of control and peace down deep, when the bits of good seem darkly overshadowed by the world's cruelty, even evil, as some call it. We shudder at the hatred we see in the headlines. And we see so many headlines. Status updates. Tweets. The events of the day, the very cold, desperate, hard facts of life like rubble in pockets cause us to drag our feet, sink into despair, raise a skeptical eyebrow at the thought of our children's children living peaceful or even safe lives.
If the Enemy rightly named is anger, or hatred, which I believe it is, then threatening this hatred is not the answer but will only make it swell with more hate- kill its leaders and many will become martyrs. Terrorists love their truth as much as I love mine. Reasons have been offered for this by people wiser and more articulate than I, and I look to their words as I take up my hay fork and turn all this dirt, all this waste over and over again in my head and my heart, turning as an act of faith that eventually the trash will once again become usable earth, something that holds the possibility of life. This is me, turning my compost of sorts.
I look to Wendell Berry, who I've recently discovered to be a prophet for this generation. He wisely says "To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it." He has taught me of the beauty, the sacred and subversive act of farming. Hands to earth. Hard labor. Dependence on sun and rain and community. Tending the garden as prayer.
I look to Madeleine L'Engle, as I have for more than a decade, because it pulls me up and out of despair. She taught me that we have strayed far from the land, from story, from imagination and fantasy, and it is our loss. She challenges me, invites me, even, to stop dividing all of life into the categories of good and evil and start seeing my choices and my reactions as either creative or destructive, as promoting life or promoting death.
I look also to writers like Annie Dillard, whose quote recently surfaced: "Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." We do have the option of seeing the beauty instead of the chaos. It is not completely out of our control.
And that all leads me this week to Barbara Kingsolver, a story-teller I've only begun to notice, quite frankly. I'm in awe of her grace that pours onto the pages, whether in story or essay. She says "God is frightful, God is great--you pick. I choose this: God is in the details, the completely unnecessary miracles sometimes tossed up as stars to guide us." Take heart, she says to me.
But back to Syria and this devastating predicament at hand. Kingsolver offered me a wonderful parable I need to share. Not her own, but the Greeks' understanding of their enemy, and of our enemy today, because, in fact, while something new is upon us, nothing is ever really new.
The story of Jason and the Argonauts is a favorite tale of heroic adversity. The enemy, the dragon, was slain and fell to the soil. Each of its teeth grew into a new enemy, and Jason finally couldn't fight his way out. Kingsolver says, 'It took a woman who loved him, Medea, who whispered into his ear a simple truth: Hatred dies only when turned on itself. This force could not be extinguished by the sword, she told him; only a clever psychological strategy could vanquish it. Jason took her advice, throwing a rock cryptically and inciting an internal riot of rock throwing in which the dragon's-tooth warriors destroyed one another. Later on, encountering another dragon, Medea again stops Jason from drawing his sword with a gentle hand on his arm. This time, rather than allowing a new field of hatred to be sown and reaped, she moved quietly to the mouth of the sleeping dragon and gave it an elixir of contentment so it would remain asleep as she and her lover passed by.'
"It would require the deepest possible shift of our hearts to live in this world of fundamental animosity and devote ourselves not to the escalating exertion to kill, but rather to lulling animosity to sleep. Modern humanity may not be up to the challenge. Modern humanity may not have a choice," Kingsolver writes. "We are alive in a fearsome time and we have been given new things to fear. We've been delivered huge blows but also huge opportunities to reinforce or reinvent our will, depending on where we look for honor and how we name our enemies. The easiest thing is to think of returning the blows. But there are other things we must think about as well, other dangers we face. A careless way of sauntering across the earth and breaking open its treasures, a terrible dependency on sucking out the world's best juices for ourselves- these may also be our enemies. The changes we dread most may contain our salvation. And the stinging truth that we aren't entirely loved for our ways in this world? This thing could eat us up or save us. We are in no position yet to declare the moral of our story."
Despair says the world will always be this way, bent toward selfishness, love of power and force and ultimately sowing anger. Despair clutches the rubble in our pockets in case we need to fight back. Despair concedes that you and I have no real control over our future, or our children's future, or the future of those families we don't know around the planet we share.
But hope says it doesn't have to stay this way, that there are true and good victories in every generation and every day, however seemingly small the wonder. Hope takes imagination and puts the dragon to sleep. It turns the rubble into art, and weapons into farm tools. Like Jesus said, there is another way.
So I will do what I can to steer my heart away from despair. I will be honest with my children about war and honest with them about hope of our country living better, not stronger, because there is no bomb big enough to eradicate hate. I will turn the compost until I can plant seeds of life in it, and with hard work those plants will sustain us. My children will learn about miracles by watching flowers bloom and by pulling carrots out of dirt. We will seek love and compassion and humility and bring bits of heaven to this earth.
Take heart.
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