This commentary is by Michael Caldwell of North Wolcott, a member of the international ecumenical Iona Community and author of The Radical Center, a syndicated monthly column transcending current fractures in culture and religion.
I like my new glasses more now that Vermont’s slow spring has finally arrived. On frigid winter days, coming in from the cold, it takes transitional lenses close to 10 minutes to turn from dark to clear. With warmth, I can see better sooner. The lenses clear faster when I come inside.
Now that “The culture wars have gone global” (New York Times, 2022, David Brooks), peace looks less possible than ever, in one way of looking at the world.
The gift of Brooks’ penetrating Palm Sunday prophecy is that we see clearly, in example after example, the global emergence of a paranoid new nationalist nativism. You look at Ukraine and waver from outrage to grief and back again. You have to start with realism. But then you ask, “What now?”
Beyond Brooks’ dark glasses and the rather rose-colored glasses of Stephen Pinker (“Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”) is a new type of lens for looking at the future that adds a transcendent dimension neither of them employs in their otherwise thorough analyses. What the world needs now is a transparent transcendence unencumbered by dark sectarian god claims, a transcendence that gives secularists and people of faith the same transitional (change-worthy) lenses for not only another way of seeing, but another way of being.
Canadian folk-rocker Bruce Cockburn sings about our “little round planet in a big universe/sometimes it looks blessed, sometimes it looks cursed/depends on what you look at obviously/even more it depends on the way that you see.”
Just before my mother died, she got into a kind of mystical state I’d never seen in her before. It was something a magnificent hospice team interpreted as “right on schedule” when death gets closer.
She was struggling with how to handle a rude neighbor. I suggested his behavior originated in the untreated severe PTSD that had afflicted him since his military service, and that meeting his coarse insolence with kindness might be a healthy response. That’s when she said, “It’s hard to be that kind of a person in this kind of a world.”
What Cockburn sings, my mother longed to see.
On that day when we begin to exercise the way of seeing that Cockburn implicitly recommends, we will find a nonsectarian transcendence that prophesies a new way of being.
Then, when you see pro-life and pro-choice activists shouting at each other across police lines, you imagine a center that sees abortion as tragic, keeps it legal and safe, and establishes reasonable boundaries after viability.
Then, when you hear a homophobic critic of the gay pastor in the next town, you listen to his rant and tell him that Jesus never condemned homosexuality.
Then, when you hear Democrats not questioning nonbinary gender fluidity, you suggest that LGBTQ rights don’t imply that anything goes, and that male and female identities can be beautiful and have integrity beyond cultural stereotypes.
Then, when you hear a financially conservative socialist questioning the “stewardship” of a future annual interest payment close to $1 trillion on a national debt approaching $30 trillion, you rejoice that recovery from deficit spending may be seen in the national interest.
Then, when you see Republicans in denial about their deathly addiction to Trump, you suggest recovery is possible, and probably essential for the viability of their party.
Then, when idiot despots like Trump and Putin are challenged for their bigoted bullying early in their exercise of a demonic charismatic magic that pulls wool over otherwise wise eyes, a weary world awakens to a new way of being — a way that takes off dark glasses or rose-colored glasses and gets down to work in nations and neighborhoods full of opportunity for transitional behavior.
I take off my glasses now, not to wait for the lenses to clear, but to enjoy the unencumbered seeing that comes from closing my eyes and meditating for just a moment on a new future hard to see but transcendently possible.
