| Walter Wangerin Jr. & Outspoken |
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Dispatch #14 614 miles on the odometer. Yesterday's ride included perforce a strip of stone-and-dirt road about 8 miles long; a low road under water; signs: "Road closed 1 mile"; dogs; and a very good ride after all. When local citizens assure me, "The road is flat," between, say, Buffalo, Minnesota, and, say, Willmar; and when I go forth to ride their flat road, I learn that the good people themselves have only ridden the road in motored vehicles--for the entire route is either rising to a crest or sinking from a crest, and half the time I feel the hills in my knees.... I think this observation of mine has something to do with observation in general: if it isn't altogether in your experience, then it must be known by your alert observing, your ability to imagine yourself into the place where you are not, your ability to use your senses in order to imagine it, and, imagining it, to turn imagination itself into a kind of fictive experience (personally) but real experience (universally). It is in this way that watchful folk exercise, in its deepest sense, "sympathy." It is by such sympathy that artists can write from perspectives not altogether their own; and it is this most natural sympathy which many little children have in regard to their caretakers: for when my mother cried, I straightway cried with her, filled with grief, but yet with no knowledge of the reason for our grief. A primal sympathy. "Sympathy: in Greek, Syn, meaning "with"; and pathos, meaning "suffering" or "deep feeling." It is the ability to slip one's skin a while to dwell in the skin of another. A further commment: And if folk who either do not or cannot practice this blessed exchange with others (1) tend to make pronouncements about other people and (2) have the social force to impose their ideas on others, then we have the dangerous situation of belittling prejudice. For those who think they know what they do not know will never know the truth; but if their narrow knowing affects others (talking about the powers of government, of business, of the police, of the church, of teachers, etc. etc.) their ignorance creates the grievous context in which the people the powerful belittle are imprisoned indeed, and their truer names are hidden in society. Of course all the elaborate comment does not mean to blame my friends in Buffalo. It merely encourages everyone reading to think twice before a judgement of some importance is made: first, immediately, let your personal experience speak; but then wait, review the situation again by an extra-personal observation (senses, imaginings, fictive experience) and then, second, modify your first judgement to include the more universal knowing of sympathy. Okay: so you didn't feel as if there are hills between Buffalo and Willmar; but what do you "see"? Can you see the road ahead of you for miles and miles? Does the land on either side of the road also stretch flat? Is the corn planted in perfectly rectangular fields? Or is the corn contoured? All this should be available in the alert person's, the observant person's, memory. And if you've only traveled on interstate highways place to place, can you look off to imagine what the county roads must be like upon this landscape? Enough. + + + It's the shining rail that takes the train. + + + A snow white egret contemplated flying as I rode by, then, by a slow spread and a slow wave of its wings, flew: glided, actually, some thirty meters over cattails and still water, only to drop its legs and then itself and thence to contemplate me. + + + Altogether, now, I believe we've spoken to something like 1200 to 1300 people on this pilgrimage, most of these people having been met at our nine rallies; but with some regularity I've met smaller groups of people, (those who have cycled with me, those who gather in places where there won't be a rally, those I stop and talk with merely as a biker of some interest, often asking directions, pastors in conference, etc, etc), which groups increase the community we are weaving for Lutheran Vespers. + + + The sore throat, though with me still, is easing now. + + + It is impossible not to be conscious of the anniversary grimly approaching us now, the first anniversary of dramatic, massive death. Tomorrow on Lutheran Vespers, I will shape my message to this gaunt remembrance (though this dispatch may not be posted so soon, and you might be reading this on Sunday the 8th or after it). For the present moment, I wonder: other disasters of commensurate sorrow, such as the Bubonic Plague in the Middle Ages, or the eruptions of such volcanoes as Vesuvius in Italy, had no one to blame. They were disasters caused by forces not human. Here we have a disaster by forces most human. My questions: are we better off having someone to blame? Spiritually better? Does it focus our confusions and rages and griefs? And, given to believe that we can do something about this cause (War Against the Terrorists), are we more fully human ourselves? Is what is best about us given scope and action thereby? Are we (truly) improved? Or is the case here as elsewhere, that the event has granted us the opportunity to choose virtue and to grow in it, or else to choose attitudes and actions and emotions that demean the human within us. I am very curious about the desire (and sometimes the grim satisfaction) in finding someone to blame. My grandson Noah, when he bumps his head or runs into a patch of virile frustration, balls his fists and cries out, "I want to hit someone!" He is expressing his emotional heat precisely. The human hunger: "Who did this to me? Who can I make pay?"--when it cannot in fact be satisfied by a true culprit, sometimes even goes so far as to make up that culprit, and then to make the man who bears our imputation of blame to pay as if he were indeed blameworthy. Oh, how deep goes this desire, and how dangerous it can be: wrath becomes its own justification! But here there were indeed people behind the murders, people who caused gladness in their compeers. And what shall it make of us? And how (truly!) can this sorrow ennoble us in the response? For if we are not ennobled; if various forms of anger prevail and become the very weathers in which we exist; if we believe and ourselves disseminate the simplistic fairy tale by which so many interpret the event (that, by nature of the attack alone, we are the good and the bold, the heroes, while those we judge responsible for the attack are the bad--nay, worse than bad, worse than sinning, but are evil itself [which must elevate us past heroes unto the level of gods of goodness]); if, I say, we do not choose well but choose ill in this terrible, remarkable opportunity, then the real distinction between ourselves and other cultures convinced of other doctrines, between ourselves and those who judge us, blurs. I am talking about the long term effects, as this event enters more and more into our own culture and history, our character and our dreams. I am talking about its anniversary presence. I am not talking about the actual event itself, in its own moment, for then and there heroes existed and heroes acted indeed. Oh, let us memorialize that! Let that memory triumph: firemen and the police choosing to rush, for the sake of others, into ignorance; they ran up the stairs with knowledge the civilians did not have in order to impart knowledge, experience and safety. But even they had to know that they did not know the immediate future in those shattered towers. To act in the face of such not-knowing is indeed to act heroically. I know the meaning and the history of the word "hero." It has been much debased in our society where a quick act of kindness (which is kindness indeed, but kindness only) is called nonetheless "heroism," diminishes a seriously identified role--and to ignore the true value of kindness, too. Heroes perform in extremities; they act in spite of the very real peril of death; they elevate a service job and the welfare of people past absolutely any consideration of self (for that consideration could cause hesitation and failure)--that is heroism. There were heroes a year ago. Celebrate them. Share (sympathetically!) the mourning of the families they left behind. Grieve with those whose dear ones once worked in the trade centers; make your grief the spiritual companion of theirs; though they may not know your names, their hearts shall be strengthened by such community. And, finally, this: if we should model ourselves on anything or anyone to make the best of this tragedy; if we now look for the shapes which our personal lives must take hereafter, let it not be a goodness that must be defined against someone else's evil which we choose, use, and put on; let it rather be the goodness that is purely good alone (that selfless heroism of the fire fighters, police, the passengers who brought the flying weapon down in Pennsylvania) which we choose, use, and wear now as our common clothing. Peace, friends. And thank you for your attentions to these particolored dispatches. Walt |