Phillip Berry | Orient Yourself

What might a 720-year-old epic poem offer the working professional, parent, teacher, healthcare worker, or leader of the 21st Century? Plenty. I recently completed a course on Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, a journey through Inferno, Purgatory, and into Paradise through the lens of this 14th Century poet. The work, comprised of three books with the names above, is a tour de force of poetic form, historical commentary, philosophical exploration, psychological insight, and theological reflection. For the me, the books have provided a profoundly revelatory burst of intellectual curiosity and I will be contemplating Dante’s wisdom and insight for years to come. There is far too much to unpack in a few posts but I wanted to offer a bit deeper dive into these works through a modern reflection on each book offered over the next three weeks. Whether or not you’ve journeyed into the Divine Comedy, I hope this piques your curiosity and inspires deeper reflection on some of the insights I’ve gleaned from his brilliant work.

Looking at me sincerely, she replied, “Jesus wants your heart.” After reading 34 Cantos, watching 34 videos and a documentary, reading thousands of words of supplementary material, and participating in four robust class discussions on Dante and The Inferno, I found myself spinning in the facts, characters, imagery, opinion, history, and legend, of this classic work and its author. The layers and intricacies astounded and confounded me. I found myself stuck, frozen in the Cocytus under the flapping wings of Lucifer in my own lead-lined cloak of gold, hypocritically grasping for complete understanding even as I critiqued Ulysses’ sin, suspecting it more than slightly reflective of Dante’s own disordered quest for knowledge.

Sensing profundity hidden behind the veiled references and clever rhyme, I grasped, frustrated, asking, “What’s the point?” Sally’s pronouncement landed like a thunderous punch from the giant, Antaeus, shaking the 9th Circle of Hell. The voices of numerous scholarly commentators came to my mind, counseling a reading of The Divine Comedy knowing it is also reading me. The Inferno is the first leg of Dante’s spiritual journey which will ultimately lead him to Paradise and the fulfillment of all desires in the Beatific Vision. “Jesus wants your heart,” she repeated. The Inferno suddenly had purpose beyond the facts and figures, for me and for those who move in the world with me. The words of my patient wife chased chaos away like a terza rima wave artistically ordering the thoughts of the Poet.

Waking the following morning, a Pope Benedict XVI reflection transported me on this Feast Day of Saint Benedict of Nursia, into the vision that led the Saint up the mountain to a tower and into the upper room – symbolic of Jesus’ Last Supper with the Apostles. Here, Saint Benedict looked out the single window to see the wall of the world removed while earth and heaven were revealed. Dante’s vision in the Divine Comedy reflects heaven and earth, as well as the distance between. The Inferno is a revelation of what sits in between: sin and its distancing effect from the Bread of Life. Saint Benedict’s efforts to preserve Roman texts through the ending of the Roman Empire, gave the pilgrim Dante access to Virgil, Dante the poet’s heavenly choice to guide him through the Inferno, eight hundred years later. Saint Benedict also gave the world The Rule, a book on structure and order which, not only underpinned Benedictine monastic life, but served as the blueprint for European civilization post Roman Empire, and points to the structure and order of the Inferno. Both echo the ordered symmetry of Creation, the fashion in which God brings cosmos from chaos.

Dante builds his epic on mathematical structure and order, using terza rima, a rhyming structure built on three-line stanzas, to symbolize the Trinity. Is it random chance that Saint Benedict’s Feast Day falls on our last day of discussion of the Inferno? For Dante, Fortune is a general minister of God, “scrambling now and then the empty goods from race to race, from one blood to another, past all defense man’s shrewdness might devise” (Canto VII, 78-80). In Dante’s universe, even chance answers to God’s great plan. From across the centuries, Saint Benedict pronounces his first rule, “Ausculto” or listen, challenging us to hear God’s voice and see the Divine threads crossing time from his vision to Dante’s Inferno, and what it can tell us today.

Dante starts the Inferno, “Midway upon the journey of our life.” A place where he realizes: “I found myself in a dark wilderness, for I had wandered from the straight and true.” Nearly a thousand years later, sixties singer Norman Greenbaum reflects the spirit of modernity in Spirit in the Sky, “Never been a sinner, I never sinned. I got a friend in Jesus.” Looking around, Dante sees a path to Heaven, but realizes his way is blocked by a leopard (excessive appetite), a lion (representing bestial violence), and then a ravenous she-wolf (representing avarice, fraud, and treachery). Sin has beset him, barring his way to paradise, and only the appearance of Virgil, sent by Beatrice in Paradiso, saves the pilgrim Dante from these beasts.

Modern culture has relegated sin to the guilt-ridden dogma of backward religion. “I’ve never been a sinner” might be a cultural slogan telling us there should be no guilt, and even those believing in Jesus often see him as the friendly hippy, loving everyone without judgment – just or otherwise.  American culture in particular festers in a pool of subjective truth, affirming that “I’m alright and you’re alright,” in whatever ways we choose to live our lives. Our hyper-focus on individual rights and self-determination has obscured objective truth, and the very real dangers to our humanity, and our soul, when we guide our lives by our everchanging desires. “In those days there was no king in Israel, but every man did that which was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6).

For the modern Catholic on his or her own journey, as well as the budding evangelist, one of Dante’s lasting gifts is to give us a dimensional perspective on the nature of sin as a barrier to eternal joy as well as earthly happiness. The image of hell in the Inferno gives us both geography and topography, evoking a sense of distance and depth. Approaching the city of Dis, Dante observes, “We sped along into the deep-trenched moats that fortify that never-solaced land, the city seemed to loom with iron walls” (Canto 8, Lines 76-78). Here, hell consumes space with ominous, imposing presence. “At the edge of a ring of broken stones, heaped in a tumble down to the steep pit, we came upon a crueler pack of woe, where for the horrid overwhelming stink belched up out of the depths of the abyss…” (Canto 11, Lines 1-5). Dante takes us on a sensual journey into the depths of sin as he paints a picture of a world so very distant from goodness, and He who is goodness.

In his writing and speaking, Bishop Robert Barron frequently references “spiritual physics,” suggestive of the Divine playbook and its fixed set of rules governing our spiritual lives in cause-and-effect fashion. Dante vividly demonstrates these spiritual physics with contrapasso, a reflection of natural law in that every sinful choice has an equal and fitting punishment. “Stuck in the mire they say, ‘Sullen we were up in the sweet air gladdened by the sun, bearing a sluggish smoke within our hearts. Now we are sullen in this black bog here.’ Such is the hymn they gargle in the throat. They cannot get the words out whole and clear” (Canto 7, Lines 121-126).  Dante names the sin, evokes its heaviness, and describes its contrapasso, it’s punishment: they are literally stuck in the mire of hell as they were emotionally stuck on earth, unable to intelligibly describe any just source for their melancholy. These equal and fitting contrapasso appear in all nine Circles of Hell, each one depicting the earthly sin and its matching punishment for the unrepentant sinner.

The spiritual physics become more intense as we go deeper. In the 10th ditch of the 8th Circle of Hell, Dante shows us the falsifiers: “Down toward the bottom, where the minister of God on high, Justice infallible, punishes counterfeits who’s sins on earth It enters in its book. No greater gloom did all the sick of Aegina behold, when the air was so full of pestilence” (Canto 29, Lines 55-58). He goes on to describe their punishment: “And I’ve not seen a currycomb so fast scrubbed by the stable boy whose master’s coming, or by one waked against his will to hurry, As did each soul rake himself with the bite of fingernails in the great maddening itch, itch that will never find relief or rest…” (Canto 29, Lines 76-80). The itch for more, driven by falsification on earth, translates to an eternal itch scratched endlessly without satisfaction. Dante’s powerfully sensual descriptions affirms the temporal dissatisfaction in the sin and its eternal consequence.

The structure of the Inferno reflects a descending progression into worsening sin. Upper Hell is composed of Circles 2 through 4 describing sins of incontinence, or excessive appetite, resulting in lust, gluttony, avarice, and prodigality. These sins are disordered desires for sex, wealth, power, and prestige – the things of the world that, in moderation, can be good but in sin turn to excess. Dante’s prowess as a poet, insights as a repenting Catholic exiled from his home, and experience as a sinner, reveal themselves in the Inferno. In one story from Francesca, a young lover caught in adulterous lust, we hear: “One day we two were reading for delight about how love had mastered Lancelot; were alone and innocent and felt No cause to fear. And as we read, at times we went pale, as we caught each other’s glance, but we were conquered by one point alone. For when we read that the much-longed-for smile accepted such a gentle lover’s kiss, this man, who nothing will divide from me, trembled to place his lips upon my mouth. A pander was that author, and his book” (Canto 5, Lines 127-137)! Francesca’s tale reveals the danger of human frailty, naively caught in a near-occasion, in which passion overtakes reason, and the brokenness of which all humanity is prone, is revealed. Murdered in the act by her husband, she could not repent and now sits in Hell, doomed to blame love, and the writer of a story, for the choice she made.

From there, the Inferno moves to Middle Hell, composed of Circles 5 through 7, holding those guilty of sins of violence, against others, against oneself, and against God. In the second round of the 7th Circle, we find the spoilers and suicides. The pilgrim Dante plucks off a branch from a tree he encounters only to hear it cry, “Why do you hack at me?” Virgil asks one of the trees how the “soul’s grafted here inside these knobs” and receives this response: “When the ferocious soul that plucks itself from its own body leaves it and departs, judge Minos sends it to his seventh shelf. In the woods it falls, no chosen place. Wherever Fortune’s crossbow slings it, there is puts its roots down like the rankest weed., It shoots into a sapling, a wild plant. The Harpies chew its foliage for their feed…” (Canto 13, Lines 94-100). Dante learns that this tree was once an advisor to King Frederick II, became scorned at court, and was driven to kill himself to escape the shame. The Poet’s description captures the degrading nature of this sin’s corruption in a kind of animalistic domination of the mind. But Dante is not done showing us how sin progressively corrupts.

Lower Hell, Circles 8 and 9, show us sins of the intellect: avarice, fraud, and betrayal. Dante’s characterization of these sins reflects the deepening corruption of darker sin born of malice and intention. The characters, stories, and contrapasso, become increasingly repulsive as we delve further toward Satan’s icy domain at the bottom of the 9th Circle. The 8th Circle presents seducers and panderers, guilty of fraud in their deceits. In the 1st ditch, we learn of Jason the Argonaut who “With acts of love and words of sweetest skill he fooled the pretty Hypsipyle, who’d fooled the rest in leading them to kill. He left her great with child and all alone;” (Canto 18, Lines 91-94) and then drop to the 3rd ditch where those guilty of simony, selling church favors, are reviled, “The things of God should be espoused to righteousness and love, and you Rapacious wolves, you pander them for gold, foul them for silver (Canto 19, Lines 2-5)! Dante takes us further and further into human depravity, demonstrating the darkening of souls and intellect to its most base with contrapasso to match. Canto 21, line 52, tells of punishment for those guilty of accepting bribes: “When they’d harpooned him with a hundred prongs they jeered, “You do your jigs here undercover, so grab the cash in hiding, if you can!”

Thinking back to Saint Benedict’s vision of the Upper Room and its revelation of heaven and earth, we are reminded of this line from Jesus’ Bread of Life discourse in John 6:54, Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.” By Line 54, Jesus has upped the ante by using the Greek “trogo” as the word for eat – a version that dramatically means “to chew on” or “gnaw on” (https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/the-real-presence-part-two?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss).  Now near the very bottom of Hell, we meet Count Ugolino and Archbishop Ruggieri, both betrayers and enemies now trapped together in Antenora, an area of the 9th Circle of Hell devoted to betrayers of nation or party. In life, Count Ugolino was locked in a tower with his young sons and left to starve. Watching them all die over a period of days, Ugolino resorts to cannibalism before he too dies.

Now trapped at the bottom of hell, we see them, “two frozen in one hole in such a way that one man’s head was like the other’s hood, and as a hunk of bread is chewed in hunger, so did the top soul tear his teeth into the other, where the neck adjoins the brain, Just as Tydeus in his spiteful rage gnawed at the temples of his enemy, so did he gnaw the brains, the flesh, the skull” (Canto 32, Lines 125-134). So deeply has sin corrupted these souls, that they are completely cut off from the Triune God, resorting to gnawing on each other in eternal damnation, rather than on the gift of the second person of the Trinity, the Bread of Life. Dante’s special gift is to give us this stark vision as both contrapasso to Ugolino and Ruggierie’s sinful choices, and contrast to Christ’s offer of His body for the redemption of humanity. 

What’s the point?  Returning to Sally’s words, “Jesus wants your heart,” I’m reminded that Dante’s journey through Inferno was only the beginning. Saint Benedict entreats us to listen: to the Word, to each other, and by sign and implication, to the poet Dante. Beatrice’s rescue operation was a Divine intervention in the hope of bringing the pilgrim to Paradiso. Jesus wants the hearts of all people. The facts, figures, structure, characters, and veiled wisdom of The Inferno are complex layers building Dante’s inspired creation of a world and narrative meant to shock, challenge, inspire, and invite, in such a way as to turn our eyes heavenward. The Inferno is a descent on the first leg of a journey in pursuit of truth, toward the ultimate Truth. But rather than Jesus’ truth: I am the way the truth, and the life, the Inferno offers us a warning:

I AM THE WAY INTO THE CITY OF WOE
I AM THE WAY INTO ETERNAL PAIN
I AM THE WAY TO GO AMONG THE LOST

JUSTICE CAUSED MY HIGH ARCHITECT TO MOVE:
DIVINE OMNIPOTENCE CREATED ME,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND THE PRIMAL LOVE.

BEFORE ME THERE WERE NO CREATED THINGS
BUT THOSE THAT LAST FOREVER – AS DO I.
ABANDON ALL HOPE YOU WHO ENTER HERE.

For Dante, there is hope. Despite the layers of sin he experiences, Virgil continues to remind him that they are progressing. God’s great promise of redemption is all the greater from the depths of sin we find in the Inferno. These souls are lost, relegated to a Circle for their particular sin, but in Hell for lack of repentance. For the living, this makes the Inferno a story of hope. Given the imagery and language to evince a new sense of sin and its eternal consequences, we are armed to understand and share the Good News with a renewed relevance to a world who has forgotten about the weight of sin, and the insidious effects of its corrupting nature. From here, we’re ready to begin the long journey home.

Opening the Wall Street Journal yesterday, I read that their poll shows that Kamala Harris, a week into her run for President, is now even with Donald Trump – a dramatic turn of events for this year’s election. Thinking about this contest, knowing how divisive it will be, and not looking forward to it in the least, I thought: how comfortable we’ve become with being underwhelmed. Our country is going to duke it out passionately over a couple of candidates, put forth by two parties, who few think are the best options we can produce. How strange.

Another headline over the week-end referenced the opening of the Olympic Games in Paris and outrage in the Christian community over the parodying of DaVinci’s Last Supper by a troupe of drag queens. I didn’t bother to watch the video, but I find it curious that this type of performance would be chosen as part of the pomp and circumstance of an international sporting event with the tradition of the Olympics. Of all the subjects in the universe, they chose to lampoon that particular painting focused on a very specific (and sacred) event in a major world religion. Actually, it’s not curious at all – banal seems to be a better word choice.

Thinking of both headlines this morning, one question came to my mind: when did we become so comfortable with being underwhelmed?

It’s not just politics or entertainment feeding our circus of the inane. A major hot-button issue in healthcare is price transparency. Politicians, lobbyists, employers, etc. are demanding that purveyors of healthcare goods and services actually communicate what they are charging. What? This is a thing? Like me, you may find yourself asking: isn’t that pretty basic? Yes, it is.

Talking to a health system executive a few years ago, I was told that one of their major initiatives was a “do no harm” initiative. Huh? The goal was to reduce things that happened in their hospitals which caused patients additional issues to the ones they brought in with them. Describing our offering to an employer recently, he looked at me solemnly and asked, “Will that aggravate ________, our current insurance provider?” I said, “Yes, most likely.” “Great!” he replied. “I love to stick it to them.”

Finally, in a recent conversation with another client, we were closing the call and she commented: “Great call! Thank you so much. It’s nice to finish a conversation like this and not feel like I need to go take a shower.”

What is going on? In what universe does it make sense to not know what a thing costs before it’s purchased, to need to remind someone not to cause harm to patients, or that we continue to work with any company who we dislike enough to admit that we want to implement a program that undermines them? Aren’t these things just an ante to the game? Table stakes to even contend? Why would we work with anyone who was “slimy enough” to make us want to shower afterward?

Alas, we’ve really gotten comfortable with minimum expectations. In our politics. In our entertainment. In our workplaces. In our relationships. It often feels like we’ve lost our sense of excellence or at least the energy to demand it. What happened to doing something because it’s the right thing to do or doing our best because…well, because it’s our best?

We seem to be suffering from cultural sloth. A 21st century form of urban malaise that has dumbed-down our dialogue, our entertainment, and our expectations. We’ve white-washed the complex wisdom of our western heritage and gotten comfortable with “good enough,” “not too bad,” and “at least.” There are plenty of smart people, why do we have so few good ideas? Or good political candidates? Or good leaders? Why are we so tolerant of “just enough” and “average” and “banal?”

Staples was right, we like the “easy button.” The store that makes it easy to buy. Push. The sound bite that makes it easy to think. Push. The political party that makes it easy to vote. Push. The brainless show that makes it easy to laugh. Push. The life that makes it easy to get by. Push.

We’re too comfortable with comfort. We’re too accepting of mediocre. We’re too addicted to easy. It’s made us soft. Soft in our thinking. Soft in our expectations. Soft in our will. We’re not made for easy and it’s killing us. Literally. Easy calories make us fat. Easy sex undermines families and relationships. Easy religion demands little of us. Easy “whatever I want when and how I want it” cheapens, softens, and weakens.

Over the last week, I’ve referenced caterpillars and cocoons several times. Sally suggested sea turtles. In both the emerging butterfly and the baby sea turtle, it is the struggle of its first efforts that makes it strong enough to survive. The newly formed butterfly will not be strong enough to fly unless it builds its strength in the struggle to get free of the cocoon. The baby turtle will not be strong enough to swim against the waves crashing upon the beach unless it has dug out of its nest and fought its way across the beach to the water. Ease is the enemy of strength.

When the hard work is outsourced, the hard lessons softened, and the hard thinking abdicated, we cannot build the strength, the will, or the intellect to do the hard things that life demands. Our resolve, fortitude, endurance, resilience, grit, etc. are forged in the flames of adversity, difficulty, challenge, suffering, disappointment, and exertion. Weakness is the straw house built on easy.

We’ve grown to accept underwhelming, average, and banal, because they are easy. We tolerate a lack of virtue because it is hard to live virtuously and hard to find those who fight the good fight though it is really, really, difficult.

I’m not suggesting we all become stoics or ascetics, eschewing all goods or pleasures of the world. But we could all benefit from more self-denial. We do not have to pursue struggle or difficulty in some kind of fabricated masochism, ready or not, it will find us. But we do have to choose to strengthen our self. We do have to work on our “will muscle” as well as our physical muscle. We can push others to do better and tolerate less of the banal in our entertainment, politics, and purchases. We can and should expect honor and integrity from others…and from ourselves.

Want to stop being underwhelmed? Beware of the siren song of the “easy button” – it is beguiling and it is a trap. Instead, push the “hard button”: give more, expect more, and be patient in putting off the mediocre of now for the excellent of later. The malaise of our cultural sloth will resist, but the strength built climbing out of that cocoon will be worth it.

Kneeling on the floor of Lucas Oil Stadium last night, I scanned the massive audience, straining my eyes, and my attention, to focus on individuals among the throng of 60,000 people. What a surreal experience. The hard concrete floor was unforgiving, but 45 minutes quickly disappeared in the faces, the music, and the moment.

Catholics from around the country gathered this week in Indianapolis for the National Eucharistic Congress – a Revival – an intimate gathering of thousands to re-energize our faith. I think it worked. Why was I kneeling? Because that is what one does when he finds himself in the presence of his Creator. But that is a story for another day.

Have you ever taken a moment at a massive sporting event or concert and tried to look at the individuals blended into the sea of colors? Moving my eyes across the cavernous expanse of the stadium, I suddenly felt a strong desire to see each person. There was an incredible variety of shapes, sizes, colors, hair styles, clothing choices, and facial expressions, standing, sitting, walking, and kneeling everywhere around me. I quickly realized that it was physically impossible for me to focus on each individual. How many of the 60,000 people did I actually see? At one point I started to count: 20, 50, 70, at 100, the counting became distracting. Twenty minutes later, I wondered, did I see 500? 1000? 10,000?

At one point during the night, Bishop Robert Barron asked, “What would happen if this crowd of 60,000 people went out and lived their faith fully?” Then he asked, “What if America’s 70 million Catholics suddenly began to live their faith fully?” “It would change our country. It would change the world.”

There could be many definitions of living one’s faith “fully.” Some might suggest that “following the rules” is a good place to start.

Perhaps.

Kneeling among this crowd, seeking the faces of individual human beings, I found myself thinking about their stories, struggles, hopes, dreams, and fears. These things that pervade our common experience as Homo sapiens. Each story as distinct and personal as a fingerprint. Each face, voice, and personality, different at a scale beyond imagining, and yet, sharing so many of the same experiences of existence. Each given by his or her Creator a dignity, a specialness, born of being made in the Imago Dei, the image of God, including the soul accompanying that image.

The last few days have been an exercise in patience as we’ve navigated the frustrations of moving among thousands of people trying to get to their destinations within constricted spaces. Even massive hallways, exhibit halls, meeting rooms, and stadiums, become small and cramped in the shadow of 60,000 people. The size and scale make it easy to lose sight of the individual. The mass of bodies becomes a moving barrier to what it is one wants to do or wherever it is one wants to go. Together and apart, the person disappears into the crowd, blurred into the backdrop. We cannot process such volume, we cannot engage at such scale. It becomes very easy to lump the individual, and his innate God-given dignity, into the amorphous blob of the throng – now simply a barrier.

A barrier to what? To what I want. What I desire. Where I want to go. My plans. Humanity gets in the way and it’s frustrating.

Beginning to see individuals in the crowded stadium, my mind wandered to the other end of our human experience. Each person’s story revolves around his or her relationships with those encountered in life, in how they treat and how they are treated. If the crowd is a barrier, the individual often becomes a means to an end. To a large degree, the great sin of the world is that we use others to fulfill our desires. Directly and indirectly. How well they serve our purposes often dictates our happiness with them, or disappointment in them. We get lost in our own self-regard, often losing sight of the human being before us, as well as his or her particular needs. Ours are so much more important.

What is it to live one’s Catholic faith fully? What is it to live one’s humanity fully? Rather than the rules, Bishop Barron suggests that love is a good place to start. What is love? He quotes Thomas Aquinas: “Willing the good of the other.”

Kneeling there, in a communal silence among 60,000 people, I imagined the faces I couldn’t see, and the human beings behind them. What would happen if we all willed each other’s good in each encounter?

Then, it hit me: what would happen if I willed the good of every person I encountered?

Maybe love can save the world.

For over twenty years, we’ve had a pretty steady tradition of having breakfast as a family after Sunday Mass. One of the staples of that tradition has been Le Peep in Castleton, an area on the northeast corner of Indianapolis. Our kids grew up on “The Eighteen Wheeler” and “Funny Face Pancakes” as well as with a host of friendly characters we’ve gotten to know in many years of going to the same place. Who says that Cheers is the only place where everybody knows your name?

Interestingly enough, next month we celebrate 20 years in our current home. This is a milestone for our married life and for my entire life. A fun dynamic of such longevity in one place has been the chance to expand some of our children’s traditions to include our grandchildren. We still do Sunday breakfast, and it still ends up at Le Peep most of the time.

Picking up Cooper recently to spend a day together, we found ourselves talking about plans for the day. He wanted to go to Le Peep for breakfast after daily Mass, and I told him that we’d need to do something different because we were going to be at the office for a little while that morning. We settled on Lincoln Square Pancake House as a reasonable alternative and I asked him what he wanted for breakfast. “I think I want pancakes,” he replied. “Great! Will you be able to look at the server and order it for yourself?” I responded. “Ok Poppy,” he said. “That’s why I like to go to Le Peep. With Travis, it’s easy to speak for myself.”

Ahh, Travis. Of course. I’m not certain if Travis has been at Le Peep for the entire time we’ve been going, but it’s close. Cooper doesn’t know a world without Travis in it. You know Travis, he’s the guy who has your table set before you arrive (including perfectly timed macchiato’s for your girls delivered as they’re sitting down), taps you on the shoulder at a Dave Matthews concert to say “Hi” because you happen to have seats next to one another, holds the back room for you even though they don’t accept reservations, and knows what you want to order even if you happen to fancy something different on a particular day.

We all love great service, appreciate places where it’s comfortable and familiar, and love those individuals who help make the things we do great experiences. But how many people do we know who make it easy to speak for ourselves? It wasn’t something I had every considered.

Last week, I attended a conference at which a grandmotherly figure complimented me on my “firm handshake.” “Why, thank you,” I replied, smiling. These are the things we like to teach our children and grandchildren. Stand straight, say “please” and “thank you,”look the person in the eye when you shake his/her hand, smile. When we’re young, transitioning from mom and dad speaking on our behalf to owning it ourselves is a big move. Oh, the pressure of talking to an adult! These are dangerous waters and all children must pass through them on their way to adulthood. Many struggle.

Speaking for ourselves has many risks. The risk of a mistake. The risk of going blank. The risk of weird eye contact. The risk of being asked a question to which you don’t know the answer. All pointing to the ultimate risk: the risk of being made to look or sound foolish. Kids get this intuitively, knowing the stakes are high. As adults, we often mask or avoid it in different ways.

How is it one can make it easy for another to speak for him or herself? Put another way, how do we make it safe to speak up? With Travis, familiarity is a big part of it. He is a known quantity. However, all of us have known quantities in our lives who have the exact opposite effect. Jokesters. Sarcasm. Cynical humor. Trick questions. They all feel like traps – efforts to put the other in an awkward or humorous situation…normally at their expense. Positive familiarity is absolutely necessary. For a child, or anyone, to speak for himself, there must be trust.

Thinking of Travis, the playbook is pretty straightforward. He greets warmly, asks sincerely, listens intently, smiles knowingly, and genuinely seems to care. He’s not overdone or sappy with sycophantic servitude – there is no hint of “being managed” in interactions with him. He’s steady; busy or slow, good day or bad…you can’t tell. His tone is consistent, his expressions convey sincere interest, and he seems to like the work he does, even on the days when I’m sure it’s not easy. He’s not “put-on,” you can’t fake it over 15-20 years. It is who he is and it just shines through. He’s likable, in all the right ways. With Travis, it’s easy for all of us to speak for ourselves.

Thinking of recent interactions with children, I wonder if I made it easy for them to speak for themselves? Did I play with with their awkwardness or create an open channel for connection? What about the adults I encounter? Do I add risk or take it away when speaking to others?

I think Travis has a super-power. To empower others with the gift of making it easy for them to speak for themselves is laudable. To have a seven year old describe you thus is high praise. Think about a Travis in your life, how might you encourage the stewardship of this gift? Thinking about seeing Travis today, I’m going to make a point to encourage him and then work to emulate his great example in my own life.

Walking into the broad conference hall, I recognized many people. After a few casual “hello’s” and some hand shaking, I mounted the podium and proceeded to make my presentation. It went really well. I nailed my points, heads were nodding in agreement, and the clapping at the close, affirmed mission accomplished. Walking into the crowd afterward, I received a few questions and enjoyed some follow up conversations. The day proceeded and I was able to make my rounds, meeting a few new people, and reconnecting with old acquaintances. I felt really good about the day and my ability to connect our story to the priorities of so many attendees.

The following morning, the breakfast hall was filled with people. The room was filled with the sound of plates, glasses, and chatter. It was a dull roar of activity and I made my way to the coffee. Oddly, the warm interactions of the day before were missing and I found myself alone at a table in the corner. Looking around, the faces seemed less familiar and completely unengaged. Not a single person made eye contact with me. Moving to a full table, I greeted its occupants and received terse acknowledgements as everyone picked up their plates and left.

Noticing a guy I had spent some time with the day before, I walked over to him and asked, “What is going on?” The man cocked his head slightly and squinted his eye as he responded, “Didn’t you notice?” I shook my head. He continued, “You strode into this hall yesterday, your head held high. You stood in front of this room of highly successful experts and pontificated on your brilliant ideas. Your remarks were boorish, unimaginative, and borderline offensive. Afterward, you feigned interest in numerous conversations, asking questions you thought were ‘sincere and insightful’ when in fact they betrayed your pride, arrogance, and indifference.”

Dumbfounded, I looked around and noticed the noise in the hall had stopped and everyone was looking at me. A veil across my eyes was suddenly lifted and I realized that he spoke the truth. All the conversations from the day before jumped into my head and I saw it all clearly. My “insights” were actually rude and bearish bragging. Individual interactions revealed my biases and preconceived conclusions while not so subtly trying to highlight my own brilliance. Thinking I was being clever, I anticipated comments or read the expressions of other people incorrectly. My “intuitions” were crass self-adoration. I was blind-sided by his astute feedback.

Waking from the dream, I was left with the uneasiness of a strange trip ending with a return to reality. As the details of the dream faded, the words “blind spots” remained, imprinted on my mind like the flickering remnant of a lighted sign glimpsed moments before.

In Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, the pilgrim finds himself descending through Hell led by the poet Virgil. Encountering lost souls along the way, he witnesses them experiencing punishments that reflect the nature of their sin in life. Even in the midst of their tortures, these lost souls frequently seem unrepentant of the sin that landed them in Inferno, often blame it on someone or something else, and remain consumed with their life and reputation left behind. All of them went through their earthly lives oblivious to the dangers of their choices relative to their eternal life.

Dante’s poem is a brilliant reflection on living a virtuous life and the potentially hellish consequences of our choices. Few would intentionally choose damnation, suggesting that many of these tortured souls fell due to “blind spots” in their own lives; places where they couldn’t see clearly. Considering my dream, I was left thinking about blind spots in my own life, what causes them, and what I might do to illuminate them.

Blind spots are places where we’ve lost visibility. When using mirrors on our car, there are places behind and around us that fall outside of our ability to see. Entire semi-trailers can disappear in these blind spots. Blind spots can occur when lighting is poor, hiding objects in the dark. Blind spots also happen with gaps in knowledge or information. On the way to a destination, we might not know to turn on a particular street because it is missing from our map.

The imperfect vision of our daily lives leaves lots of room for blindspots. We can never have perfect or complete information, which requires that many of our choices be based on educated (or uneducated) guesses, depending on available data. Also informing these guesses are experience, bias, and desire. The conclusions we have about the world around us are formed through these filters and tend to adjust based on changing information and circumstances.

Over time, we build confidence in our perspectives. Is it calcification or conviction? The hardening of our mind, and/or our heart, holds us back from discovery, insight, and evolution. Where and when does pliable intellectual growth turn to brittle conclusion? Our convictions may be born of objective truth and the hard facts of our experience. However, the subjective reality of changing circumstances demand that we wrestle with doubt or new inputs to firm or refine perspective. Calcification occurs when our subjective reality becomes fixed despite the evolving world around us.

Howling, crying,
Screaming at the moon
Only my voice came back
Only the echo came back

In a recent conversation, I asked a friend about some disagreements he had with another. He responded, “We have a different world view.” In addition to the lessons learned from hard experience, we each possess a moral center that informs our convictions. Our world view is born of biases formed from experience and the moral frame underpinning our sense of write and wrong. As our convictions in this world view firm, we become more convinced of our own “rightness.” One of life’s great challenges is balancing conviction in our world view with the changing in puts of reality around us.

Pride is the great danger of our convictions. Not pride in the sense of being “proud” of our children or in the quality of our work or in keeping our house nicely maintained. The deadly sin of Pride occurs when we become so convinced of our own “rightness,” that we tip into the prejudice of believing that all who disagree are “wrong.” Here, conviction can turn to calcification as we set ourselves up for real blind spots that foster resentment within ourselves and the people around us. Our fixation hardens our heart causing us to reject others and their ideas – often to everyone’s detriment.

In our organizations and personal lives, the calcification of our world views tend to create their own echo chamber, a place where the only voice we can hear is our own, repeating our truths and conclusions back to us. Moral conviction may be the right place to hold our ground, but sclerotic thinking impedes innovation, imagination, and our overall ability to solve the problems confronting us. Our own fixations limit our ability to grow and evolve as the world places new demands upon us.

The pride and prejudice born of our own convictions can create blind spots, not only hampering our effectiveness, but potentially exposing us to being blind-sided by the unexpected. There are places where we must run with conviction and places where our convictions run into a reality missed or unseen. Here, we live with the stories we tell ourselves even as life demands a pliability necessary for us to evolve in new discovery.

Being blind-sided is waking to a world that brutally opposes your conclusions and suddenly realizing that its may be right. The jarring discovery of a hidden domain lying beyond all that you knew was correct and real, destabilizes and threatens the very foundations of that comfortable world you’ve built. Here, we walk into a room of people who reject us for the calcification they experience in our pride and prejudice, finding ourselves on the outside of what we once thought was firmly in our grasp.

With age, we tend toward being fixed and will stay there when we stop asking, seeking, and feeding the machine that draws conclusions. This is the status quo of much of our world and dangerous in its invitation to be blind-sided. What do we do to avoid it?

But as it is written:
“What eye has not seen, and ear has not heard,
and what has not entered the human heart,
what God has prepared for those who love him,”
this God has revealed to us through the Spirit.

We spend so much time processing inputs through our mental machine, always with the goal of drawing a conclusion. “What’s the answer?” we ask. In work, we position our solutions as answers to others’ problems. At home, we work to fix family members by solving their issues. Along the way, we alienate others through our own fixed views of the world or by piping our voice outward from the echo chamber we’ve built to convince ourselves. Along the way, we stop asking the questions, or even worse, waiting for the other’s response.

New information, fresh perspective, and surprising insights are where we grow, and, the only counter to our blind spots. A powerful antidote to the pride and prejudice of calcified conclusions is humility. In 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan Peterson’s best-seller, rule #9 says “Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.” This seems like a good place to start.

Thinking back on my dream, I wonder about my own conclusions. Where have they calcified? Perhaps the issue is one of heart more than mind. Facts may inform our intellect, but experience and encounter with others shape our heart. Perhaps the more powerful antidote to the blind spots is an open heart, ready to see, and to hear, the possibilities beyond my own “rightness.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In their wisdom, America’s Founding Fathers summed up some self-evident truths and presented them as a cornerstone in the foundation of the most enduring democracy and, arguably, most successful nation in all of history. For nearly 250 years, the United States has been fighting for, testing, arguing about, and often imperfectly, moving these principles forward at home and abroad. Our great experiment, with all of its flaws and challenges, remains a bastion and beacon for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

One of the great features of our founding, and the principles laid out in both the Declaration and the Constitution, is the room they allow for argument and discourse. Somehow, they allow enough specificity to guide us meaningfully while giving space for argument over interpretation and actualization. Some might argue that these gaps have fostered great strife but I would rebut that they have also enabled our country to scale in a massive and highly integrated way. Despite personal preferences and beliefs, our founding structure and rule of law have largely maintained our steady worldview. They have given us just enough rigidity and flexibility to evolve.

Recognizing the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right is a fantastically brilliant bit of fuzziness built-in to our Declaration. We do not have a right to actual happiness but we are free to chase it in whatever way we desire as long as our pursuit does not break laws or otherwise impinge on the rights of other citizens. So what is happiness?

Happiness is a tricky word and leaves lots of room for interpretation. Loyola Marymount Professor, Christopher Kaczor, describes four levels of happiness: level one reflects bodily happiness in the fulfillment of basic human needs like food and shelter, level two centers on achievement in what status, power, and wealth, level three happiness stems from love and service to others, and level four is agape, love of God – the place where we begin to approach true joy.

The fact that one word needs four levels to begin to break it down and is supplanted with the word “joy” at its highest state, points to the broad sweep of possibility in its pursuit. Kaczor’s point with the levels is to highlight the fact “happiness” is fleeting in most of its forms and our pursuit of a particular level often leaves us wanting for more as it fades. From there, we begin to fill our need for happiness with things that ultimately do not make us happy.

In his book, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being, psychologist Martin Seligman introduces his PERMA model suggesting that positive emotions, engagement, relationship, meaning, and achievement, are the keys to the highest state of happiness which is flourishing. Seligman’s argument is that these are the fundamental elements necessary for us to flourish in this life and the degree to which we are experiencing them will dictate our ongoing happiness.

In the 5th Century, St. Augustine wrote of the “Imago Dei,” the image of God in the soul of man as the source of fundamental human dignity – a central theme to Catholic teaching. The notion of fundamental human dignity is the ultimate inalienable right and is foundational to justice in the core sense of giving the other his or her due as a beloved son or daughter of God. Augustine saw our mind as composed of memory, understanding, and will, empowered with reason – all reflections of the Creator. If we are each endowed with the image of our Creator imprinted upon our very soul, then there is inherent value, dignity, in us as human beings.

In Against Heresies, St. Irenaeus of Lyons wrote “For the glory of God is the living man, and the life of man is the vision of God.” This line is often misquoted as “The glory of God is man fully alive” but one might interpret the spirit of Irenaeus’ message pointing toward human flourishing – an existence fully alive with positive emotion, full engagement in existence, loving relationships, meaning in work and activity, and achievement through the stewardship of gifts given.

From a governmental perspective, protecting the right to pursue happiness may be enough, particularly when the very notion of happiness can be defined so personally. However, for us as parents, teachers, friends, siblings, and leaders, perhaps there is higher call and deeper possibility. If every person has a fundamental human dignity and justice demands that we we give them the due of that dignity, what is our responsibility? Looking in the mirror, if we are called to flourish, to be fully alive, what is our duty to ourselves?

Maybe human flourishing is the point. Our flourishing and the flourishing of those around us. Let’s break it down.

What’s the point? If we approached our relationships as a solemn duty to help the other flourish, what would happen? If we led this way, loved this way, trusted this way, and forgave this way, every day, what change would occur in our little worlds?

Too vague? Perhaps a bit too foo-foo? A focus on the dignity of the individual and his or her flourishing is wildly pragmatic. If the people working for us are flourishing, it will help our customers flourish. If our children are flourishing, it will help their friends flourish. If our spouse is flourishing, it will help our children flourish. If our friends are flourishing, it will help their families flourish. And, if all of these people are flourishing, we can’t help but flourish too.

Why have a government? Why have an organization? Why have a community, a society, a culture, or a family? What’s the point? The Founding Fathers were on to something, but let’s not just pursue happiness. Let’s flourish. How? Help enough other people get there and we can’t help but find ourselves fully alive.

Leaving a recent dinner presentation, I remarked to Sally, “There was something in that talk that isn’t sitting well with me.” She paused for a moment, then replied, “He has obviously done many great things, is clear on his gifts, and seems to know where he is called to share them.” Without saying it, she knew where I was headed and prudently took the high road on a conversation that I was going to turn into a negative critique.

A few days later, the subject came up again, and Sally shared something she had heard in a podcast suggesting that, when listening to speakers, our tendency is to either idolize or despise them. I didn’t despise the man who presented to us, but the point of casting our reception of such presenters in the extremes of “idolize” and “despise” are great reference points for our own hearts. We tend to buy-in or we don’t.

What was it that troubled me? The talk centered on good things: business success, generosity to employees, great charity to the community through a foundation and direct giving, and lots of praise for team members. The presenter shared his faith and how it shaped his perspective on his works – all of which aligned with my own worldview. Was I reacting to his personality or style of presentation? Was I feeling some sort of envy or the resentment of comparison?

Digging a bit deeper, I was able to discern the elements that grated upon me: lots of “me’s” and “mines,” the success report card, the call-outs to team members that still seemed to point back to the speaker, the casual name dropping that is rarely casual, the subtle but not so subtle reflections of power and authority, etc. Actually, I didn’t have to dig very deeply, each of those items was bobbing in pretty shallow waters. My internal critique was biting, and in my mind, justified.

It also troubled me. Idolize or despise. There is a deep-seeded tendency in all of us to tear-down others in some kind of twisted notion that it makes us more. Somehow, I’m better if she’s less. Of course, the truth is that it doesn’t make us more and rarely makes us feel any better. Was I simply tearing at this man in my own head out of my own small need to feel like I was more?

We filter the world through a lens of many colors. Brilliant or base, that filter colors all that we receive, often shifting, categorizing, interpreting, and even manipulating it into those places that fit our view of ourselves, and the universe around us. Considering this man and his words, I realized that I did not know his heart, the sincerity of his words and actions, his struggles, his failures, or how he interacted with the world he described. I could not possibly know. And, it really didn’t matter.

The truth is that what he shared had nothing to do with me. All I could do was react: positive or negative. I could choose to take it at face value, see the good in it, and take any lessons from it. Or, I could reject it as false, insincere, and self-aggrandizing. Neither reaction would affect him, his mission, the people who work for and with him, or the people he served. But my reaction might affect me or anyone else with whom I share it.

I could not possibly know that man’s heart, but I can know mine. In that man’s style, I saw the bluster into which I might tip if left unchecked. In his words, I heard the arrogance that I might exude if not careful. In his list of accomplishments, I heard the pride of my own voice. In his shout-outs to team members, I felt the danger of false humility that might overtake me. In the “me’s” and “mines” I heard the cries for recognition that could pour forth from the boy within who will always long to be noticed.

Ours is a culture of rejection, criticism, and crucifixion. When we don’t hear what we want to hear, don’t agree, or worst of all, cast our own dark shadows upon others, we react, often viciously. We figuratively stone them and their irritating ways, canceling them, blotting them out, and rejecting all the falsities they share. But often, we sense the things we dislike the most in ourselves as we watch them rear their ugly heads in what we see in others.

Look around you today at the people who trouble you the most. The annoying things they say or do, the sound of their voice, the places where you vehemently disagree with them, the dark feelings that well up within as you react to them. Is it possible you are seeing shadows of your own reflection?

There are places demanding right judgment. There is objective truth and we must continually discern in our response to others. However, there are also places which our own brokenness takes us, unknowingly. Small, dark, places that reflect the wounds, inadequacies, fears, and resentments, that assail our own hearts. What is yours and what isn’t? Tuning that filter to allow the good to pass through for whatever value it may bring, regardless of the heart of the other, will not only change how we see him or her, it will also change how we see ourself. Still imperfect but, perhaps getting better.

God chooses ordinary men for fatherhood to accomplish his extraordinary plan.

My dad introduced me to an audience at a recent speaking engagement. Looking at him beam as he spoke, and then at my smiling mom who attended to “see me in action,” affirmed the truism that, no matter how old our children get, they are always our children. I felt the strange mix of my 10-year-old self in a “look at me” moment and my 55-year-old fatherhood/grand fatherhood as I tuned-in to the glowing pride he projected. I had wondered if it would be awkward for me having my parents in the audience and found that, no matter how old I get, I still feel the sonship that was my original vocation.

Driving back to my office after my presentation, I came out of my own thoughts for a moment when I noticed Bono’s voice on the radio:

This stanza from “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On You’re Own” grabbed me. The original is excellent, but this version was from U2’s newest album, Songs of Surrender, primarily a collection of old songs remade. In the newer version, you can really hear the mature Bono’s heart, and hurt, from the conflict he felt with his father as he tells him “you’re the reason why the opera is in me.” Beautifully complex and profoundly real.

All of us have varying degrees of complexity in our relationships with our fathers and the father-son form possesses its own uniquely masculine dynamics. The push and pull of that dynamic emerges in our necessary struggle for independence and identity, in a growing-up that may never really be complete, and amid the hopes, dreams, and expectations, a father naturally has for his son. Father’s can get a bad rap for this as none of us are perfect, but there is a gritty necessity to the tension that must necessarily appear as our younger selves wrestle out of our cocoon of dependence to become our independent selves.

What do we need and want from our fathers? Central to it all is a longing for approval that never really goes away. Our hearts are hungry for the unconditional love that says “no matter what you do, I’ll still love you.” Our fathers are a point of reference, an absolute measure in a subjective world and we revolve around that point, consciously and unconsciously gauging our progress. As sons, we are perpetually trying to measure up, as daughters, we hunger for the affirmation from our first love, the seed of our lifetime reference point for how we should be loved.

In “Papa Don’t Preach,” Madonna tells the story of a young girl in love and in trouble. I know I messed up. I know you’re going to be upset. Don’t focus on my mistake, please forgive me, please love me. As fathers, we have so much experience to offer. We build a life focused on developing and protecting our children, and then we let them go. It is at once ours and then, necessarily, not ours. As children we say, love me through my mistakes.

Are we the prodigal son, asking for our share of our inheritance, squandering it, then asking to return, forgiven? Or are we the dutiful son? Steady and present through thick and thin, and then indignant at the warm reception for our wayward sibling. But this is the father we want, the one waiting with open arms, no matter our failings, and the one offering patient compassion to the dutiful son who feels injustice has been served. More importantly, it’s the father we’re called to be.

“When you coming home, dad?” “I don’t know when”
But we’ll get together then
You know we’ll have a good time then

Of course, Harry Chapin has something to say about the complexities of fatherhood. That sharp edge we walk between our own ambition, and duty, to climb and provide and produce, while also being present for those who need, and want, us most. Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” poetically captures the fleeting nature of time and the discoveries of fatherly maturity. What is most important? Eventually we realize that fatherhood, like motherhood, is a vocation of sacrifice. It’s forming is helping us learn that our life is not ours alone and, ultimately, is really not about us.

As a father, I think Paul Simon captures the spirit of fatherhood quite well in “Father and Daughter”:

I believe the light that shines on you
Will shine on you forever (forever)
And though I can’t guarantee
There’s nothing scary hiding under your bed
I’m gonna stand guard
Like a postcard of a Golden Retriever
And never leave ’til I leave you
With a sweet dream in your head

We can’t always leave our children with sweet dreams, and life has plenty of scary things to offer, but the father will always stand guard, no matter how old his babies get. I think of my father and his particular brand of love. Steady. Present. Protective. Fierce. The father really must be lion and lamb. He must be ready to fight for his children and simultaneously ready to sacrifice himself for them. Our duty never goes away.

As fathers, we have to acknowledge the responsibility of our vocation while maintaining a degree of self-compassion. We have to embrace the duty of our fatherhood even as we forgive our own fathers for being human when we expected them to be inhumanly perfect. We also need to continually aim for the higher bar, knowing that our shadow is falling across every corner of the life of our family.

In my life, I watch my sons grow into their own fatherhood, even as they help me mature into my grand-fatherhood. Are they on the right track? As usual, the children offer the best clues as they dote upon their dads. In a world that seems hyper-obsessed with itself, these young men show great self-giving and the necessary restraint for fatherhood. Devotion is a beautiful virtue. Courage may be in short supply in many places, but I see a beautifully masculine, and moral, courage in these young men.

Thinking of my own father, dressed in his suit and tie, holding that microphone, and beaming as he introduced his son, makes me smile. I see a lifetime of moments cascade through my memory and realize that I have been a lucky one. My father has taken his duty seriously, stood guard like a golden retriever, and never told me “not today.” Thanks Dad, I love you too. Happy Father’s Day.

We meet on the common ground of an uncommon age and share out our gifts of dark and light, good and bad, simple joy and not so simple sorrow.

“Ohhh, man, it’s early, you know what I’m sayin’?” So began my 30 minute chat with Sean, the randomly assigned Uber driver who showed up at my doorstep. What is it that brings us together? What is it that pushes us apart? There is a powerful force in our world – a true power – bent on division. The great scatterer lives in, among, and upon us. It wants what it wants, when it wants it, and how it wants it. This force flourishes in chaos, feeds on conflict, and magnifies our most negative energies through our darkest capacities. What’s to stop it?

Walking to my Uber in the dark of 5am Houston, I saw my driver, Sean, leaned back in the driver’s seat, peering out of his window. “Pheel?” I nodded. “Back’s open.” Within seconds he’s verified that I’m his passenger and sized-me-up for any signs of threat – a necessary concern in this massive city that doesn’t sleep. I put my bags in the rear and climbed into the back seat. His tone warming a bit, “Hey Pheel. Good morning.” I look up and he’s got the rearview mirror trained on me. Smiling, he verifies my terminal at Houston Intercontinental and we’re off.

Civility often seems a lost art in our culture. At least, that’s what we’re told. Much of our current cultural narrative tells us that our online world and fixation on social media has hampered our socials skills and our manners have suffered. Three Uber drivers later on this trip and my anecdotal experience says that’s not true. Within 60 seconds, Sean has assessed my disposition and relaxed into an easy banter. “Am I your first pickup today?” I ask. “Naaa, man…I’ve been goin’ since 10 last night. I’ll do one more run before I head to the HEB for breakfast…then home.” “Wow, all night!? Are you busy the whole time?” I ask. “Oh yeah, Houston’s a 24 hour city. I just stay away from the women…they can’t hold their liquor. I’ve never had a man throw up in my car.”

What is it that brings us together? Shared experiences. Shared desires. Relationship. We’re hard-wired for it. We are made for communion with others. Sean doesn’t need to talk to me. He’ll never see me again. But for the next 30 minutes, we are in relationship – a shared experience that may or may not matter. But that’s not the point. There is no point but the human need for connection and our willingness, or unwillingness, to participate.

I comment, “Do you like driving for Uber? You seem to have a great disposition for this work.” “You know what? You get what you give,” he replies. Is that the “Golden Rule” I hear? There is such an elegant pragmatism in his statement. If I want you to treat me with respect, I’ll need to treat you with respect. Willing to give it first, this man clearly sees the world through cause and effect. I can’t expect you to treat me better than I’m willing to treat you so I’ll invest myself in it. If true justice is giving one his or her due, what would happen if we all expected to get what we gave?

“Where you from, Pheel?” He draws out the syllables of my name like we’re old friends. I notice it – there is a comfort and familiarity in it. He has sized me up: no threat, easy-going, open to the banter. “Indianapolis,” I respond. ‘Really? I’m from Chicago!” He throws it out there like we’re from the same neighborhood. “I been comin’ to Houston for 30 years, then moved here a few years ago.”

What is community? It is common ground. Firm footing for our frame of reference. Our physical existence is framed in the context of our surrounding, the solid foundation on which we exist. Our city, our state, our country – these represent common ground and shared experience. “I use to live in Houston,” I mention. “Mid-90’s.” “Oooooh, man, then you’ve seen it change,” he replies.

Change is central to our shared experience. The physical changes of age and geography are fundamental to our existence. Time and distance are formational and ubiquitous, bringing struggle, joy, and possibility. With time, we gain perspective, with distance we see it acutely. To be human is to exist within the frame of perpetual change. The ebb and flow of these changes forms us and unites our experience in the common fabric of our shared humanity. We see the world, and each other, through our unique lens of change even as the particular of that lens highlights what unites and distinguishes us. Ultimately, we discover that the unifying elements of shared change tend to bridge the distances in our own distinctions.

“Do you have kids, Pheel?” Sensing something kindred in the exchange, Sean took a turn toward the personal. “Yes, I do,” I replied enthusiastically. “I have four, though our baby is now 25.” “Me too!” Sean effused. As powerful as shared experience is, shared values tighten the cords of unity. Core to our being, and reflective of natural law, is our desire to create, participate in, and love the life we’ve created. Loving children is good, true, and beautiful, reflecting the beauty of our own creation and love of our Creator – it is divinizing and powerfully unifying. Loving, protecting, and nurturing, our children is objectively good, we are made for it and sharing it brings us to an absolute understanding – as clear as our own hand waved before our face. I get it. I understand. I know exactly what you’re saying.

A few stories later, I’m smiling to myself. I like this man. He’s real, like rock underfoot, solid. His isn’t an easy life. He’s seen things. He’s lived through struggle. He recognizes it. And, he’s learned from it. I hear the pragmatic in his stories, they have a point. He sees it, accepts it, and moves forward. A bit smarter each time. More human in living it, more man in learning from it. His story is unique but his struggles aren’t. Our conversation drew to a close but the echo of common ground lives on.

“Pheel, safe travels, brother,” smiled Sean as he looked at me in his mirror. “God bless you.” There it was: belief. Whoever God is to Sean, He represents something good…something worth invoking to my benefit. If there was any distance of fundamental understanding left between us, Sean walked across it, bringing the Divine Author to bear on our brief exchange, and offering Him as a gift of goodwill. I wish you well. I wish goodness for you. My prayer for you is that God will bless you.

St. Thomas Aquinas tells us that love is willing the good of the other as other. It is no casual thing to love another but it is a beautiful expression of our humanity and reminder that we are made for relationship, for communion with our fellow man. In that moment, Sean’s heart was full, he felt something real and true, and in giving it, it returned to him, filling him more completely than any words I could have offered. It also filled me. His gift to me was Good; and True; and Beautiful. He gave love without reserve, not recognizing it as such, but fully realizing that a threshold had been crossed. Somewhere the accuser, the dark scatterer of men, screamed in frustration.

Many claim that our culture has become toxic. That we’ve lost our sense of humanity, shared values, and the national identity that once made us strong. Our cultural institutions are crumbling amid our loss of common ground, shared experience, and shared belief. Perhaps.

However, my 30 minute trip along the streets of Houston reminded me that we still share far more than we realize. The great divider may be working hard to make us think that we’re too different, too disagreeable, too far gone, to ever unify in any meaningful way. There may be many who feel there’s too much money to be made in division and perhaps some who hate what our nation has come to represent. But I think there are plenty of Seans out there, working hard to earn a living, trying to do good in their efforts, learning from their mistakes, loving their families, obeying the law, and seeking to find meaning in the communion of a shared humanity that is ultimately seeking the same things.

Thank you Sean. God bless you brother.

There is a something about the shoreline that is magical. The gritty give of sand and its unique texture against the soles of your feet hints at life’s uncertain flow, one moment solid and the next, shifting mysteriously as you try to stabilize. The infinite line of beach extending to either horizon, suggests possibility in both the glimpse it gives, and the fuzzy unknowns of sights too distant for clarity. The persistent waves speak of hidden movements bringing life to and fro, like a heartbeat, steady, rhythmic, and frightfully beyond our control. The expanse of water, near and far, its size and depth beyond reckoning, contains life so abundantly that even our limitless imagination cannot comprehend its sheer scale.

What a beautiful backdrop for the wandering mind, the wondering heart, and the searching soul. We had a chance to get away to the beach last week, and there was more than jellyfish, shells, and driftwood resting upon the sand. Walk with me for a bit along its endlessly variable steadiness.

During a two hour walk along the beach, one can cover significant distance. Even if the mileage isn’t dramatic, much is still revealed. Early, pre-dawn walking reveals the wildlife: a sole heron hunting along the shoreline, stingrays foraging in shallow pools near the beach, small terns diving into the water to grab fish, and little ghost crabs skimming along the sand and edge of the water grabbing little pieces of whatever they can find. They all prefer the beach when no humans are around. Go figure.

With the sun come the people: fishermen, vacationers claiming beach territory with chairs and umbrellas, shell collectors, casual strollers with coffee cup in hand, runners, and the workers setting up chairs, umbrellas, and other activities for the day. Moving along the beach each day, I passed houses and resorts before moving into a national shoreline park area and its more remote elements. For me, the rewards of such walks lie beyond the places where the people gather. Most never get there.

Watching the patterns of footprints along the beach, one can see where people turn around. Over a few days, individuals and their routines start to become apparent. Most people walk to the edge of the busy areas and then turn back. Footprints diminish quickly at half a mile, and there is almost no one to be seen at 2 miles. For me, that’s where the magic happens. The wildlife is visible, eddy’s form in undisturbed pockets of surf and sand, and the wind speaks truths uninterrupted by human activity. It’s not easy to get there.

Walking on the sand is tiring. However, there is a universal truth in pushing through the discomforts: there is always something interesting in those steps beyond the point where we turn around.

Pausing along the beach to look out over the ocean, I overheard a man with a southern accent talking on his phone. I say “southern accent” because, along with the curious dynamic of hearing one side of a conversation, there is always a sense of otherness in hearing a specific dialect doling out its own particular wisdom. Our regions all have their own colloquialisms but there are universals that come from a nation that is deeply rooted in the values, work ethic, and reasoning of Judeo-Christian thought. Despite our differences, we still share much of the same heritage.

Within seconds, it was clear that the man was speaking with one of his children. He listened intently, his tone was encouraging, and he had a clear sense of what was needed from him. I only listened for about 60 seconds before I hear him say, “If it doesn’t happen, there’s something else.” Faith. Trust. Hope. They underpin our worldview so subtly that we don’t even notice them. We are all hungry for them, seek them in constructive and destructive ways, and possess them as powerful currency in how we interact with those in our lives. We have the power to promote them and the power to take them away.

Of course, there’s always “something else.” Another job. Another love. Another chance. However, delivering what might be a trite response in a powerfully encouraging way is a special challenge, and gift. Here, we are dealing in encouragement and hope is a powerful salve.

I like to talk about my friend Bill and his beach services business. Twenty three years later, he’s still out on the beach with his ever-changing crew. The young men who work with him each season, work very hard. They provide a “white glove” service to demanding vacationers, keep their beaches spotless, and manage the setup and take down of hundreds of chairs and umbrellas each day. We spoke every morning last week as I started my walks. One can cover a lot of ground in a five minute conversation.

Walking away from him one morning, I was reminded of Fezziwig from Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Remember Fezziwig? He was the joyful proprietor of the business where Scrooge first worked. Hosting a Holiday Party for his employees, he spent lavishly and encouraged revelry among his employees. I’ve never seen Bill dance, spend lavishly, or laugh out loud. However, he possesses a joy, a quiet serenity, that emanates from his person. He is not chasing wealth, an “exit,” power, control, or pleasure in his little business. He is chasing happiness.

The character of Fezziwig was a reflection of happiness. He represented an abiding joy that was not caught up in worldly notions of success, maximizing his wealth, or squeezing the last drop of productivity out of his employees. We get to choose our lifestyle, the way we live, no matter what we are doing, how much we are making, or the status of our particular occupation. There can be vocation and purpose in wherever we are, what we are called to do, and how we choose to respond. I think Fezziwig, and Bill, are on to something.

Returning to our condo one day, I noticed a sign at the pool nearby. “Do Not Enter Pool if Ill with Diarrhea.” For some reason, I thought of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. Though I doubt this one will present itself in his next book, it struck me on several levels.

First of all, how sad that we need a sign reminding us to stay out of the public pool when we have diarrhea. There was a moment in time when this sign became necessary and everyone ever since must see it and wonder. Likely, it was a parent trying to keep a child happy and occupied but, come on, can’t we figure this out? Such is the way with so many signs and rules. We keep inviting other people to protect us from our own stupidity.

Beyond the obvious in this sign, rests something more profound. Think about your daily interactions. How often are you taking your illness into someone else’s pool? How often are they bringing their illness into yours? The reality is that we routinely bring our “diarrhea” into the lives of those around us, spilling our illness into the collective pool of our togetherness. Think about it: gossip, grumpiness, complaint, sarcasm, ill-will, indifference, and even sadness, are all part of our personal illness which we present to others.

For many, these things become habits which are very hard to break. They are an illness we often choose, then allow to spill onto others. Sometimes, we can’t help the holes we fall into. That’s life. However, we can help taking our sickness into the pools of others. We truly belong to each other and part of that is showing up for one another when in need. I’m not proposing a stoic, keep-it-all-inside form of living. However, my guess is that we could all be a bit more aware of sharing an excess of our own illness and take more responsibility in buffering a bit when we are in a bad way.

There is something about the shoreline that is magical. The unique combination of surf, sand, and sky, can settle the soul and allow a wandering heart and wondering mind to find firm footing, even amid the shifting sand. The real insight is that we all need a bit of distance from time to time, to re-center, re-orient, and reclaim, perspective on our own lives. Life is the beach, and the biggest insights often come from the least obvious and most mundane aspects of our lives. The beautiful ordinary we so often take for granted holds it all, right in front of us, every day.

It’s good to be home. Bringing some of that beach back to Indiana today, the joy comes with it along with the steady rhythm of those waves still washing upon my shores.