Shadows

‘All this time I was leading another life

and it is clear now which was the shadow and which

was the substance…’

                         Gerald Stern, ‘Crosshatching’

I have memories that make me cringe.  They run the gamut from acts to statements, from truly harmful to simply stupid. Some get dug up from childhood, some may have occurred in the past few days.

Throwing dirt in a brother’s face.  Hateful things said to a loved one. Flunking a test because I didn’t study.  Failing to show up to meet someone when I said I would be there.  Dumb things I did as an exchange student.  Procrastinating on a task to the point where someone else has to pick it up.

These memories pop up at the oddest times, and for no particular reason.  My brain must be lazy and it wants to throw ugly reminders over the wall.  Or they show up in nightmares, with people and places and timeframes mixed up, out of order, or thrown in with the latest movie themes just for the dramatics.

These are long shadows that trail us on our path, glued forever to our soles – and souls. 

But they don’t have to stay attached.  Certainly, we carry our blemishes, bruises and mistakes with us.  They become part of who we are as characters, as personalities, as people.  We learn from them, we try not to replicate them.

And we try to overwhelm them with the positive aspects of a life worth living.

Stern’s poem steers away from the negative theory of such shadows:

‘…though I particularly hate the word

shadow to describe it since a shadow

itself is a substance and shadows are lovely and stretch

across my lawn at six in the evening and they

take different forms—when it comes to painting—and one

is a mass in the foreground, one is a shake of likeness,

simply defined, a true state of color’

Rather than the black hole of bad memories, I prefer this latter description of shadows and their use.  Stretched across the lawn in the rising sun.  The statue of a likeness in a true state of color.  An image simply defined.

Friend Jane likes to take shadow pictures.  She places a group of people with the sun to their backs and takes a photo of the shape created by the shadow on the ground.  In a photograph, the shadow becomes a piece of whimsy, a straightforward representation of our shape in the sun, reflected in the grass. 

That’s a better image than the blackness of bad memories.

The civic cost of Inequality

From Michael Sandel's book, Justice:  What's the Right Thing to Do?

Too great a gap between rich and poor undermines the solidarity that democratic citizenship requires.  Here's how:  As inequality deepens, rich and poor live increasingly separate lives.  The affluent send their children to private schools (or to public schools in wealthy suburbs), leaving urban public schools to the children of families who have no alternative.  A similar trend leads to the secession by the privileged from other public institutions and facilities. Private health clubs replace municipal recreation centers and swimming pools.  Upscale residential communities hire private security guards and rely less on public police protection.  A second or third car removes the need to rely on public transportion.  And so on.  The affluent secede from public places and services, leaving them to those who can't afford anything else.

This has two bad effects, one fiscal, the other civic.  First, public services deteriorate, as those who no longer use those services become less willing to support them with their taxes.  Second, public institutions such as schools, parks, playgrounds, and community centers cease to be places where citizens from different walks of life encounter one another.  Institutions that once gathered people together and served as informal schools of civic virtue become few and far between.  The hollowing out of the public realm makes it difficult to cultivate the solidarity and sense of community on which democratic citizenship depends.  (Sandel, Michael.  Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.)

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'The hollowing out of the public realm.'  As government is increasingly viewed as 'the problem', rather than part of our society that provides governance and contributes to the social fabric, we are reaching that condition.

Little Apocalypse

My daily commute includes three choices on the car radio:  NPR for news, ESPN for sports, and a public broadcasting rock station (a unique genre, by the way).

I have avoided the NPR button of late.  The primary news item is the killing of 20 school children in a Connecticut elementary school.  Such news only weighs on my shoulders and creates pain in my chest.

There is no rational explanation for such an act.  Plenty of people are postulating theories, but the young man who pulled the trigger, and the mother who raised him, are both dead.  They have each left pieces of evidence behind – all of us leave trails of some sort in our lives – but the scraps may never equal a clean accurate picture.  We humans are too obtuse and complex for that.

But the event itself is not the only reason for my aversion to broadcast news.  Ingesting this news every morning, at the same time, from the same source, spoken by the same voices, can become overwhelming.  Or repetitive.  Or numbing.  Or all of the above.

I am reading Jan Richardson’s book “Through the Advent Door” during this season.  She writes of the ‘little apocalypse’ events that occur frequently in the Bible – events or actions that either foretell something much larger, or that lead to social upheaval, or that represent a new sign from God.  Richardson notes that the Greek word apokalupsis, from which we derive the English word, also means ‘revealing’:

            Though we most often use the word to refer to a destructive ending of momentous magnitude – namely, the end of the world – at its root, apocalypse simply means revelation: how God unhides Godself.

In the context of horrific events such as the killing of 20 young children, this presents a semantic conundrum.  I certainly view any such act as an apocalyptic one -- deadly, destructive, the end of life for so many.  It may also lead to significant social action in this country, as we reevaluate whether it makes any sense whatsoever to permit killing machines to be easily available, and whether we are truly helping individuals who suffer from emotional and mental disorders.

But what is revealed?  There are those who use this to argue that we have taken God out of the schools and if God were spoken of more often in our schools, such killings would be less prevalent.  But God isn’t so easily niched:  there are no closed doors to God’s presence, it is not as if God belongs in some places but has to avoid being in others just because we say so.

The reveal at Sandy Hook Elementary may be much more basic: God exists in all such places.  We can say Yahweh – that which could not be spoken.  We can call out that spirit in Adam Lanza, in each of those children, in the kid wielding a gun in a Denver movie theatre, in the cop or the medic who first enters such a scene.  God may be hard to find amidst the evil, but God is.  God can be revealed in all.

I may still avoid the news button on my radio.  There seem to be too many apocalyptic events, even though my rational mind tells me that such events have always occurred. Given the existence of poverty – physical and spiritual -- on one side of the human ledger and selfishness on the other side, such events in all of their forms will likely continue.

We will seek Yahweh’s spirit in all scenes, whether a ‘little celebration’ or a ‘little apocalypse’.  Advent calls us to listen and watch, to be ready.