sputnik

Humanities, this may be your Sputnik moment. Sputnik was a wakeup call to American educators to improve their teaching in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. But technological expertise is not enough. In meeting the challenges of society today we will want to draw on the resources of philosophy, politics, and economics, as well as historical and religious studies.

Recently the New Yorker magazine online ran an article on the importance of the press for democracy, drawing upon a mid-century study by a group that included Reinhold Niebuhr. Follow that line and you get to his prescient essay, "The Race Problem", first published in the summer of 1942 in Christianity and Society. That it was prescient is not the point. That it was dedicated to a thorough and serious examination of the persistent challenges of human society is: these are more than pandemic issues.

And even more recently, in an article by Lawrence Wright, entitled, in the July 20, 2020, issue of the New Yorker, Gianna Pomata, a medical historian from Johns Hopkins, observed, "After the Black Death, nothing was the same. What I expect now is something as dramatic is going to happen, not so much in medicine but in economy and culture. Because of danger, there's this wonderful human response, which is to think in a new way."

https://www.newyorker.com/…/how-pandemics-wreak-havoc-and-o…

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclo…/niebuhr-reinhold

https://www.newyorker.com/…/how-can-the-press-best-serve-de…

Getting Rid of Stuff

Bighorn Fire, Catalina Mountains.

My brother used to talk a lot about getting rid of stuff. After his death, we went through his apartment. We found his clothes and his excess vitamin supplements, his training equipment and his furniture, and eventually opened the top drawer of his dresser. The Lord of the Rings DVDs were in the drawer under the TV. We found a double rack of six storage bins with his personal papers. In the closet were his hiking hat, green pullover pile sweater, and fancy walking stick. On the wall hung our grandfather's campaign hat from the forest service or the first world war. 

Up front as we entered the apartment had been an organizer bin propped on a dining room chair, full of photographs. In the trunk of his car were a bunch of road flares. All we took was a box of things that seemed practical at the time. A Pendleton blanket. I don't know what else. What happened to his lifetime of photographs -- he was a pretty good amateur photographer -- or anything else, and it doesn't matter. What really mattered was gone.

In the early days of the Bighorn Fire, from the evening we watched the lightning strike the Catalinas, and the next morning's first smoke, I remembered the smoke rising over the Oakland Hills on the Sunday morning when hot dry winds fanned slumbering embers into flame that consumed a neighborhood. Among the parishioners were a man named Bob who lost everything and another man who already had, in a divorce. The second man shrugged and said he'd sleep at the hospital where he worked for awhile. Bob was devastated. I hope he's okay. 

And I'd remember longer ago, the family memory of 1906 in Cow Hollow, San Francisco. Aunt Carol said, "When I was eighteen years old there was an earthquake. My father said, 'Carol, stand in the doorway, and I did!" The Japanese art student living with the family asked, "Do you have these here often?" And, we learned, the family evacuated to Golden Gate Park, or perhaps the closer Presidio, where "Mama cooked in a big black pot over an open fire" and they slept in a tent until the all-clear.

Early in the past month I recalled the picture of Gandhi's personal effects assembled after his death: two pairs of spectacles, sandals, a dhoti, and a rice bowl. And what was found in the coffin of Saint Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, when they opened his tomb in Durham Cathedral five hundred years ago: his episcopal ring and pectoral cross (the latter often copied), his comb, and his portable altar with its mica top (for a stone surface) and inner drawer for the bread, the wine, the oil, the sacraments.

I thought of aunt Em's last possessions, as she waited death in a convalescent home in Millbrae. Just a wall bulletin board pinned with family photographs, and the latest copy of TV Guide, which I sent her. What she remembered were the visits of aunt Diane. Her own sister Virginia had predeceased her by years.

And I thought about the stuff in my house after the Loma Prieta earthquake, how I'd gotten home from San Francisco late that evening (at 5:04 in the office hallway I'd remembered Carol's words and stood in a doorway) to a house full of light and the cats with their eyes wide. And I could step outside and shut the door behind me and walk around that house and everything I had was in it. But nothing mattered, not so much as friends and family and life itself. But sometimes we lose even those.

What then shall we save? What will be preserved? Left behind? What will matter then? To us, to those who remain?

Habit, William James would tell us. Habits of behavior - ‘how you wind your watch, how you pack your pipe’ - and habits of mind, that ‘set like plaster’ by the time you’re thirty. 

Ben Weir told me that what he remembered during the months and years in captivity, held as a hostage in the dark by militants in Lebanon, were the words of Presbyterian hymns. And since then I’ve made a practice of daily devotions, taking in words and phrases, prayers and psalms, from the Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. So those are the habits of mind and heart I build in myself. 

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” (Acts 2:42)

When Herb O’Driscoll came to visit my anxious congregation, he had me move the baptismal font front and center. He reminded us that as long as we have the story, and the water and the oil, the bread and the wine, each other - and the Spirit - we’ll be alright. What we have in these anxious days may not be the daily or weekly gatherings we cherish but we do have the story, each other, and the prayers. Those remain.