Tag Archives: resignation

Anticipating Newness:  An Advent Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

28 Nov
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Once they’ve rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.  Kouta Hirano

Anticipation is a gift. Perhaps there is none greater. Anticipation is born of hope. Indeed it is hope’s finest expression.  Steven L. Peck

So many of us grow into doubting, hopeless, callous adults protecting hardened hearts. Medicating the pain. Life isn’t what we imagined. Nor are we.  Charles Martin

One who is fed on promises feeds from an empty bowl.  Marsha Hinds

What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.   Henry David Thoreau

You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream. Dejan Stojanovic

For unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly.   Françoise Sagan

As we close this long chapter of weekly posts in anticipation of less frequent but perhaps more impactful contributions, there is much to reflect upon, much to give thanks for.  While the audience for these posts has declined in recent times – a sign perhaps of a voice that has become tiresome and even redundant – I am so grateful to all of you who have dipped your toes in the water we have collected over many years, water which hopefully has helped to nourish both the day to day of this edgy world and that also anticipates a world that is on a path to become cleaner, fairer and greener, one more conducive to the health and well-being of our collective progeny.

I began these weekly posts several years ago in Advent and I will end them with Advent as well.  For those located (or stuck) within the Christian tradition, Advent is perhaps the most neglected of our ecclesial seasons.  We are so anxious to get to Christmas that we utterly fail this season of preparation, of discernment, even of longing.  We too often ignore the value in anticipation of a world in which human and divine converge, where a vast universe of creation deigns to shine its light on our relatively tiny planet and its equally tiny pursuits, light which emanated from the stars long before the dawn of the human age.  The light was there before we were, before our species embarked on this long journey – one clever in large measure but less so in wisdom – a species which now seems alternately passionate about renewal and resigned to what, in some key sectors of human existence at least, has become a precipitous and even ugly decline. 

This pervasive and creeping resignation is why Advent still matters, perhaps matters as much as the holiday season of incarnation to which it is attached, that holiday towards which we drive much too recklessly and certainly over the speed limit.   For how can we fully grasp the significance of the Christmas incarnation – of God with us (if you are able to accompany me there), and thus of a world that can be more than we have imagined it being — if we bypass the anticipatory stage to which it is rightly tethered?  How do we make full sense of a season which has become captive in too many instances of addictive consumption and awkward reunions around a dinner table without also sitting in contemplation of all that is in danger of being lost from life now, and all that could be if we were truly and fully engaged in the task of making it so, indeed if we still believed that such a world is possible?

The anticipation associated with this season is not to be confused with wishful thinking or an excuse to avoid the localized affairs which constitute so much of daily living.  Yes, the universe is vast beyond belief; yes, we are being called to discern more, to abandon resignation and embrace a kinder, fairer scale of possibility.  And yet, there are also diapers to change, wood and water to gather, children and elderly to protect and reassure, bills to pay, dishes to wash, bathrooms to clean, rice to harvest and cook.  On and on it goes, practical responsibilities that force our attention and focus our energy, the many details of responsible living which for many of us are challenging enough all year round, let alone as Christmas approaches, a logistical burden such that this seasonal call of the universe to us – this call of the divine if you will – cannot easily be heard let alone heeded. 

And yet we cannot escape the fact It is anticipation in its best sense that is the glue that literally holds this time of Advent and incarnation and its myriad details together, giving it a full meaning.  Theologians including Paul Tillich understood that to anticipate is to enable the energy of what our hearts long for to directly influence our thoughts and actions, to begin in essence to live in us as though the promise we anticipate is actually on its way, or more precisely is in some way already a living force within us, if not quite yet at its final landing spot. 

We don’t have to look far to see this insight in action.  The woman for whom an engagement ring is a symbol which allows her to anticipate and even map out the contours of a long life with another.  The child anticipating a bicycle for Christmas that is not so much about the object itself but about the future ability to ride through the parks and around the neighborhood.  The farmer attending to the question of to whom to sell and/or give his/her harvested crop while that crop is still months from its full ripeness. 

We know how to do anticipation.  We have experienced some of the effects of longings which have already taken up space in our hearts.  But it is so difficult now to capture this one, unique Advent longing as the logistics of the Christmas holiday drown out the promise of an Advent season that strives to beam hope into lives that, in too many instances, have largely short-circuited their hopeful connection.

But we must be clear: The problem we face now is more than logistical, more than ensuring that our personal effects are in order or that our laws and (in the case of the UN) resolutions are properly framed.  The problem now is in part that so many of us seem resigned to our current slide.  Many of us, including in our own policy sector, seem to be giving up on the possibility that climate change and species extinction can be reversed, that nations can replace enmity with trust, that the vast inequalities of wealth and power can revert to the mean, that our vast expenditures on coercive security measures can be diverted to solving problems that are still within our capacity to solve, that our communities and families can do better than building walls and shunning diversity.

Collectively, we are indeed increasingly in a resignation frame of mind.  We are increasingly suspicious of everything and everyone save for ourselves. But we are in some ways, if the sages and psychologists are on point, also desperate to be rescued from smug and callous versions of ourselves. Sadly our faith communities are simply not doing enough to reverse this toxic course.  This applies as well, perhaps especially, to my own Christian faith, one which should stake its claim fully on anticipation rather than resignation, at least if the core of Advent is to be believed.

In this regard, I am reminded of an old professor of mine at Yale, Jaroslav Pelikan, who used to refer to a Christian faith characterized by “pessimism about life and optimism about God.”  What this meant was that there buried deep within an otherwise hopeful faith is a resignation about ever having the world we might want, a world that is more than a snare and temptation to sin, a world envisioned by agreements like the UN Sustainable Development goals, but even more by the promise of incarnation — coming and already here –; a promise that is much more than an “empty bowl,” a promise to both honor and answer the vastness of a universe almost beyond comprehension, vastness which might otherwise make us despair of ever mattering in anything approximating the grand scheme of things. But the Advent promise reminds us that we matter anyway.  The world matters anyway. We matter to each other anyway. 

Mattering, perhaps, does not seem like a particularly high bar to many of you, but ours is a bar that has been slipping for some time and is now sliding lower still, a bar that needs so desperately to be repositioned such that it can inspire us to live out our lives in the light of the world we anticipate, to place our energies, talents and aspirations out where the light of a divine universe can shine upon them. We need to recover that place which confirms that a better world is possible, indeed that such a world is poised to appear if only we would consent to the “privilege of making humanity our footpath,” pledging to do at least our part to both anticipate the coming of a kinder, gentler, healthier planet and ensure its safe passage.

For the past six years, one Sunday after another, these missives have been devoted to that Advent spirit, one which eschews the temptations of inattentiveness, logistical chaos, personal resignation and, yes, of hardened hearts, one which attempts to inspire institutions large and small to keep the promises they make and, more particularly, that splendid promise of a world which has managed to come back from the brink, a world filled with people from all regions and backgrounds who have also found a way in this time of indifference, poverty and pandemic to come back from brinks of their own. For our part, we continue to live in anticipation of a world fit to sustain the lives of children, a world of doors not walls, a world of modest lifestyles and ambitious generosity, a world striving to bury every metaphorical hatchet — from hate speech to weapons of mass destruction.

For all our partial achievements and palpable failures over many years, this is what we continue to anticipate; this is what has been and remains alive in us; this is what we will do our best to grow and sustain until we meet again.

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Weekend Escape: A Labor Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

5 Sep
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They are closing the mine in two weeks, they say. Six days a week bumping down in the gondola, pecking out the rocks and hauling them back up, doing it again the next day for twenty-seven years, one cave-in, three thin raises, and a failed strike. Where am I going to go every day, what am I going to do with all that sunshine?  Lou Beach

Ramona felt sad and somehow lonely, as if she were left out of something important, because her family was in trouble and there was nothing she could do. Beverly Cleary

There is tons of work to be done, and lots of people who would like to do the work. It’s just that the economic system is such a grotesque catastrophe that it can’t even put together idle hands and needed work, which would be satisfying to the people and which would be beneficial to all of us. Noam Chomsky

As long as there are ways we can serve, then we have a job to do.  Marianne Williamson

That paper–it sits there, open at the employment section. It sits there like a war, and each small advertisement is another trench for a person to dive into. Markus Zusak

Once we attain self-awareness, we stop becoming the victims of worthless comparisons, identity clashes and, of course, idle mindsets that make further progress impossible.  Dr Prem Jagyasi

The soul is made for action, and cannot rest till it be employed. Idleness is its rust. Unless it will up and think and taste and see, all is in vain.  Thomas Traherne

As most of you who read these posts recognize, this is Labor Day weekend in the US, a last gasp of the northern summer, but also a time to reflect on those who labor in a society increasingly without a culture that values labor, without a culture that grants and sustains the dignity of those many persons who we largely ignore but without whom are lives would be immeasurably impoverished.

In a time of pandemic, when so many children are forced into horrific working conditions or, in places like Afghanistan where women are losing the little income they managed to secure, it may seem a bit tone deaf to focus on US labor issues.  But we have plenty of them, some due to restrictive immigration policies, some due to the lack of a sustaining culture of respect for labor itself, and some due to a culture shift, in part motivated by pandemic isolation, regarding what we want in return from the investment of our skills and energies, how we seize current opportunities to create better synergies between what we do for money and what we do with life.

I won’t dwell on the immigration issue, except to say that we remain in the midst of vast migrations of peoples due in large measure to armed conflict and climate change.  As now with Afghanistan, these are not only people on the move; these are people with skills seeking a new home, a new outlet, a new chance, but they are met with growing skepticism and even hostility within destination states.  Some of this hostility is overt as in “we don’t want you here.”  But some is more subtle, a message of tentative welcome so long as they consent to do the work that we don’t want to do, indeed won’t do ourselves.  On this weekend, I am reminded of all the soul-sucking, dangerous jobs that exist in this world, from the slaughterhouses to the coal mines and –in the media this week – from picking fruit in 100 degree weather under an unrelenting sun to delivering food on a bicycle in New York City while the winds of Ida howled and over 7 inches of rain came thundering to the ground – and this for the $5 which that delivery worker earned for his trouble.

Many of us have done these sorts of jobs at an earlier stage of life.  I have my stories also.  But I also was given a pass to “escape” the mind-numbing danger, the back-breaking labor that never gets workers and families off the treadmill of “barely making it” of having to deal with endless health, education and housing issues without anything like a safety net, without anything like the perks of employment for people with degrees and the privileges to match.  I remember some of what that felt like.  I can’t forget it.  None of us should.

And yet we do forget, we do push the labor conditions of others to the very back of our minds, as though fruit and pork magically appear in our pantries, as though our houses heat themselves and forest fires simply end of their own volition, as though century-old transportation infrastructure somehow fixes itself and babies actually bring themselves into the world.  We do forget because we are privileged members of societies which have jettisoned their cultures of respect for labor, for the people who often do the dirty jobs that keep the rest of us afloat, for the people who struggle to provide basic necessities for families living on the edge of a society that has long ceased to honor their contributions.  We don’t “pull for each other” so much now, do we? Rather, we tend to be consumers first and foremost, little interested in how things are made (and by who), what it takes to make them or, for that matter, dispose of them when the items in question have outlived their usefulness.  Our posture is primarily competitive, suspicious of unions or anything else that might cause us to pay more so that our workers can have more.  Moreover, we have allowed ourselves to indulge in (as Philip Rieff once noted), “colonies of the violent.” devoid of any stable sense of communal purpose, left to “vacillate between deadly purposes and deadly devices,” all in an attempt to escape what has become our modern mindset’s signature pandemic – that of boredom.

But as some of the quotations at the beginning of this post maintain, there is plenty of work to be done in this world, plenty to care for and support, plenty of skills to blend and respect, plenty of ways to add value and meaning to our own and others’ lives.  In a world such as ours, boredom is surely a sign of desperation, if not a complete failure of imagination, a sign that our “strategy” of competition and autonomy, of using each other rather than working with each other, is not having its intended effect.  As a society, we are still chasing “wealth” that cannot be sustained rather than, as Vandana Shiva would put it, pursuing wealth based on “rejuvenating the bounty of the earth through care.”

Fortunately, culture and its impacts are not static; its permissions and controls are being modified as we speak, in some welcome instances to help people break through the discriminations and injustices that culture has too often served to hold in place. On this Labor Day we would do well to ask if there a pathway to restore intrinsic value and respect for the labor and contributions of others? Is there the means to counter our current, high levels of comfort with exploitative practices, our equally high levels of indulgence with the forms and tools of violence designed to distract ourselves from becoming the people we could be? Can we somehow identify and preserve the life that allows everyone time to serve our children and communities as well as our employers?

There are hopeful signs.  The “great resignation” chronicled in the press over these past few months suggests a growing discontent with how labor is organized and how employees are recognized.  Workers worldwide are demanding that the jobs for which they are compensated provide more than just a paycheck, provide more than just the material means to sustain what is too often a demanding and deadening life cycle.  Teachers are leaving voids in school systems as threats from parents and from a virus we are still not taking seriously enough push more and more educators out of the classroom.  Health care workers are also quitting in droves, many of whom have spent the last 18 months trying to keep people alive who dogmatically refuse to help themselves (or their communities) stay healthy.  Restaurant and other hospitality workers are leaving their positions as well, tired of the long hours, short customer tempers and small tips which constitute the bulk of their pay.

These are all essential workers, people we simply cannot do without. These are also not easy choices, the choice to walk away, the choice to say “enough.” But we would do well to support this transition.  Several articles this week suggested that the pandemic gave some of us at least the chance to readjust our hearts and minds, to recalibrate how our gifts of time and talent are shared, how the “human” aspects of our “being” might find a fuller expression.  We must find ways, in policy and practice, to make such a chance accessible to all. Our GDP and stock prices might take a hit, but the peace that could emanate from a rejuvenated world where children are in school, women are fully engaged, laborers have rest and respect, nature is cared for and boredom is vanquished would be, at least to my mind, well worth every effort.

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