Good Monday morning, good citizens of the cosmos. It's a good thing I do these morning reflections. They help to reorient my sense of time, which can get completely discombobulated between December 25th and January 6th — celebrating Christmas, the New Year, and the Epiphany.
Lord, have mercy!
It's the sixth day of Hanukkah and the sixth day of Christmas when every true love gives their true love six geese a-layin'. The number of geese—six—reportedly represents the number of days of creation. The goose was also seen as being a “sacred” bird. The expression “silly goose” is not slanderous, but pious in origin. It means blessed, happy, innocent, and gentle.
It's the fifth day of Kwanzaa, the day to observe and consider Nia, or purpose. "To make our collective vocation the building and developing of our community to restore our people to their traditional greatness." It can mean the purpose for your own future, the financial purpose of your family, or the collective purpose of your economic community.
In my meditation this morning, I've been considering the gift of this day of Christmastide. I keep coming back to the gift of the life of former President Jimmy Carter.
Conservative political pundit, George Will, wrote a scathing review of Carter's life. It was, unfortunately, the first thing I read after I learned of his death, as if he had written the piece after Carter entered Hospice care two years ago in anticipation of Carter's imminent death. George seemed ready to pounce as soon as Jimmy Carter's death announcement was made.
The headline of his opinion piece should have been enough of a warning to me not to read it.
I blazed ahead anyway thinking, surely, George knows, despite what has happened in his not-so-grand anymore but still old party as well as in our culture, that one ought not speak ill of the dead.
George did, anyway. Here's that headline:
"Jimmy Carter was the president who made Ronald Reagan necessary: Richard Nixon made Jimmy Carter tempting; Carter made Ronald Reagan necessary."
What a jerk, right?
Never mind about the abysmal records of Nixon and Reagan. No, let's use the death of a 100-year-old man, the longest surviving former POTUS who was married for the longest time (77 years) to the same woman; a man who embodied and lived his life in the Christian values he purported to believe; the only former POTUS to win a Nobel Peace Prize; the Camp David Accords he brokered that reshaped the Middle East; the work he did to diversify the federal judiciary, including nominating a pioneering women’s rights activist and lawyer named Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the federal bench; the environmental reforms he put in place, becoming one of the first leaders in the world to recognize the problem of climate change - let's take all of that goodness and blame him for the necessity of electing a crook and a scam artist to the White House.
Some people have become so normalized to corruption and deceit that they wouldn't recognize integrity if it lived for 100 years in the same person.
Integrity is a spiritual gift. We are born with the seeds of it when we enter the world, red and yowling and shivering with anxiety, protesting the cold and the blinding light of our new reality.
For some of us, that will be our most honest reaction to the harshness of the world into which we are born. We are then carefully tamed to behave, to not make others uncomfortable with the truth, to adjust and acclimate and fit it.
Some of us never do and spend our lives as misfits and ne'er-do-well. Some try their whole lives to dull the pain of human existence and recreate with drugs or alcohol the serene happiness and comfort they knew in utero or as newborns.
Some become artists who do their truth-telling with the gift of their artistry using words or music, paint or sculpture, telling the stories of our lives with visual or audible or creative images and symbols. Some are activists and work to bring about cultural or political change and transformation.
Still others look around and are determined to improve the human condition, to change the world for the better - through science, medicine, the law, social sciences, and education, or through trades like carpentry, plumbing, and electricity.
And then, there are those who think that the only way to improve the world is to serve themselves - no matter the cost or who pays for it or who gets hurt.
Greed is one of the greatest tempters of integrity. Greed, I think, is an adaptive strategy to the anxiety with which we are born that never really leaves us.
We're about to see unprecedented levels of greed and avarice in the days ahead. The result will be that our individual and cultural anxiety levels will rise in direct proportion to the amount of the corruption and greed and cruel narcissism we will witness in our elected leaders and replicated in our employers, neighbors, friends, and family members.
In the days to come, it will be important to remember the gift of integrity that each of us is given as part of entering the enterprise of being human. It's a costly gift, one that needs attention and care and sacrifice in order to grow strong.
It will be good for us to remember the lives of Jimmy and Rosalind Carter, and the work they did together both while in office as well as after they left the White House.
In the years after their "retirement" the Carters were involved in monitoring more than 100 elections around the world; helping virtually eliminate Guinea worm disease, an infection that had haunted Africa for centuries; and building or repairing thousands of homes in more than a dozen countries as part of Habitat for Humanity.
Oh, and attending church and teaching Sunday School. Most every week. At their beloved place of worship, Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia.
History will probably not remember Jimmy Carter as the best POTUS. And, that may be fair enough. I think he will be remembered as a decent man who lived his life and led this country with integrity.
No small thing, these days.
As he lies in his grave, Jimmy Carter stands as a reminder of St. Paul's exhortation to the church in Philippi, that, "whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things. " (Phillippians 4:8-9)
In the days to come, as the normalcy of our lives becomes even more discombobulated than it does during "the holidays," we're going to need that reminder.
I hope something good happens to you today.
Bom dia.
No comments:
Post a Comment