She was only thirteen-years-old.  We did not know her personally.  She had been a student in a private school in the northern suburbs of Atlanta.  We only heard what happened because my children also attend private schools in those same suburbs, and with social media, kids talk.  The news got around.  During school hours, this child walked into a bathroom and killed herself.  But the kids do not call it suicide.  That word remains unspoken.  Instead they say “committed.”  The thirteen-year-old girl “committed.”  The specific act is implied, left out, perhaps, because one word sounds more dramatic than two.  It is hard to say.  I just know that the young have come up with their own way of naming an act that cannot be undone – that itself is the very signature of hopelessness, despair, darkness beyond measure. 

Edwin Arlington Robinson seemed to know something about this darkness.  In his 1897 poem entitled “Richard Cory,” Robinson lays bare the exterior and, importantly, interior lives of a man who everyone assumed had it all together.  The poem is worth quoting in its entirety. 

Whenever Richard Cory went down town, 

We people on the pavement looked at him: 

He was a gentleman from sole to crown, 

Clean favored, and imperially slim. 

And he was always quietly arrayed, 

And he was always human when he talked; 

But still he fluttered pulses when he said, 

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked. 

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king— 

And admirably schooled in every grace: 

In fine, we thought that he was everything 

To make us wish that we were in his place. 

So on we worked, and waited for the light, 

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; 

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, 

Went home and put a bullet through his head. 

In past episodes, I have talked about the spiritual malaise that emerged out of the Industrial Revolution.  Folks were not treated like the human beings they were – children of God with hopes and dreams, loves and struggles – and with rising ideologies, nihilism, existentialism, and Darwinism incessantly pressuring individuals to see the world without meaning – to see themselves as mere accidents of nature – the end result was a multi-faceted disaster.  World wars.  Genocides.  You have heard me say it here before. 

Robinson’s poem, then, is both reflection and prophecy.  It is where he was at the end of the 19th century; it is where the West was going into the twentieth.  Could the poem be anything else, however?  Readers are often stunned by the abrupt, even nonchalant ending.  Does that, dear listeners, amount to a challenge?  Is Robinson’s nonchalance a call to be awake to the darkness that is enveloping the affluent West? 

Perhaps.  If we take it as such then we must necessarily be awake to the individuals around us, for, as Ian Maclaren, Scottish writer and Protestant minister penned in the latter half of the 19th century, we should “[b]e kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”  We should build each other up, not tear each other down.  But this, I hasten to add, takes courage and a willingness to step away from what distracts us.  Indeed, it takes an intentionality that resolutely breaks through superficial and even silly social mores that impede us from knowing the true story about a person.  I am not suggesting that we be rude or otherwise nosy about a person’s business.  I am simply suggesting that we strive to lead authentic lives and have authentic interactions with those around us.  Not long ago, I had a strapping young man in my class.  He was an athlete, imposing, physically strong, without a doubt.  I asked him how he was doing.  He said that he was doing fine.  But then I paused, leaned in a bit.  No really, I said.  How are you doing?  That is when he began to cry.  I really wanted to know.  He really needed to tell me, someone, anybody who would listen without judgment. 

So I want to try something different with you all, dear listeners.  “We people of the pavement” thought they knew Richard Cory.  Had him in the bag.  Understood him in his entirety.  But they were wrong.  Sadly so.  Had they only asked him how he was doing – sincerely, authentically, from the heart – the outcome might have been different.  To be sure, so many horrific, unspeakable outcomes might have been different.  So please, muster your courage and ask.  You never know who might at that moment be losing a battle against a different voice, an evil voice, pushing them to commit, what, the world is too self-absorbed to say. 

First published in 1927, Ernest Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants” takes place at a train station in Spain where a couple, an American man and a character simply described as a “girl,” are waiting for the express to Madrid.  It is hot, and in typical Hemingway fashion, the characters begin their exchange by talking about what they would like to drink.  Dos cervezas.  Two beers.  Big ones, at that.  After being served, the girl makes a simple observation.  The hills in the distance, she says, look like white elephants.  This is as innocuous a statement as could be made, but it is the beginning of an exchange that has nefarious, ignoble currents.  The girl, the reader soon intuits, is pregnant, and the man, through guile and clever wordsmithing, is trying to convince her to have an abortion.  He says it’s “just to let the air in” and after this happens, they will both be so happy.  What makes his scheme so duplicitous, however, is how he repeats the words “don’t do it” if you do not really want to.  He makes the argument that they will be as they were before – blissful, free of responsibility – only, again, only – if she agrees to go through with it.  Discerning readers see and understand his attempt at reverse psychology, and perhaps the girl does, too, for, in the end, she begs, “Would you please please please please please please please stop talking?”  She has had enough of his efforts, his manipulative ways, and soon thereafter, to his question, “Do you feel better?” replies, “I feel fine.  There’s nothing wrong with me.  I feel fine.” 

The defeatist sarcasm practically jumps off page. 

Sometimes, readers are disgusted by the man, but other times, I will hear the tired refrains from the Pro-Choice camp.  My body, my choice.  I do not need to repeat the slogans.  Two interpretations.  Two takes on a short story nearing a hundred years old.  Given the fact that the story is a product of the same century that gave us the sexual revolution, I wonder if it might be helpful to offer a different sort of analysis – one that scratches at the surface of what it fundamentally means to be human. 

Dear listeners, allow me to offer the following: We are made in the image of God, the Creator.  As such, we are made to create.  We create books and cities, machines and paintings, and, most importantly, we create babies.  Little human beings with immortal souls.  From conception, I hasten to add.  When we indulge in sexual sin, however, which is to say any sexual act that is not intended to create, we, thus, fail to live up to being a creator, to being, as it were, in the image of God.  Again, sexual sin, and I will leave it to you to spell out the list, is sin that does not create – sin that is not ordered to create.  This is likely why sexual sin and the traps that lead to it are so prevalent.  In our films, in our music, in our advertisements, in our news feeds -- the temptation to sin sexually is alarmingly pervasive.  But why?  Have you ever asked yourself why, around every corner, on every station and channel, a part of so much public discourse is there so much sexually laced content?   Perhaps it is precisely because it tempts us to reject being in His “image.”  The enemy – that fallen angel secularists insist is an invention of the Godly to keep people in fear and under control – wants us to live in a distorted and disordered way.  He does not want us to be image-bearers of God.  He does not want us to see each other as children of God with souls.  What does this mean?  A society in the death grip of pornography and, as it relates to Hemingway, abortion is either heading toward a nihilistic end or, sadly, is already there. 

When the girl finally acquiesces, the man’s response is telling.  He says, “I don’t care anything about it.” 

So there you have it. 

Does a nothingness worldview follow shortly on the heels of indifference?  Is apathy a sure way to meaninglessness?  It seems to be the case.  Nihilism is the opposite of the “image” bequeathed to each one of us by God Himself.  So let’s recognize the tactics for what they are and the silver tongues surrounding us repeating “don’t do it; don’t do it” all the while placing the temptation beneath our very nose, for not to do so runs the risk of a future when we will be unable to recognize ourselves let alone God who formed us out of the dust. 

As an undergraduate at Lock Haven University, I would sometimes jog along the Susquehanna River while discussing Milton or Donne or the infamous Popish Plot with my roommate.  Later, when I became a graduate student, those conversations moved inside, and I along with others pursuing advance degrees would sit with our wine around stacks of books each taking a turn at reading some passage, some poem out loud.  I am first to admit that those were halcyon days.  Our only worries involved writing papers and keeping up with the reading.  But we were happy sponges who delighted in masterful turns of phrases and rapier wit. 

It was a year or two before I wrapped up that leg of my formal studies that I discovered poet Charles Bukowski.  I cannot recall how.  I do not remember him being assigned in class.  In fact, when sharing news of his discovery, a female professor in the English department declared, “Of course you like him!  You’re a man!” 

The retort was not meant to be supportive. 

I could not get enough of his work.  I bought every collection of poetry I could find by the rough-around-the-edges poet because I found him to be incredibly authentic.  He was real.  There was no pretense about him.  He smoked.  He drank.  He cussed.  He womanized.  He gambled.  Bukowski arrived on the scene at a time in my life when my understanding of literature and writing was likely getting a bit too stuffy.  Indeed, his ability to be true – to the world, to his readers, to himself – shocked me out of a dusty stupor and reminded me why we are the types of creatures that write at all.  It was a curious epiphany.  What does it mean to study the written work of other human beings?  I had been reaching for what they had to offer.  I had not considered why I was reaching for it at all. 

Bukowski wrote untold numbers of poems in his lifetime.  I could offer any one of them, and you, dear listeners, might get a good taste of his style and approach.  It is the following poem, however, that best captures his no-frills directness: 

The poem is entitled, So you want to be a writer? 

if it doesn't come bursting out of you  

in spite of everything, 

don't do it. 

unless it comes unasked out of your 

heart and your mind and your mouth 

and your gut, 

don't do it. 

if you have to sit for hours 

staring at your computer screen 

or hunched over your 

Typewriter 

searching for words, 

don't do it. 

if you're doing it for money or 

fame, 

don't do it. 

if you're doing it because you want 

women in your bed, 

don't do it. 

if you have to sit there and 

rewrite it again and again, 

don't do it. 

if it's hard work just thinking about doing it, 

don't do it. 

if you're trying to write like somebody 

else, 

forget about it. 

if you have to wait for it to roar out of 

you, 

then wait patiently. 

if it never does roar out of you, 

do something else. 

if you first have to read it to your wife 

or your girlfriend or your boyfriend 

or your parents or to anybody at all, 

you're not ready. 

don't be like so many writers, 

don't be like so many thousands of 

people who call themselves writers, 

don't be dull and boring and 

pretentious, don't be consumed with self- 

Love. 

the libraries of the world have 

yawned themselves to 

Sleep 

over your kind. 

don't add to that. 

don't do it. 

unless it comes out of 

your soul like a rocket, 

unless being still would 

drive you to madness or 

suicide or murder, 

don't do it. 

unless the sun inside you is 

burning your gut, 

don't do it. 

when it is truly time, 

and if you have been chosen, 

it will do it by 

itself and it will keep on doing it 

until you die or it dies in you. 

there is no other way. 

and there never was. 

At the end of the day, I am glad that I was steeped in the classics.  I was blessed with the opportunity to receive such an education, and I remain very, very grateful.  I acknowledge that many would have loved the same access.  I am also happy, though, that Bukowski came relatively late in the game – as if he were the cherry on top.  When I began my studies, I was just a kid from a small town in Pennsylvania who spoke plainly.  Toward the end of that leg of my formal studies, I was reintroduced to the power of plain language by a poet who likely did not give a rat’s ass about the academy.  All said and done, it was a lesson in humility and a reminder – not so subtle, I hasten to say – that language and story should never have gatekeepers – that a person should never have to check with those who have titles and rank to determine if that language and those stories have worth.  We all have the built-in ability to recognize the authentic.  This is, after all, Bukowski’s thesis.  We should not pretend to be someone we are not.  We should not force the story.  And this goes for our lives as much as it goes for anything else, for it should never be contrived.  Contrived work and contrived lives are no good to anyone even if you are a man or, perhaps, especially so. 

Henry David Thoreau wished to live deliberately, so on July 4, 1845, he walked into the woods by Walden Pond and lived a simple life for two years.  Industrial society had gotten too much.  Rapid developments in technology and the sciences along with a burgeoning awareness that something was not quite right – perhaps spiritually – prompted the unique-looking man to step away from it all.  Thoreau had had enough.  It was time to withdraw and regroup.  Rediscover what is important.  Take a breath and think.  By still water, no less.  Not a stream.  Not a river.  A pond in the Massachusetts forest. 

Thoreau was a Transcendentalist, which meant that, like his friend and contemporary, Ralph Waldo Emerson, he believed in the agency of the individual – that every man, every woman, every child had immeasurable worth, but this worth was in opposition to the ruthless machinations of a faceless society that was only concerned with wealth and power.  A person was much more than a cog in a machine that benefited the few.  A person had a spirit, a good spirit, which led him to pen the words, “all good things are wild and free.”  It is difficult not to see the Americanness of this assertion.  Wildness.  Freedom.  Thoreau was the mind of a nation that had seemed to forget itself.  While hordes of people dutifully marched into the factories, clocked in, worked long hours, and then clocked out only to do it again the next day and again and again, a thinker with untamed hair entered the forest and by doing so reacquainted America with our wilderness roots only to emerge with insights like a thunderclap to arouse anybody who would listen from their dreadful slumber.  He writes in his essay entitled “Civil Disobedience” that “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.” 

We might be tempted to thank Thoreau for his contribution to the formation of the American conscience, but that affable nod might be premature. 

Recently, I was having a discussion with my students about escapism.  A person cannot turn this way or that without seeing somebody, head down, absorbed by their devices.  I suggested that it was another form of escapism.  During the Great Depression, folks fled into the movie theatres to get even an hour’s worth of escapism from a poor, dirty, and desperate world.  They did the same during the Cold War when the atomic bomb imposed an existential threat.  As the years stacked up to where we are today, it can easily be pointed out that our screen time has increased.  One hour a week in the 1930s – umpteen hours a day in the current year.  The reason, I argue, is the same.  Escapism.  The world is too much. 

I turned it back around to my students.  Why is the world too much?  Their answers were at the ready.  Wars.  Climate change.  Rising rates of depression.  School shootings.  No hope.  No ray of light. 

Quiet desperation.  It had not gone away; it had only become worse. 

You, dear listeners, have probably already heard of the following schema to understand history: soft times create weak men; weak men create hard times; hard times create strong men; strong men create soft times. 

When society reaches a certain level of affluence – when everybody carries on their person a little computer that gives them access to untold amounts of information, allows them to keep in touch with others around the world, shop, affirm, discover, snoop, search, like, connect, learn, and, yes, order Chipotle, then we can safely assume that our world today is soft and that our members are weak.  Are hard times to follow?  Nobody can know.  But is it in us to rediscover the fact that we were fearfully and wonderfully made?  Thoreau took a two-year walk in the woods and said that we could.  Perhaps our walk awaits.  We do not want to be desperate anymore. 

Psychologists have a term for it.  Collective inattention.  Imagine a group of, say, coworkers, chatting in a circle.  One of the coworkers has a piece of broccoli in between his teeth.  Everybody notices but nobody says anything.  This is collective inattention.  Or when a class is sitting in a classroom with one of the lights out.  They all know it is dim.  But nobody moves to turn on the light.  Again, collective inattention: an unspoken decision to do nothing to correct a problem. 

Nobel Prize recipient, author, and Holocaust survivor, Elie Weisel did not use this term in a speech he delivered in Washington, D.C. in 1999, but he might as well have.  The author of the acclaimed 1960 memoir about his time in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, Night, recounts the rage the American GIs expressed when they liberated the camps – how he could not understand their language, but how he was grateful for their righteous anger.  They bore witness to one of the biggest crimes against humanity in modern times, standing there in a hellscape, littered with, as Weisel puts it, “Muselmanners” or those prisoners who were on the ground “wrapped in their torn blankets...staring blankly into space.”  These broken individuals, he continues, “no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst.  They feared nothing.  They felt nothing.  They were dead and did not know it.” 

It is likely that these scenes haunted the American soldiers for the rest of their lives.  Indeed, like the rest of us, they likely asked themselves over and over again how something like the Holocaust could have occurred at all.  What would they say if they found out that major world leaders at the time actually knew what was happening in the camps?  Indeed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, among others, was aware of what Hitler’s Nazi machine was perpetuating.  The final solution.  The beloved Commander-in-Chief was informed. 

Wiesel notes that this sad fact has understandably sullied FDR’s reputation among the Jews.  To be sure, the fact that the St. Louis, a ship containing a thousand Jewish refugees, fleeing from Hitler’s Europe, was turned away from an American port in the run-up to the war and that some American companies continued to do business with Germany up until 1942 should be cause to revisit established narratives from that time in history.  The Wehrmacht could not have conducted its invasion of France without oil from American sources.  This is a disturbing piece of the puzzle, indeed. 

How does one explain this indifference?  Wiesel, who was speaking, I hasten to say, in front of the Clintons while Bill was still in office, asks this question directly.  When he brings up other crimes committed by humans against other humans, the question only grows in volume.  Why do people shrug their shoulders in the face of so much pain, so much suffering, so much evil? 

Is the answer psychological in nature?  I had a professor as an undergraduate to proclaimed that, had we been living in Germany in the 1930s, barring obvious racial considerations, we would all be Nazis.  We are more herd animal than we care to accept.  Even when the issue is glaring, our impulse is to do nothing on our own.  We defer to the group.  And nothing gets done.  Collective inattention, indifference, apathy.  Armchair statesmen might rally and proclaim that they would certainly take a stand, but history and human behavior point to a different reality. 

Wiesel’s speech ends with a litany of unanswered questions.  And that makes sense because they amount to a plea, not so much for the old man Wiesel is becoming, but for the child – the one who experienced the camps – who has never left him as well as the children of the new millennium, marching into the future with fear and hope, hope and fear.  Perhaps the one remedy to indifference is to see the children as belonging to all of us.  A parent would point out the broccoli.  A parent would turn on the light.  We already have our model, after all –not my Father or your Father but ours. 

Abraham’s first reaction to the news that he and his wife Sarah would bear a son, Isaac, was to laugh.  They both were up there in years, and the thought that he would be the father of a great nation was ludicrous.  Abraham discounted both himself and Sarah.  He passed judgment.  He failed to see God’s plan.  To the first question, How do I feel about myself?, Abraham might have said that he did not feel up to the challenge.  He was too old.  Life and the opportunities with it had passed him by. 

It occurred to me on a chilly walk to the gym that I am guilty of this posture toward myself, too.  Unilaterally, I take in the world around me and declare what I cannot do because of age or talent or position or connections or money or what have you.  And if I am honest, any account I take of myself typically yields negative results.  I am a sinner.  I hate this or that about myself.  I am afraid.  I am tired.  I am trying as hard as I can, but it is clear that it is not enough.  So I take it to God in prayer, which leads us to the second question: How do I feel about God?   

God, of course, is almighty.  He is omnipotent.  He can do anything.  And he deserves my worship.  But resting on that question alone can create feelings of great distance between us and our Creator.  I am so small; He is so big.  How could we ever possibly connect? 

It is on the third question, dear listeners, that I would like to pause, for it is, I believe, the most important one: How does God feel about me?  On my short, cold walk to the gym, I stopped and regarded the sunset as I chewed on the question.  The first two questions – How do I feel about myself? and How do I feel about God? are important, but it seems to me that the third question is the linchpin: the proper lens through which we must see our very existence.  He sees us with perfect clarity.  He knows us better than we know ourselves.  And there are no limits to what He can do with us to grow His kingdom on earth. 

For many of you, I am sure, I am stating the obvious.  God loves us.  Check.  But I still wonder if we are living in a culture that amplifies the first question, dismisses the second, and forgets the third.  Indeed, we seem to be verifiably obsessed with answering the question, How do I feel about myself?  To be sure, we have created a whole industry to find the answers, and from my vantage point, all it seems is that we are digging the hole deeper and deeper, uncovering so-called conditions that were never a thing even a decade ago.  How do I feel about myself?  Take a seat.  Do you have an hour?  We defer to feelings and whims, and while I may not have a conclusion just yet as to where this is going, patterns are emerging that suggest that we like the Nanny state a bit too much. 

The second question typically gets brushed to the side.  God can be anything someone wants Him or Her or It to be.  A distant clockmaker.  A cosmic errand boy.  A force that is ultimately, and sadly, apathetic to the trials and tribulations of humankind.  But, in the end, there is nothing but conjecture.  Differences of opinion.  Confusion where there ought not be any. 

But, again, the third question: How does God feel about me?  Or Abraham?  Or Sarah?  Or, years upon years later, Elizabeth, Mary’s cousin, who also found herself to be with child late in life?  Perhaps it is a matter of rubrics: God’s and ours.  Our methods of measurement are limited by virtue of the fact that they have been composed by humans – us.  God’s methods of measurement, on the other hand, are unlimited, and the exciting thing is that He applies them to us – humans.  If we take that worldview – the one where God does and can do the seemingly impossible with flawed human beings – then we are able to step more fully into a great adventure that is centered, not on anything we come up with, but on everything God has come up with and will come up with.  So, dear listeners, how does God feel about each of us?  Go ahead and laugh because the answer is more than any of us could possibly imagine. 

Few would deny that Hanson is an exceptional wordsmith. The prose in her memoir, The End of Tennessee, regularly slips into the poetic as she details her tragic coming-of-age that resulted in estrangement from both of her parents and even her siblings; however, what could have been a tale with redemptive notes amounts to an artful diatribe. 

That Hanson was dealt a poor hand early in her life is evident. Both of her parents are depicted as individuals with internal compasses running amok, reaching this way and that to find meaning, secure purpose, and establish roots, but the end results are neglected children, extreme financial distress, at least one extramarital affair, and unfairly burdening the oldest daughter, Hanson, with taking care of her younger siblings. Add to this her parents’ unmoored take on and expression of Christianity, and the outcome is an undeniable disaster, prompting Hanson to, first, attempt the unthinkable and then, second, to run away from home in a fit of desperation after working up the courage to say goodbye to the only ones with whom she sincerely shared a loving bond, her, as she sometimes calls them, “babies.” 

Hanson eventually finds a toehold in this world and begins to scale the ladder in academia, but, in the latter half of the memoir, as she processes the events in her life that prompted her to make a clean break with her family, it is difficult not to notice how her hatred and anger amplifies. To be sure, the number of so-called f-bombs increases, suggesting that, while she “ended Tennessee,” physically, Hanson very much carries Tennessee with her emotionally and, arguably, spiritually. 

Yes, Hanson makes it abundantly clear that she is an atheist. From a former neighbor from her childhood – a preacher – who abused his wife so much that she attempted suicide, to her refusal to join the Orthodox Church with her family, the writing is on the wall with regards to where she would eventually land in a religious or, in her case, anti-religious sense. Indeed, her decision to abort her own baby seems to be a wrathful middle finger toward those who plead on the other side of the fence, as it were. But the inclusion of a scene that openly mocks the Nativity at the very end of the memoir arguably speaks volumes about what may really be going on. She is feeding her pets in the kitchen. They are all named – Fairbanks, Seymour, Punchy – but the boyfriend is simply called “partner,” itself suggesting an aversion to emotional attachment. Off the cuff, he conflates the Nativity story, the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, with their cats preferring wet food to dry.  She writes, “In the time of Caesar Augustus a decree went out that all wet food should be taxed, and so being of the house of Baker Place, Behr (a dog) and Punchy came to North Carolina from the East, and Seymour who was with child Fairbanks came from the West, and when they arrived they waited in the kitchen, for there was no room for them in the bed.  In the fields the shepherds were watching over their flocks when suddenly an angel appeared in the sky, and said, ‘Behold, I bring you good tidings of great wet food.  For this very day, in the city of Asheville, wet food is served.”  I could go on, but I won’t.  The mockery is a bit much.  Tellingly, Hanson is quick to note that her boyfriend is a former Catholic, so at first glance, a reader might chalk this scene up as an attempt to be cute or even random. But given the trajectory of a memoir that eventually comes to this place, it seems likely that Hanson is making a damning statement on the basic unit of society throughout the ages – the family – and that the real resentment, beyond her mother, beyond her father, is vertically directed.  Her beef, in other words, is with God and the Holy Family – that ideal of families – even if she does not know it. 

Ultimately, The End of Tennessee is emblematic of one strain in Western society that prefers deconstruction to construction, but to be charitable, the memoir reveals much in the way of why there is this strain.  Broken families.  Individuals who promote self over others.  And pride.  Always pride.  In the end, while Hanson, perhaps on purpose, does not entertain any possible silver linings outside of her own liberation, readers may nevertheless come away with their own path forward – a reorientation toward what family should be, must be, or else – and this, arguably, is the memoir’s best attribute. 

My generation, Generation X, had Nirvana and Pearl Jam.  We wore our flannel shirts and ripped jeans with the pride of teenagers wondering what the twenties will be like, and we were the first generation to use email in our interactions.  But before all of this -- the rise of grunge music and the internet – we had the Muppets.  A happy memory from my childhood includes waiting all week for the next episode and being completely tuned into it when it aired, and, yes, “aired” is another term from my youth: not streamed.  Fozzie Bear was always my favorite, though Animal always made me chuckle.  Part of the Muppets family also included Emmet Otter from Emmet Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, which premiered in December of 1977, days shy of my third birthday.  The storyline is simple enough.  Emmet Otter wants to get his mother a piano, so he puts a hole in her washtub to fashion a washtub bass with the idea that he and his friends could enter and win a talent contest.  His mother has the same idea.  She hocks a toolkit to get money to buy fabric for a dress she plans to wear as a contestant in the same contest.  Emmet’s mother wants to buy him a guitar for Christmas.  Neither knows the other’s plans and, sadly, neither wins the contest.  Viewers are gifted with a surprise ending that will not be ruined here.  Understandably, songs permeate the holiday special, but one in particular has caught my fancy.  “When the River Meets the Sea” is a lament about crossing over from this life to the next.  We learn that Emmet Otter’s father is dead, which explains why mother and son are so financially strapped, so when the mother breaks into song about mountains and clouds, a river and the sea, viewers get a glimpse into the heart of a widow, doing her best to provide for her son.  She sings, “When the mountain touches the valley, all the clouds are taught to fly / as our souls will leave this land most peacefully.  /  Though our minds be filled with questions, in our hearts we’ll understand / when the river meets the sea.” 

As a boy, my curiosity may have been piqued by her sadness, but I can assure you, dear listener, that I was not explicating the lyrics as I might now explicate a poem.  There was no intense study – no major effort to unpack the meaning of the lyrics.  I now look at one of the delights of my childhood in a different light, though.  Why would somebody include a song about the afterlife in a children’s show?  Perhaps it can be chalked up to it being a different time.  Some episodes of the Muppets included alcohol and smoking, after all.  If you are curious, Google the Muppets and “The Gambler” by Kenny Rogers.  Much of that would not pass muster in children’s programming today.  But even so, is the inclusion of “When the River Meets the Sea” a nod to a greater understanding of what children can handle?  Were children somehow included in a conversation that is difficult to have? 

The metaphor is beautiful.  Rivers wind.  The zig, and they zag.  They get deep, and they get shallow, placid and rough.  Sometimes they even dry up, and sometimes somebody wants to dam them up – stop their flow.  It is a circuitous, unpredictable existence, yet the sea awaits them all: enormous, expansive, as the song later tells us, “almighty.”  Emmet Otter’s mother continues, “Like a flower that has blossomed in the dry and barren sand, / We are born and born again most gracefully. / Thus the winds of time will take us with a sure and steady hand / when the river meets the sea.” 

What we cannot begin to understand in our minds, our hearts will understand.  Our hearts will know.  That great leap – that great transition – does not require an advanced degree in theology.  Perhaps, then, we have our answer as to why the song is in a children’s show.  Our deaths will be simple.  Our hearts already know the way.  Peace comes in accepting this to be true.  As Christ says, "Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God.”  It is fitting, then, that the song ends the way it does.  She concludes, “Like a baby when it is sleeping in its loving mother’s arms, / what a newborn baby dreams is a mystery / But his life will find a purpose and in time he’ll understand / when the river meets the sea. / When the river meets the almighty sea.” 

The Muppets.  On life.  On passing.  On our universal journey to the sea. Wacka.  Wacka.  Wacka. 

Paul Kalanithi could have been anything.  He was a gifted individual who excelled in both the arts and the sciences, earning, among other degrees, a Master of Arts in literature from Stanford University.  His lot, however, was to be a medical doctor because he eventually ended up at Yale School of Medicine.  Kalanithi’s life could have continued to be storied as he was a rising star in the field of neurosurgery; however, in his early thirties, just as he was beginning to catch his stride in a would-be successful career, he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer.  In 2015 at just thirty-seven years old, he died leaving behind a wife and a one-year-old daughter.  His memoir, When Breath Becomes Air, tracks his meteoric rise and tragic battle with the disease that would take him from this world.  His wife, Lucy, would write the epilogue. 

Kalanithi came from a Christian family, but like many twenty-somethings, he experimented with different ideas not exactly in keeping with the faith of his childhood.  Eventually, he would return to his Christian roots, which is why it is not surprising to see his reflection on life and the death that was fast approaching sprinkled with scripture.  On coming to terms with his own inescapable mortality, he writes, “Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes described, hold so little interest: a chasing after wind, indeed.”  When we think of our lives, we are tempted to rest in the notion that it is one long and unending trajectory upwards.   A ladder.  We go from milestone to milestone – graduation, college, a first job, marriage, children – until, if we are lucky to live so long, we run out.  And then what?  We are left with a pair of questions: What was worth it, and what was a waste of my energy?  For Kalanithi, the answer came in stark relief as his final contribution to his memoir was a chapter written about his infant daughter, Cady.  His body will die as will each of ours.  That is what it means to live in a fallen world.  But there is something that human beings create together that transcends natural law.  It may even be called sacred.  Kalanithi continues, “I hope I’ll live long enough that she (his daughter) has some memory of me.  Words have a longevity I do not.  I had thought I could leave her a series of letters – but what would they say?  I don’t know what this girl will be like when she is fifteen; I don’t even know if she’ll take to the nickname we’ve given her.  There is perhaps only one thing to say to this infant, who is all future, overlapping briefly with me, whose life, barring the improbable, is all but past.  That message is simple: When you come to one of the many moments in life where you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more but rests, satisfied.  In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.” 

I would not want to suggest that Kalanithi, at this point, has revealed some secret about the meaning of life, but I would suggest that he takes a robust step in that direction by reflecting on his relationship with his daughter. 

God, to a Christian, is not merely a rule-maker and rule-enforcer.  That would make us subjects to a Divine king.  On the contrary, God is our Heavenly Father.  Just as Jesus Christ Himself cried out from the cross, “Abba!” we, too, are encouraged to see God as Abba, which, loosely translated, means “Daddy.”  It is familial.  Tender.  It suggests a close relationship, not a contractual arrangement.  While we may not all be parents, we are all someone’s child, so, at least in theory, we have access to this way of relating.  As a parent myself, however, this hits me in a special and profound way, and, if I am honest, Kalanithi’s words about his daughter delivered a gut-punch of emotion.  Why do we do anything if not to lift up others, especially our children?  Kalanithi may have accomplished quite a lot in his short life, but in the literal end, all that mattered what his daughter who, likely, could not even say, “Daddy.”  His joy was in the immediate present.  No more making plans.  No more setting goals.  Happiness was in the right now. 

So perhaps the takeaway is this: we can appreciate the milestones.  We can look forward to the celebratory parties.  But the reality is that all we really have is the here and now and the ability to decide who gets to be with us in it.  “Even if I am dying,” Kalanithi writes, “until I actually die, I am living.”  Our exit from this world will come to pass.  It is why scripture refers to our physical bodies as tents.  On this side of paradise, they were only meant to be temporary.  But until then, here we are.  At this moment.  A happy overlap if we let it. 

https://www.amazon.com/When-Breath-Becomes-Paul-Kalanithi/dp/081298840X

Decades after the publication of two of his most celebrated novels, The Grape of Wrath and Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck, two years shy of his sixtieth birthday, embarked on a journey to rediscover America.  With his black poodle, Charley, Steinbeck trekked across the country in a camper he dubbed Rocinante: a humorous nod to Don Quixote’s mount in the 1605 and 1615 book by Miguel de Cervantes.  He packed plenty of paper, plenty of writing utensils, and plenty of booze only to run into the traffic snarl that is New York City and surrounding areas.  Eventually, he broke free and headed first to New England and then west to Niagara Falls, Chicago, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Seattle, and then he turned south.  California.  His old stomping grounds, Salinas.  And then east.  The Mojave Desert.  Texas.  New Orleans.  The deep South.  And finally north.  Virginia.  New York.  Long Island and his home in Sag Harbor.  In 1960, the year he took this trip, America was in the midst of the Cold War.  The Korean conflict had been put on pause, and the war in Vietnam had not yet broken out, at least for the Americans.  Steinbeck wrote about his country his entire career, joking one time that he could not join the rest of the expatriates – Ernest Hemingway among them – in Paris because he could not afford the price of a ticket.  His muses were his own people: salt of the earth types whose hands were always calloused, whose days were filled with toil under the sun, dawn till dusk.  Steinbeck felt that he needed to reacquaint himself with these people, his countrymen: listen to the cadences in their voices, the words they use, the concerns they have.  America was in a different place, politically speaking.  The smoke from the second Red Scare, fomented by the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, still lingered, which meant that Americans were still acutely suspicious of anything even resembling communism.  The Russians and the Chinese were our enemies.  Nobody wanted to be called pinko.  To be sure, the country was on edge.  Atomic war remained a very real and sobering possibility.  This was the charge in the air Steinbeck discovered everywhere he went. 

How many Americans reacted to Russian “groupness” was to become hyper individualistic.  If the Commies deferred to the government to do their thinking, then a good American thought for him or herself.  They were shackled to mindless conformity.  We were independent in every sense of the word.  The way many Americans lived in the world was socio-politically inspired.  This was the age of the Lone Ranger.  Gunsmoke.  Wagon Train.  Bonanza.  TV series that celebrated American ruggedness and individuality.  Can-do, stand-up men who defeat their enemies with wit and wiles and, of course, rifles.  It was nostalgia brought to life on these relatively new machines populating living rooms across the country: television sets.  It was a reminder of our scrappy roots.  Who we once were.  Who we still are.  Hi-ho Silver. 

This was much different from the America Steinbeck had written about in the 1930s.  The Great Depression was extremely rough, to say the least, but people stuck by each other.  They helped when they could.  Steinbeck calls it the family of man, but in other places, he calls it the phalanx.  A Roman phalanx was a military unit composed of soldiers who held their shields and weapons in all directions as they moved from place to place.  They worked as a team to accomplish the same goal.  They were very effective and very lethal.  Steinbeck’s America in 1960 did not resemble this way of being a community.  People, he found, were anxious and distant.  In retrospect, the protests and violence of the late 1960s makes sense.  Steinbeck was merely observing the germination.  His travelogue, therefore, becomes very helpful in tracking the trajectory that led to assassinations and the torching of cities.  A man with a black dog told us something about ourselves.  In less than a decade, the madness would peak. 

My grandmother once told me a story about the time she was in a one-room school over on the back of the hill.  Each day, each child would bring an ingredient.  A potato.  An onion.  A few carrots.  And the teacher would gather up the ingredients at the beginning of the day and toss them into a pot that sat on a woodstove in the middle of the classroom.  Whatever was prepared would be lunch.  And this was at the height of the Great Depression. 

What Steinbeck’s book, Travels With Charley, tells us is that the country was becoming one where individuals kept their own potatoes, their own onions, their own carrots, refusing to contribute them to the pot.  And this was over sixty years ago.  Would Steinbeck dare strike out on the road today?  It is yet again a different country.  I, for one, can only speculate with my own black dog, Arrow, and carrots in the refrigerator, my truck in the driveway, the country, the world always at my fingertips. 

https://www.amazon.com/Travels-Charley-Search-America-Steinbeck/dp/0140053204/ref=sr_1_1?crid=10R10TQ5H0F2U&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.agpreFfMvhgG2x7NrlleWw5LipRJenfbMzycgYjYuy0dhKjGjIRPiyN4CPDW57oHZ6bX9MVTxGYV6kL-mgCzPAxE_epcgUR1AYowFIrJNRJsldL-smaST-pF2uHs9_c1AXg3q6EduIXlG4Em2S1g91or-KeROoMWpQRererGDfWv0iUElvbrubHBiZSmqKUQCjw9t44kcCgT7B2ISsdgnyc0ZvN1EAsHsQtRw03NYqA.BWGX3QcFIgX6cUqygAtNRlL1aZXEWAwFyMD69EKP8MU&dib_tag=se&keywords=travels+with+charley&qid=1734230737&sprefix=travels+with+charley%2Caps%2C102&sr=8-1