Mercury
You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream. Dejan Stojanovic
Once they’ve rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath. Kouta Hirano
So long awaited that its coming was a shock. Mohsin Hamid
One who is fed on promises feeds from an empty bowl. Marsha Hinds
For unhappiness has nothing to teach, and resignation is ugly. Françoise Sagan
You should seek answers, although it is better to anticipate some, to be the light and dream. Dejan Stojanovic
It is our daily lament that we cannot love enough. Charles H. Spurgeon
It is Christmas Eve morning in a deceptively-sunny New York. Deceptive in that the temperature is 7 degrees F, the winds are howling through windows that leak more than a typical Congressional aide and that have so far resisted all my efforts to tape their edges. The heat now comes on and off and the ‘hot” water is tepid at best.
I am blessed.
Blessed because there is oatmeal and apple in the house. Blessed because we were able to track the impending blast from an unstable Arctic and had some time to prepare. Blessed because I am not sitting in an airport after a long night of searching for food and explaining to increasingly unsettled children why they might not make it to grandma’s house after all. Blessed because the leaks in my home, much like the leaks in my life, are much more likely to be plugged than those who will face another holiday in prison or trying to steal some rest in the far corner of an empty subway platform.
Blessed because I did not have to spend an icy night tending to a newborn child in a barn.
But as in years past, despite our endless predispositions to violence, our ever-hardening hearts and our well-practiced capacity to look away from the storms we well have the capacity to track, the newborn child comes as “light and dream;” as a reminder that the life we have built is not necessarily the life to which we are now called; that the storms which we face – and the storms we make – are still within our remedial range; that the promise of that birth is not just another “empty bowl” but rather as grace to as Stevie Nicks once wrote, to allow the “child in our hearts to rise above,” such that we might “handle the seasons” of our lives” with greater generosity and dignity, with a firm gratitude for blessings that can survive the cold and all the other storms with which we are currently afflicted, blessings as represented in that manger which we pretend to anticipate each and every Christmas year but which somehow still come to us as a shock.
As most of you know, we are still engaged on a regular basis at the United Nations, though this past year of access has made us wonder a bit about our value, real and perceived. While change at the UN can be even more glacial than waiting for teenagers to vacate a single family bathroom, we have witnessed some shifts in attitude – a growing sense that a UN which has been too much about promises as “empty bowls,” anticipating storms with considerable skill but then playing politics with responses which do not take seriously the expectations of constituents, that UN is increasingly incarnating a practical recognition that forecasts must be accompanied by active preparations and, when needed, emergency accompaniment. More and more, whether on biodiversity protection, poverty reduction in the Sahel, online hate speech or gang violence in Haiti, UN agencies and their leadership are genuinely starting to “fill the bowls” with tangibility, with something more than endless rhetorical aspiration, condemnations which have long-lost their impact, or emergency provisions from often-remarkably dedicated humanitarians mostly accessible only after some of the proverbial horses have already left the stable.
Especially during this holy season, I often wonder what exactly is wrong with us, is wrong with me? Do we truly lament that “we cannot love enough?” And if so, what do we do about that? What’s our plan to energize that skill? And what are the signposts indicating that we are making progress on perhaps this most essential of human attributes, signs that we are truly commited to caring beyond our current capacities, loving better despite ourselves, pushing harder to balance the world in lieu of some of our modest, even petty personal aspirations?
Those of you who regularly consume these posts (I feel for you) recognize the predisposition to equate loving with attentiveness and discernment. Despite my own limitations, I remain firmly committed to the task both philosophical and practical set out by my graduate school mentor Maxine Greene who hopefully suggested that “we want ourselves to break through some of the crusts of convention, the distortions of fetishism, the sour tastes of narrow faith.” Such “crusts” and “distortions” simply have no place in institutions devoted to the care of human souls nor other aspects of the global public good in a time of intersecting crises. Such “narrow faith” has no place in a season calling us to “fill the bowls” with goodness and mercy; calling us to resolutely discern the times and supercharge our attentiveness; calling us to eschew any and all forms of resignation and be the light that a shivering child in a manger gave us sanction to be.
The temperature outside has risen to 9 degrees. The water in the sink is getting warmer. The winds are still compromising what passes for apartment windows, but now more like a knife through hard cheese than soft butter. And the baby in the barn is calling out to us once again to be that light unto the world, to be the dreamers who can flip our global storms into fresh and sustainable possibilities for future generations of humans and the species on which our very lives depend.
We can do this. Happy Christmas.
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