Our Lady, Our Promise

 A couple of weeks ago, I sailed across the North Atlantic from England. It was the end off a month-long adventure that included a study-abroad experience called Royals and Rebels that completed my requirements for a bachelor's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, followed by a couple of days in Paris, part of which was spent learning some new cooking techniques, and a week on the Queen Mary 2, which treated me to seven days of nothing by ocean. But when people ask me my takeaway from it all, the first thing on my mind was this - sailing into New York Harbor on a sparkling Spring morning.

After having spent a month studying and talking to Brits about our relative political woes and hypothesizing their contradictions and solutions....well....this. There were nearly 2000 guests on board ship that day, and not since the sailaway party had they all been in one place at the same time until that morning. The top decks were shoulder-to-shoulder as we approached the harbor and all eyes trained on the lady who greeted us on behalf of the United States of America. My companions were citizens of dozens of countries from all over the world, but an unprompted hush came over them all as we looked at her shining in the sun.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, 

the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. 

Send these, your homeless tempest-tossed, to me. 

I lift my lamp beside the golden door."

Everyone there, even if they didn't know the words inscribed under that raised lamp, knew what she stood for. There we were, a ship peopled with privileged humanity from almost every continent, remembering a French gift to an American people who had done something no one had ever done before and are still trying to figure out how to succeed in it over the long haul.

The morning before, a very distinguished British gentleman had challenged me with this: he encouraged me to picture our country twenty or fifty years from now after we, having relaxed our borders, lived in a land taken over from people from everywhere else. Then I saw that he wasn't talking about us, the United States, but about Britain. England, after having been master of the world and maintaining a stranglehold over, in particular, India, is now a startlingly cosmopolitan nation, with a quarter million Indian immigrants settling there in 2023 alone. He was looking around at what he saw in his own country, didn't like it, and assumed we wouldn't either. 

But there was something that distressed gentleman didn't understand. The UK rests on its tradition and history, one rooted in centuries of kings and queens stretching back in traceable lines. This country does not. The United States is what people from other places made it. 

My grandparents, all of them, made a journey across the ocean similar to mine. They sailed into that same harbor, saw that same monument to hope, and made a life here. A good one. And I'm not the only one. Everyone I know is descended from immigrants. It is immigrants who made this country, ones who trusted the promise made by the monument. Consequently, change may not be that by which the United Kingdom identifies itself, but it is at the root of who we in the U.S. are. 

It's not possible for a people from a foreign country who settles here with the intent to share in our heritage of freedom to "take over". They simply become the latest in the unbroken chain, not of kings and queens, but of people who have a dream for something better. Will we change as a nation because we have welcomed them? Of course, but that, too, is who we are. It's our responsibility to recognize ourselves in them, because a striving toward hope is something we share. 

This is the Fourth of July, a time to celebrate independence from tyranny. That, too, is who we are, even when the tyranny comes from within. As long as this great lady stands at the entrance to our nation, we have a promise to keep to the world and there is a world out there counting on it. 

Photo by the author

Does Anybody Really Know What Time It is?

 

I'm in London, and the theme is time. Obviously, here, that's Big Ben, near Parliament and Westminster in the most powerful place in town. I'm ostensibly here to study and earn the last credits I need for my degree but not unexpectedly, I'm learning more than the art and history of royals and rebels. 

It started when I ran into an altar cloth in Westminster that was embroidered with one of the last lines of TS Eliot's Four Quartets: "When the tongues of flame are infolded into the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one."

These are puzzling words and when I found out they were Eliot, well, that made some sense, but when I looked at the poem, found that the poem in its entirety, all four parts of it, deal with time - its passage and nature. Eliot tries to answer the deepest questions of human experience - questions of time, purpose, futility and meaning. Of course, he concludes there are no simple answers, because there aren't, but there is hope in remembering the restoration promised by Christ. 

Then yesterday our little group went to see Henry the IV, ostensibly to witness old Gandalf, Ian McKellan, as Falstaff, 

but then I heard what Shakespeare had to say there about time, how it passes and what it brings. What it is and what it is not...because there is no time. Not really. Time is a construct, a way to describe what we understand as reality and, regrettably to try to measure it. That doesn't work well. There is only living and the moments of it, not only one by one, but the rush of them and the wind they create. The moving urge of it is here today, in the room where I write, at the hotel breakfast table surrounded by a hundred others speaking a dozen languages I don't understand, brought together by what seem to be tributaries in a vast stream. Our rubbing up against one another may be accidental or it may be a destined nature, but it doesn't matter. I feel like Millais' Ophelia, which we saw at the Tate Britain Gallery the other day...floating along in a beautiful stream and content to be so, whatever comes.

Like that.

It's About Time!

This May 19, I'll walk across the stage at a downtown arena and graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee after starting my freshman year 55 years ago in 1969.

Yes, 1969. I know. It's crazy. But it's also been eye-opening.

You see, I had to. I just got tired of kicking myself for dropping out. And also, I needed some answers. After living a looooong time, I found I still had too many questions and no one in my usual circle of wonderful family, patient friends, and fellow wonderers had the answers. You see, after all these years, I was still asking WHY. 

Why do we humans continue to mess up in the same ways over and over again? (we do) Why do we not do better even when we know better like the common trope says we will? (we don't) Why do so many people still think that humans are basically bad and infallibly handicapped, condemned by original sin by a God who loves them perfectly? (we aren't)  Why still can't we forgive more easily? (we can't - darn) Why are young people so impossibly blind to it all, just staring at their phones? (they aren't). Why don't younger generations fail to see how much better a handle we had on the world than they do? (We didn't. Besides, it's not the same world, dude)

I mean, humans have been wondering the same things since Diogenes held his light up to the faces of strangers in the street looking for an honest man in 300-something BCE (I knew that before I went back to college, by the way) and we still don't have many answers. Or don't we?

Actually, there are more answers to be had than I thought. Here are some of the things I learned:

• Body, soul, and spirit feel like three things (Socrates and Plato thought they were, and from them and Aristotle, Augustine built our theology), but they're not. Humans have a single perfectly cohesive existence that has lots of moving parts. (Thank you, Marty Heidegger). Either that, or life is subsumed into a continuous stream of existence we share with every other living thing (Thank you, Nagarjuna). They aren't as different as you think. 
• Freedom is a two edged sword. While it brings autonomy, it also brings so many mind-numbing choices that it's beginning to paralyze the modern consciousness so that it feels like the only thing for GenZ to do is to hide their heads in escapism in an effort to stay sane.
• When examined closely, life gets more and more absurd. The point of doing Philosophy is to find a reason not to commit suicide. (Thank you, Camus)
• Social media was made to be the perfect place to share laughing babies and mutual victories, but has become the Valley of Despair.
• Modern people are monetized at every turn. Our value to our social system isn't who we are but what we spend. Count the ads on your newsfeed sometime.
• We might be in danger of becoming slaves to our own algorithms. (Alexa is always listening. You know she is.)
• The pace of life has increased to the point where it feels like we are constantly racing toward nowhere.
• The pandemic scared us to our core.

No wonder 20-somethings have been hiding. They're terrified. They still have a whole life to live and they're not sure how to do it. 

• They understand that Socrates was right. The unexamined life is not worth living and they are on the brink of that examination.

And in examining it, we find that in spite of all the terror and confusion, people, all of us, are infused with a dazzling glory - a kind of radiance that gives hope even in the face of all the weirdness of life. If we have the courage, even once in a while, to look at the hard questions together, we may not be able to solve them all but at least we'll be together. Even after all the desperation, if we have the courage to be honest together, good things happen.

And they happened right in front of me. In classrooms. In coffee shops. In chance meetings in the Union. In the caring, brilliant natures of several professors, but one in particular. I will not forget the grace he showed me. In intentional, unpredictable friendships between me and smart, insightful young people who ended up wanting the same things I did and were willing to talk about what might be done to make this world a better place. 

In the process, I found out how to care about those young people. They are much smarter, much kinder, and much more thoughtful than I think we were at the same age. Remember saying "Don't trust anyone over 30" and meaning it? They don't. They not only respected me, they made me their friend. And they made me want to do something for them in return.

So I'm going to. I advise you to do it, too. Listening, really listening, would be a good start.

More on that later. For now, I'm just going to finish the semester and celebrate. If you want the details, and a taste of some of the wonderful people I met, the link to the University article appears below. Thanks for asking, Pat Kaasa. 

Click here to connect to the full article.

February 29 is not a real day

 

Leap Day. Really?

No. It's Not.

In fact, February 29 is not a real day at all, and I have proof.

It was developed as a place holder, after all. An adjustment to keep the calendar in line with the sun and the passage of the actual astronomic year. With that purpose in mind, it was given a purpose, but no significance. All it has to do is come and go so as to keep the other days in their proper places. Nothing is supposed to happen on February 29. No one plans anything on it because it cannot have an annual anniversary. No one gets married or graduates or anything. Heaven help the person who is born on it, who is condemned to get older without getting to celebrate their actual birthday.

And this year, February 29 has proven it's non-dayness even more. Even the weather has deserted it. Today is February 28 and here in Wisconsin, Spring has already arrived. The perennials are sprouting in my garden, we've put away our winter coats, the sun will shine and the temperature will reach nearly 70 degrees. In two days, on March 1, predictions (which are usually right regardless of how much we complain to the contrary) are that it will be the same. 

But the weather on February 29 doesn't fit. It's either been transported from another dimension or has just decided to take a day off altogether. Nineteen degrees and snow. I keep looking at the forecast to decide whether someone has made a horrible mistake or is playing some kind of joke. Nope.

But in the context of the calendar, it makes a wierd kind of sense. February 29th doesn't belong.

Nineteen degrees doesn't belong.

Snow doesn't belong. 

And no one is leaping. 

It is just God's nudge to see whether we're paying attention. 

I think I'll stay in bed.

In fact, I think I'll publish this today just in case it doesn't come after all.