Archive | December, 2023

The Ripening of the Human Community: a New Year’s Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

31 Dec

It is New Year’s Eve in the US, an erstwhile flipping of the calendar which offers more old symbolism than fresh content as almost all of what we have done – and failed to do – in 2023 will carry forth into 2024.  There is no flipping here so much as dragging, dragging behind us elements of a year which for many was less than they had hoped and for others more fraught with violence and despair then we “civilized” humans should ever tolerate.

For some the past year also brought about reminders of how little we humans seem to have the capacity to shift our present course.  We have invented shiny new tools to generate vast amounts of both wealth and disinformation.  But beyond the realm of the technological, and surely in the realm of politics and policy, we have often offered more lip-service than tangible progress such as when organizing massive, cost-ineffective international conferences only to witness more global warning, more food insecurity, more violence in more places.   

Moreover, we have still not demonstrated the political courage needed to place the aspirations of global youth and the multiply vulnerable on a par with our own.  We have willingly kicked multiple cans down the road, leaving to our children the task of making urgent changes in the midst of crises we could well have resolved — in part if not in full — in our own time.  We have closed the curtains so as not to be worldly distracted from our more repetitive, domiciled distractions.

None of this is news to those of you who still read these posts.  But what to do about this?  What to do (for us at least) about the prospect of another year of polarized politics across national entities, of diplomatic statements by the thousands largely lacking self-awareness, urgency or inspiration, characterized by responsibility frequently projected but rarely  assumed?

It is all that many young people can do to maintain their belief that “life is NOT a joke,” that it is worth trying, worth deferring, worth caring.  The relative cynicism and indifference of our age has clearly and much too often been visited on the young.

In response and in my own small way, what I try to do in these posts is to highlight “takeaways,” images or ideas that might stick with people long after they have logged off this blog.  The quotations which often adorn the front sections of these pieces are designed for that purpose.  You might have little use for what I have to say but also might have your week’s enthusiasm salvaged by excerpts from the accumulated wisdom of women and men who have struggled – in their time and ours – to reinforce the value of arising from slumber and facing life’s challenges, those which affect us directly and those not.

Today’s wisdom appropriate for this calendar flipping comes from Rilke’s “Book of Hours,” lovingly translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.  Among the glorious and passionate imagery in these poems, especially in the “Pilgrimage” section, I have been most captivated by the image of ripening (reift).  For indeed, despite the calling of great minds and artists in diverse cultures and over many generations, we have surely, by temperament and intent, remained an unripe species, stubbornly clinging to familiar vines and branches, refusing to mature as we were intended to mature, even taking pride in the metaphorical hardness generally characteristic of the unripe.

As Rilke reminds, we as a species continue to “entangle ourselves in knots of our own making,” knots which in essence cut ourselves off from the nutrients which ripeness requires.  Thus we continue our collective struggle, increasingly lonely and confused, scratching our heads as we seek to discern how yet another “well-meaning” policy has crashed and burned, how a species with so many reminding us of our potential for caring and justice could routinely practice such cruelty and indifference.

Folks, we can choose to make this the year to untie the knots and allow our species to ripen, to become what we were intended to become, what we must urgently become if our children and their children are to have a fighting chance of life as we know it.  This can be the year to ripen and then to harvest the best of us. Let us strive to make it so.

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Wondrous and Mundane: An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

3 Dec

Space is still filled with the noise of destruction and annihilation, the shouts of self-assurance and arrogance, the weeping of despair and helplessness. But round about the horizon the eternal realities stand silent in their age-old longing.  Alfred Delp

The thing I love most about Advent is the heartbreak. The utter and complete heartbreak. Jerusalem Jackson Greer

Demons are like obedient dogs; they come when they are called.  Remy de Gourmont

There are wounds that never show on the body that are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds. Laurell K. Hamilton

We don’t heal in isolation, but in community. S. Kelley Harrell

We were refugees from ourselves.  Chris Cleave

One should be kinder than needed.  R. J. Palacio

The science behind nudging is little more than a thin set of claims about how humans are “predictably irrational,” and our policies and systems should heavily divest from its influence. Leif Weatherby

This mere snippet of our Milky Way, for me and others, serves as a daily reminder of the incomprehensible vastness of our universe as well as the extraordinary “constellation” of ingredients – including our relative planetary isolation – which has given life on this “third rock from the sun” at least a “puncher’s chance” of sustainable survival.

For me, images such as the one above courtesy of Hubble and Webb, speak to both the nature of Advent and to the complexities of our human condition.  Somehow, someway, we are the beneficiaries of life-permitting distance from the black holes, massive meteor incursions, supernovas and other solar instability which punctuate our galaxy and which could easily hasten the end of life as we know it.  That we have not treated our planetary abundance with the reverence that our galactic positioning warrants is yet another example of our genetic and temperamental limitations, one more reason for all of us to pay closer attention to who we are, what we long for, what we actually cherish, and who we might still become, timing, courage and intention permitting.

Little of the above, of course, would make sense to those long ago, praying under galactic illumination for something or someone to come and redirect the course of humanity, any more than would the eventual, incarnate embodiment of this redirection – a child of cosmic implications and modest means huddled in a barn.

This Advent as with others, I have tried to highlight what for me is a compelling image of a figure in “lonely exile” sitting on the edge of hill beholding the vastness of space in a world without artificial light and the conveniences and distractions which it brings to our own time. How do we make sense of the brilliance and awesomeness of the firmament juxtaposed against the drudgery of much of life then as now, drudgery punctuated by the longing that something or someone can come to us – to our families and communities – providing balm for our seasonal heartbreak while restoring our largely broken hope, a hope that many of us have almost given up believing we have what it takes to bring it home for ourselves and those we cherish.

This “lonely exile” motif highlights some of the complexities of our earthly sojourn, reaching for the stars and yet compelled to attend to some oft-mundane human needs, scanning the heavens for signs of hope while remembering to plant the crops, feed the livestock, prepare the meals, wash the utensils, and change the diapers (or whatever passed for diapers in those times).  Even in Advent, for some of us especially in Advent, we are constantly being dragged back into the habits of our pragmatic busyness, our preparations for the season of the manger which are more about material satisfaction than about spiritual consumption, more about getting our worldly goods in their preferred alignment than honoring the one we had long had the temerity to anticipate, the hope for humanity born into a thinly veiled chaos of social discrimination, straw bedding and bitter cold.   

There is little that would help most in times past to anticipate or even make sense of THAT child in THAT manger at the end of a sequence of longing, reflection and even heartbreak. For more than a few, it makes even less now as we have more or less resigned ourselves to our addictive and even counter-productive politics and diplomatic convenings, accepting the production of ever-new weapons that can kill ever-more antiseptically, threatening the future of the children we proclaim to love in order to satisfy current cravings, and introducing ever new technological manifestations such as “Artificial Intelligence” which among other things underscores the failures of humans to fully cultivate the full range of our indigenous capacities, the memory, reason and skill which constitute our inheritance- — genetic and divine – and which should have placed us long ago on a saner, kinder, less predatory, more just and peaceful path than the one we now routinely tread.

My personal “path” to Advent has not always been as aware nor as productive as it could have been.  I often spend Sunday mornings in New York engaged in a combination of activities which help to cleanse my often-clogged, spiritual palate, and which almost always include skype calls with friends and colleagues and a visit to a nearby farmer’s market with my best neighbor. But another Sunday ritual with Advent implications involves a walk to a neighborhood park to take in the bells of Riverside Church. Sitting under a rendition of Gabriel and his trumpet, I often find myself wishing that the stone could magically turn to flesh and that the trumpet could finally sound out its urgent notes, signaling some desperately needed backup from the beyond, some fortification of our now tepid and at times even duplicitous efforts to reverse climate impacts or halt our various predations and the conflicts from which they stem.  Even I who have thrown my life (alongside so many others) into an unsettled pot of policy and service can at times give in to the temptation – indeed the heartbreak – of fearing that we (and I) just don’t have what it takes to straighten out the messes we have made, that the elements of our cognitive and emotional inheritance are simply insufficiently practiced and cultivated to save us from ourselves. 

But save us we must, with whatever human capacities we can bring to bear, hopefully to include the full range of skills and intelligences that we have been endowed with but have yet to fully energize.  To help this process along in my own life, when I am able and when the darkness enveloping me grants opportunity, I join the “lonely exile”in peering into the vastness of space as a means of recovering my sense of place in all its blessings and limitations, perceiving light reaching the end of its unintentional sojourn to earth spanning many thousands, even millions of our earthly years, light emanating from celestial bodies which now bear only provisional resemblance in real time to what the light reveals to us in our own time, light which also suggests that maybe we are not so imposing a species after all, indeed as much of our treatment of the natural world (and of each other) would already suggest.

For me, such revelations from the great void tend to shake me to my core. For is it not the miracle of Advent that despite our “failure to launch” as a species, despite our often lazy and self-referential engagements with our otherwise formidable capacities, despite our persistent bouts of “self-assurance and arrogance” in the material plane which routinely call out the demons of greed and indifference but less often the courage or the wonder, is it not a miracle of sorts that the vastness of cosmos and divinity has been mindful of us, has bothered with us in this time and place, has perhaps even taken us to heart at times more than we seem to have taken ourselves?

Indeed, is this not also the wonder of the manger from the standpoint of faith, this incarnate blending of the divine and the mundane, the peace which passes all understanding informing a peace to which we only occasionally give expression and which we often do not know how to effect even in our most intimate spaces? We have, to quote a Christian prayer book, “erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.” But even more, we have set ourselves on the path to become “refugees to ourselves,” unsure how to fuse the wonder of the heavens and the chores of our immediate circumstances; how to reach for the stars and fetch the waters essential to this life; how to integrate humility and show kindness beyond that which is immediately required; how to heal wounds — together — which are often deep but which never physically show themselves; how to incarnate, cultivate and sustain skills and capacities which our world still needs and which we still have at the ready, albeit in forms too-often reminiscent of beautiful gardens overcome with weeds or sumptuous foodstuffs contaminated with mold. 

This is too much about we refugees and our limitations perhaps.  But if so, Advent can serve as a reminder to ensure that our reflections on the season are also about the best of us, the best of what we can imagine, the best of what we can desire, the best of what we can accomplish. The longings and mysteries of Advent and the coming of the manger child, for me at least, bear witness to many things, perhaps the most significant of which is that our collective best of skills and capacities remain as a formidable conduit for mercy and healing, for peace and caring. And somehow, by some measure of the grace we can barely comprehend, all this lies still within our grasp.

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