Welcome to a Group Read: Charles Dickens’ ‘Bleak House’

March 17, 2014 by

THIS COLUMN IS FROM SPRING 2014, when some of our readers decided to explore Bleak House with us.

UDPATE 2018—Over the years, many readers have commented on the opening page of this grand novel with its masterful description of London’s fog, which mingled with coal soot in Dickens’ era and was truly a defining metaphor for the whole novel that would soon unfold. So, here is that famous paragraph:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. 

CALL THIS cOLUMN … An Exciting Little Experiment. It’s 2014 and I’m your host, ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm.

We’re launching a very simple Group Read of a book: Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. For our religiously inspired readers, G.K. Chesterton called this sprawling novel Dickens’ greatest book. For our more literary readers, Yale scholar Harold Bloom seconds Chesterton’s view. An impressive chorus agrees with them. Daniel Burt’s famous listing of the 100 greatest novels of all time ranks Bleak House as No. 12, right up there with the likes of War and Peace, Ulysses and Moby Dick.

We’ve got some good friends reading along—and encouraging you to try Dickens!

  • MARY LIEPOLD: I’ve known Mary for many years, first as the online voice of the Peace X Peace international women’s network. Mary describes herself as Freelance Writer, Editor and Activist. Her own love of Dickens encourages others to read along with us: “I think the emotional workout is precisely what literature is for. It generates and exercises our emotional intelligence, without which we’re all doomed. Happy reading!”
  • BENJAMIN PRATT: Ben is one of our most popular ReadTheSpirit columnists and authors—and he’s also known for reviving the literary appraisal of Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. Ben says he’s “in” for this Group Read: “Dickens is the consummate satirist. He paints verbal parables that enable us to see ourselves with all our personal and communal warts. Ian Fleming did the same thing with his journalist’s eyes—showing us amazing portraits of our social decadence in his James Bond series.”
  • AND YOU? We’ve now posted recommendations for a first and second week of readings in Bleak House. On April 7, we will post thoughts on Week 3, covering Chapters 4 and 5. In those delightful chapters, Dickens introduces several of his most enduring characters: the zealous Mrs. Jellyby and the haunting Mr. Krook and Miss Flite (with her special birds). Join us!

WEEK 1: Read Chapter 1

Read Chapter 1, “In Chancery.” That’s just 7 pages in the Penguin Classics Edition of Bleak House. But use any copy of the book that is close at hand. Every library has copies and there are many free versions, too.  (See below.) As you read, pay particular attention to the famous opening sequence about “the fog.” Read those two pages aloud to a friend or loved one.

WEEK 2: Read Chapters 2 and 3

In Week 1, a small but encouraging number of readers dove into this Bleak House Group Read, sending some emails, talking about the idea on Facebook and encouraging others to take part. In answer to readers’ first question, we are not “dating” these “weeks” so that this online experience of the book can be enjoyed at any point. Depending on the response we get to this very simple form of a Group Read, we may launch others in coming months. Come on along! Here’s what’s waiting in Week 2 …

  • READ ALOUD During his lifetime, Dickens performed such spirited public readings that he sometimes collapsed in exhaustion afterward. As your host for this Group Read, I spent a day this past week as a caregiver for my disabled father and the best part of our day was my reading aloud to him the first three chapters of Bleak House. Try it! Take turns with a spouse or friend.
  • CAN WE SEE THE CLUES? By the end of Chapter 3, many key characters have been introduced, including Esther, the Dedlocks, the powerful and predatory lawyer Mr. Tulkinghorn and the haunting victim of the courts, Miss Flite. Several readers told me these opening chapters seemed “like a lot of overly wordy stage setting.” If so, that’s because 21st-century readers aren’t picking up the clues to the overall mystery that Dickens artfully lays out in scene after scene. If we were watching Law and Order, our radar for “clues” would have been set off a half dozen times. In Chapter 2, for example, don’t miss Lady Dedlock’s shock when casually glancing at a page of handwriting. Dickens started his career as one of the fastest scribes in British courts—so he was a famous master of handwriting styles.
  • THE ESTHER PROBLEM (AND RASHOMON) In the 1970s, when I studied comparative world literature at the University of Michigan, novels by Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens (with the exception of Bleak House) were missing from the curriculum.  Now, an influential circle of literary scholars argues that Scott, whose novels enthralled a generation before Dickens, was a pioneering “postmodern novelist,” introducing a wide range of narrators who readers would find were flawed in their perspectives. In 1950, Akira Kurosawa’s murder mystery Rashomon gave the world a term for this kind of storytelling through an accumulation of unreliable narrators. The single biggest criticism of Bleak House is that Dickens’ attempts at creating sympathetic female characters, like Esther, were just one-dimensional images of childish women. As you meet Esther in Bleak House, consider this: What if Esther actually is a brilliantly crafted “unreliable narrator”? In Chapter 3, Dickens bends over backward to paint a vivid portrait of Esther through the many flaws and gaps in her narration. Bleak House is more Rashomon than you may suspect!

WHY HERE?

Sure, there are many Group Read websites, including GoodReads, where I have occasionally posted reviews myself. Today, however, we’re trying a very simple Group Read right here at ReadTheSpirit, because it’s so Fast and Flexible. Want to join in the fun? Add Comments below—or feel free to email me directly at [email protected] with your thoughts. If this is popular, we’ll do more Group Reads.

WHY BLEAK HOUSE?

It’s one of the world’s most inspiring novels. This tale of men and women caught in the stranglehold of Britain’s notorious Court of Chancery has something for everyone. I first read it in 1969 and it inspired my career in journalism. I’m not alone. If you do wade through the more than 2,000 GoodReads reviews of the book, you’ll find people saying things like: It’s “incredible”! And, it “has had a redeeming effect on me.” One reviewer called it “the 1853 version of The Wire.” But that’s not why I’m re-reading Bleak House this time. I picked it up again because …

  • MY SON IS STARTING LAW SCHOOL My son Benjamin is an urban planner who has concluded that, in order to really help challenged communities, he needs legal expertise as well. In his initial enthusiasm, he is reading classic books about the law. Someone recommended Dickens, who began his career as a court reporter. Benjamin was the first recruit in this little Group Read.
  • ANN MORISY Talk about cutting through “the fog”! As you will read in this author interview, British “community theologian” Ann Morisy recently crossed the Atlantic, bringing her provocative message that hope doesn’t trickle down—it springs from the ground up. Of course, in Dickens’ era, he did campaign for desperately needed top-down reforms in the UK, but in his later novels he had lost much of his early faith in top-down benevolence and he became a stronger advocate of grassroots change. OurValues columnist Dr. Wayne Baker also chimed in with a series comparing Americans and our British cousins.
  • SEEKING AMERICA’S COMMON GROUND As Editor of ReadTheSpirit, I’m helping Wayne Baker and Ken Wilson launch their books United America and A Letter to My Congregation. In his day, Dickens campaigned for common values and became a Benthamist—a follower of philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Here are just a few of the things Wikipedia says about Jeremy Bentham: He advocated the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the decriminalizing of homosexual acts, the abolition of slavery, the abolition of the death penalty, and the abolition of physical punishment, especially that of children. Bentham also was an early advocate of animal rights, like Methodism’s John Wesley. Not a bad Common Ground, hmmm?
  • AND, THIS IS FREE The book is free, at the moment, for your Kindle reader (or for the free Kindle App you can load onto your iPhone or iPad). The entire book also is free right now through Project Gutenberg.

There’s even a free audio version of Bleak House, created by one of the most colorful audio-book readers ever to turn a page. Her name was Cynthia Lyons. A true Baby Boomer, she was born in 1946, grew up in the New York area and later moved to Naperville, Indiana. She was a well-known attorney, she loved book clubs—and she took up “aerobatic flying” in middle age. She loved to compete in performing eye-popping and stomach-churning flying stunts in a small airplane—and continued into her 60s.

Somehow, she also found the time to volunteer as a prolific LibriVox reader. You can get her complete audio version of Bleak House either from the Internet Archive or directly from LibriVox. Unfortunately, Cynthia died in 2011 and never found time to publish her reasons for recording Bleak House—an enormous investment of her time and energy. But it seems clear from various pieces of her online legacy that Cynthia’s passions for the law and for books converged in her passion for Bleak House.

WHY SO SLOW?

You may be asking: Why are we reading only 7 pages in the first week? This novel is close to 1,000 pages! Answer: What’s the rush!?!

One of my favorite stories involves my son Benjamin and our author Rabbi Bob Alper, who we visited in Vermont in 2010 (and where we produced a very popular column headlined Folks So Tough They Don’t Need a Last Name). During that Vermont visit, Ben, Bob and I spent a day with the Catholic Benedictine monks of the Weston Priory. The casually dressed but iron-disciplined monks invited us to join them in what they called a “Red Lunch.” Or, that’s what we thought they said. Ben, Bob and I expected something like a tomato dish, red wine and maybe cherry pie. Hardly! This was a “Read Lunch”—a simple meal of vegetables eaten in utter silence as one monk opened up a book and read aloud. The kicker to this amazing little tale is the book that was opened: Diarmid McCullough’s 1,184-page Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years. The monks thoroughly enjoyed their food and just 3 pages of the massive book at that Read Lunch!

Again I say: What’s the rush!?!

HOW CAN I GET INVOLVED?

Get the book. Read along. Post a comment. Tell friends on Facebook. Email me directly, if you’d like, at [email protected]

Great reading for the Lenten season

March 9, 2014 by

2 billion Christians around the world are in the midst of Lent, the season of prayerful reflection that leads to Easter. Whether you are a part of the Eastern Orthodox Great Lent, or the Western Lenten season, you’ve got more than a month—until Easter Sunday on April 20—to ponder your spiritual direction.

ReadTheSpirit highly recommends dozens of books, each year, from a wide range of authors and publishing houses. Today, though, we are asking our readers to help support ReadTheSpirit Books—our own circle of authors. Here are six great choices for Lenten reading …

OUR LENT

ReadTheSpirit’s founding editor David Crumm wrote this popular 40-day Lenten devotional several years ago—and we have heard from individuals, from small groups and from entire congregations who have enjoyed this book. It’s now in an updated Second Edition, available in our bookstore (where we provide easy links to buy our books from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other online retailers). In each of the 40 chapters, David takes a portion of the Gospel stories about Jesus’s final days—then,  he chooses an object in that day’s Bible passage that connects Jesus’s life with our contemporary world. In the course of these 40 days, you’ll meet everyone from John Lennon and poet Joesph Brodsky to the Cat in the Hat and the Lord of the Rings.

FLAVORS OF FAITH

Sharing food is a cornerstone of virtually every faith on the planet. That’s why ReadTheSpirit online magazine includes our Feed The Spirit department with weekly stories and recipes. Our first major book on the connections between faith and food is Lynne Meredith Golodner’s The Flavors of Faith: Holy Breads. Chapters include the importance of food in strengthening American communities, plus a recipe from a beloved American poet, and the story of pretzels as both a symbol of prayer and an annual reminder of Lent—and so much more.

BLESSED … PEACEMAKERS

Our Interfaith Peacemakers department is a great place to sample chapters from Daniel Buttry’s popular books, especially his latest: Blessed Are the Peacemakers. In these pages, you will meet more than 100 heroes, but most of them are not the kind of heroes our culture celebrates for muscle, beauty and wealth. These are peacemakers—and the world needs to hear their stories now more than ever.

GUIDE FOR CAREGIVERS

Today, you’ll find a fresh sample of the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Pratt’s writing in our We Are Caregivers department. Ben also appears in the website of the Day1 radio network. His practical, compassionate wisdom has attracted readers nationwide. This Lenten season, remember that 1 in 3 American households includes a caregiver. Buy this book for yourself or for a caregiver you care about. Here is Ben’s ReadTheSpirit bookstore page.

GOD SIGNS

Every week, author and journalist Suzy Farbman writes stories about the signs of God’s goodness that often surprise us—and may come into our lives in many forms. There’s not a better theme for the Lenten season! In her book, God Signs: Health, Hope and Miracles, My Journey to Recovery, Suzy invites readers along on a heart-opening journey through the many God Signs she encountered while struggling with one of life’s greatest challenges.

BIRD ON FIRE

Jane Wells writes on many themes. She is the host of our colorful Faith Goes Pop department, which explores connections between faith and popular culture—and Jane also has developed the Bird on Fire department, which inspires individuals and congregations to get involved in combating modern slavery, hunger and homelessness. In working with young people, Jane became aware that the enormous fascination with science fiction books and movies, especially The Hunger Games, reveals a deep concern for many of the world’s most vulnerable men, women and children. Jane’s slogans include: “Hunger isn’t science fiction.” If you know a young person—or you are a Hunger Games fan yourself—there’s not a better Lenten book than Bird on Fire: A Bible Study for Understanding the Hunger Games.

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

 

Johann Christoph Arnold interview: Finding happiness in aging

February 23, 2014 by

HIS WISDOM about family life and peacemaking has circled the globe; more than a million copies of his books have sold in dozens of languages. Now, the aging teacher and peace activist Johann Christoph Arnold turns to lessons about the spiritual treasures of—aging itself. In an inspiring and fun-to-read new book, Rich in Years: Finding Peace and Purpose in a Long Life, the spiritual head of the Bruderhof community shares what he has learned from his own life—and the lives of many other people—about finding happiness in old age.

“Old age”—it’s a phrase avoided like the plague in most books about growing older, which are aimed mainly at avoiding or denying the aging process. But, Arnold always has been a radical teacher and, in Rich in Years, he explores the provocative idea that happiness can grow even as our bodies lose our youthful physical abilities. Talk about counter-cultural teaching!

Arnold was raised in a radical, courageous tradition. His grandparents—Eberhard Arnold and Emmy von Hollander Arnold—were deeply inspired by the Salvation Army movement in Germany in the early 20th Century. Later, they gathered with friends and launched a new kind of communal Christian community, based on Jesus’s teachings in the Sermon on the Mount. Their Bruderhof (place of brothers) was founded in 1920 along with a famous magazine now called Plough. The Arnolds eventually learned of another communal Christian community with roots in the 1500s, the Hutterites, and Eberhard visited their communities in North America as he shaped the new Bruderhof.

The Bruderhof’s pacifism and defense of religious minorities in Germany, including the Jews, led to Nazi persecution. Eberhard Arnold died in 1935 after a procedure in a Nazi-run hospital and the entire movement fled outside of Germany, eventually resettling years later in the U.S. The official Bruderhof website describes the group’s history and its life, today, in more detail.

Arnold, now 73, has been an almost Zelig-like character—present at many milestones of peacemaking since the mid-20th century. He marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; he traveled occasionally with Pete Seeger; he has met and talked with world leaders in many settings, including at the Vatican.

Here are highlights of ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm’s interview with Johann Christoph Arnold …

HIGHLIGHTS OF
OUR INTERVIEW WITH
JOHANN CHRISTOPH ARNOLD

DAVID: Let’s start with a little bit about the Bruderhof today. I don’t see a membership total online. And what is your title with the group?

JOHANN: I am the senior pastor. The community I’m in is about 350 people. We have around 35 communities all over the world. We are about a total of 3,000 people.

DAVID: I also see various short “bios” of you online, but most aren’t up to date. What are the numbers now? Your age? Your number of grandchildren?

JOHANN: I’m 73. We have 43 grandchildren and one great grandchild.

DAVID: And, here’s one more question that’s so common that your website addresses it in a video: What’s the difference between your communities and the Amish?

JOHANN: There are a lot of similarities, but we really believe in going out to all people and proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus—just like Jesus asked his disciples to go out into all the world. The Amish are more withdrawn.

DAVID: You’ve got YouTube videos featuring Bruderhof men and women talking, on screen, about the movement. That’s a big difference between you and the Amish.

JOHANN: We believe in using technology, providing it really serves God and his kingdom.

DAVID: You’re one of the most prolific authors in America. So, do you use an e-reader these days?

JOHANN: No, I do not read e-books. I like to have a real book in my hands. A real book is a thrill to hold! We have a huge library of books. We believe in libraries of real books and not in e-book libraries.

DAVID: I know that you are very proud of your history. Your newest book, which we are recommending today to readers, quotes your grandfather in a couple of sections. But I wonder: Today, in 21st-century America, what kind of connection do you feel to the founders of your movement so long ago and far away?

JOHANN: I would say there are many, many similarities. In my grandparents’ time they did speak out against Hitler and for the Jews and that took a tremendous amount of courage. The German people were gripped by fear—and there was a real threat of being sent to concentration camps. So, when people spoke out, as my grandfather did, this took real courage.

My family did have to flee Germany. We eventually had to go to Paraguay and then because of a dictatorship there, we came to America because we believed here in America we could practice our beliefs. And, to a large part, this was possible.

Sadly, American society today also is gripped by quite a bit of fear, since 9/11 in particular. Fear binds people. Fear shuts up people. We need courage today to lift up the true American spirit. … I see too many people who try to stand up for something today finding that they are marginalized. So, yes, what we are experiencing today in America has similarities to what my grandparents experienced.

DAVID: The Bruderhof is known as a “peace church” and you have been personally involved in peace and civil rights movements. You marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the South. You’ve been involved in anti-war movements. Do you see yourself as an isolated voice coming from the Bruderhof? Or do you see yourself as part of a larger community of activists?

JOHANN: We are very much part of a much, much bigger picture. God is great. God constantly creates something new, something moving. We want to be involved wherever we can work with people, together, for a more positive society.

Pete Seeger was a friend of mine and one of the last things he did was to review my newest book, Rich in Years. I was with Pete Seeger at many rallies over the years, against the death penalty and on other peace issues. He was an incredible man! If anyone should have won the Nobel Peace Prize, it should have been Pete Seeger. He was a man of peace and I thank God that I knew him and worked with him.

(After his recent death, ReadTheSpirit published a tribute to Pete Seeger’s life.)

HAPPINESS IS:
‘Another day to love and to serve’

DAVID: Your way of talking about the peace movement—serving people wherever there is a need—touches on the central theme of your newest book, Rich in Years. That book is about what I would describe as “the gifts of aging.” The subtitle says it’s about: “Finding peace and purpose in a long life.” And the most important lesson you teach in this book is: As we age, our happiness depends on the service we provide to others.

Toward the end of this new book, you write about your relationship with your grandmother, later in her life. There’s even a lovely photo of her in the book, leaning down so a little girl can kiss her cheek. With the photo are Emmy’s words: “Each morning when I wake up I am happy because I have been given another day to love and to serve.” She was quite a model for you, wasn’t she?

JOHANN: My grandmother’s life was incredible. Here was a woman who was only married for 27 years and then lived as a widow for 46 years and she had a great dignity. People just loved and appreciated and flocked to her. She had an incredible long life and her memory was pretty much good until the very end. She died when she was 96.

I am thankful that we spent so many years with my grandmother. My grandfather died in a Nazi hospital. He had a leg fracture and then there was a surgery, and he never recovered from that. He died. It was never quite proven what happened, but I do know that the Nazis definitely had an eye on my grandfather. But my grandmother was able to flee and lived a very long life.

DAVID: Such a person, who survived Nazi threats and was essentially driven as a refugee around the world as a result, might have wound up quite bitter about life, quite fearful. But that was not the case with your grandmother.

JOHANN: She had very happy years right up to the end of her life.

DAVID: And, in your book, you point out why you think her life was so happy.

JOHANN: She was so happy because my grandmother believed in service; she believed in doing good deeds for anyone she encountered: a child, a grown up, a guest. She constantly was thinking of other people. In that way, she was an incredible inspiration to me and to many others. She left a legacy for younger people, today, that if you want your life to count for something, you will serve as a role model to others. Throughout her life, she was a role model to thousands.

DAVID: I have been reporting on religion and spirituality for nearly 40 years and in my library of books about the spiritual side of life, I can find very few that focus on the “gifts of aging.” Most books on aging are about how to avoid it or to deny it. The main example from this other point of view is Joan Chittister’s book, The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully.

Why did you decide to write such an unusual book—about the gifts of aging?

JOHANN: My wife and I, whether we like it or not, are also becoming senior citizens so we thought it was time to explore this and to contact other senior citizens to see how they made out. I was richly rewarded in realizing that—these old timers who have been married for 40, 50 or 60 years—they were able to do this because they had a firm belief in God and believed in what I call the old values.

I did find another book about aging that I found very helpful: Billy Graham’s Nearing Home: Life, Faith and Finishing Well. I found that book incredible. It inspired me. I read it before I started writing this book and it was inspiring to me as I put my own book together.

DAVID: Your book radically challenges our assumptions as Americans about what aging should be like. There’s a popular TV advertisement, these days, in which the actor Tommy Lee Jones is selling a financial-planning service and asks viewers: “Can you keep your lifestyle in retirement?”

For most Americans, that involves a whole lot of consumption. We measure our success largely by how much we own and can afford to keep buying. Instead, your book argues that real success—real happiness in life—depends on how much service we provide to others.

JOHANN: Yes, David. And I include stories about people who have found this to be true. There’s a story in the book about Vincent and Jean DeLuca, an elderly couple I met when Vince was in his 60s. They ran a family business until they both were in their 80s. So here are two people, who left their business in their 80s—but they didn’t sit home. In the book, I write: “Now that they are no longer in business, they spend their days volunteering locally, mentoring younger volunteers and inspiring them to work hard in whatever vocation they might choose. As Vince and Jean get older and physically weaker, it seems they get spiritually stronger.” This is an incredible story.

DAVID: That’s really a central theme: even as they get physically weaker, they get spiritually stronger. You tell about lots of other people, in this book, but let’s bring this back to your own life. You’ve lived a life of service yourself.

JOHANN: When my wife and I married, we decided that our marriage would be one of service to other people, via counseling, teaching, working together with others and enjoying being with other people. We have now been married for 48 years and in many ways, life is getting lovelier each day. Life is not boring! Every day you find new outlets where you can share with someone a little bit of joy. Jesus said that if you simply give a stranger a cup of water, you will be rewarded in heaven and that is our hope. However long God has for us, we can make a slight difference in somebody’s life with each day we have.

WHY FORGIVE?
‘Forgiveness … frees us.’

DAVID: This is such a refreshing message in a world where people often talk about the rampant fear and anxiety in our lives. This leads me to the central theme of your other recent book, Why Forgive? Before people are able to free themselves up to embrace this life of service you describe, a lot of us have to get past these heavy weights we carry around of hurt and anger, right?

JOHANN: Yes. Fear and anxiety are so widespread today. But you know, Alan Paton, the famous South African writer said that if an injury has been done to you, no matter how heinous, there is only one way to recover and that is to forgive. That is the kind of message that I and others have been trying to get out to Americans, and trying to get into our schools. And, when I have been out speaking about this, I have seen a real hunger for forgiveness and for nonviolent forms of conflict resolution.

DAVID: A common misconception about forgiveness is that it’s the same thing as conflict resolution. But it’s not. In your writing—and in other classic writing on forgiveness—this process is really about us, as hurting individuals first. We forgive by giving up our lingering thirst for vengeance. We give up our hurt, to the extent that we can. And we do this, whether the offending party participates in reconciliation—or not.

When we publish this interview, we’re also going to publish a column by the writer Benjamin Pratt about forgiveness, which he describes as “Clearing Boulders.”

Forgiveness begins inside each of us. Am I saying that correctly?

JOHANN: If we don’t forgive, we die of a cancer of bitterness and the cancer of bitterness kills as thoroughly as any other threat to life. Bitterness can destroy the lives of the most beautiful people simply because they cannot forgive. When I am in front of groups at schools, I say, “When we forgive: Everybody is a winner. When we don’t forgive: Everybody is a loser.” This is simply the message of Jesus. In Matthew, chapter 18, Jesus says we should forgive 70 times 7 times.

DAVID: You’re talking about love replacing bitterness.

JOHANN: Wherever the love of Jesus overwhelms one person, the angels in heaven will rejoice and that is something to be thankful for.

If someone really does a grievous thing against me, then I have a choice of either being very hurt, very offended, wanting justice at all costs—or forgiveness. But first I have to realize that it is wrong for me to carry all of this bitterness around with me. We must realize: If I forgive my enemy, then I am not doing my enemy any favors. The one I do a favor to is myself.

If I don’t forgive, I am a bound person. I am consumed by the person who has hurt me. I am consumed night and day by him. If I forgive, I let go of all that. I do myself a favor by forgiving. That’s difficult to understand for many people.

DAVID: In Why Forgive? you pose the challenge this way: “Forgiveness is power. It frees us from every constraint of the past, and helps us overcome every obstacle. It can heal both the forgiver and the forgiven. In fact, it could change the world if we allowed it to. Each of us holds the keys to forgiveness in our hands. It remains to us whether or not we choose to use them.”

WHERE IS HOPE?
‘Wherever people start working together’

DAVID: Are you an optimist about America and Americans these days? Or are you worried about our future?

JOHANN: That’s a beautiful question. I have always been an optimist all my life, even when things looked very very bad. Wherever there are people there is reason for optimism because God is at work in every human heart and can change it in an instant. Wherever people start working together, there is reason for optimism. One of the most optimistic guys I met was actually Pete Seeger. He was always was optimist and always saw hope and always was excited about something new. In the same way, I want to be excited about new things each day.

DAVID: You often speak to children and youth. What are you trying to teach them?

JOHANN: I have been in schools where there were thousands of students sitting in gymnasiums in bleachers and filling the floor and what thrills me in this sea of faces is seeing each child’s face. What we need to understand is that each one of these children is a unique story. We need to show interest in the stories of other people, of each person. When I talk to these groups, I say: “I am here because your story is important.” Then I point out to them role models they could look to: Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln, Mother Teresa. I tell the children: “You will become the world’s next leaders. It is important that you grow up to become the next role models.”

This all begins with thinking of other people, first. There is a reason and a purpose to life in this world—and the time we live in this world is so short, David, so short. Even if we live a long life—it is so short. We had better be active each day, doing something of service to others.

DAVID: I think we’ve come full circle, talking about your life and your work and your two most recent books. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

JOHANN: Tell your readers that they are in our prayers. For us, prayer is the strongest weapon that God gave us in our arsenal to use and it is the most underused weapon. With prayer we can change the world.

MORE ON THE BENEFIT OF SERVING OTHERS

Sociologist Dr. Wayne Baker is devoting a series of columns—in The OurValues Project, this week—to the value of helping others. In his first column, he reports on a five-year University of Michigan study that shows significant benefits in the lives of people who choose to help others.

MORE ON JOHANN CHRISTOPH ARNOLD
AND THE BRUDERHOF

Johann Christoph Arnold edited the volume in the Orbis Modern Spiritual Masters Series that collects his grandfather’s most important writing. The book, Eberhard Arnold: Selected Writings, is available from Amazon.

You also can learn more about Rich in Years at The Plough website.

Johann Christoph Arnold’s colleagues report the following about the historic Plough magazine: “Plough Publishing House, founded in 1920, is an independent publisher of books on faith, society and the spiritual life. We’re based in Walden, New York, with branches in the United Kingdom and Australia. After 12 years online-only, Plough is re-launching in 2014 with a fresh team, enthusiastic backing, and a mission to contribute to the renewal of both church and culture. In addition to serving up views and insights online, we’ll launch the Plough Quarterly, a new magazine with in-depth essays, stories, poetry, and reviews. To be notified of developments, sign up for Plough’s weekly updates.” (See the lower-right corner of this Plough homepage.)

The Plough editors add: “Appearing in print and digital editions, Plough Quarterly aims—in conjunction with Plough’s books and online publishing—to build a network of readers and writers with a common vision. As an ecumenical magazine, it will regularly feature Catholic, evangelical, Orthodox, Pentecostal, Anabaptist, Quaker, and Jewish contributors, as well as occasional Muslim, Buddhist, humanist, and other voices who in fresh ways bring out aspects of Jesus’ message.”

(This interview was originally published at readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

Clearing boulders: In our culture, forgiveness is a surprise ending

February 22, 2014 by

Forgiveness:
A Truly Counter-Cultural Story

By BENJAMIN PRATT

“Sue the doctor!”

That’s what friends and family urged my father-in-law, Donald Bosserman, to do after we discovered a mistaken diagnosis would end his life. How could this happen!?! There was no way to save him now. We wanted revenge.

I know a lot about “Revenge,” the action of hurting another in return for the wrong done to me, and “Avenge,” the verb that describes inflicting retribution or exacting satisfaction in such cases. We all know those words, because they are the fuel of our popular culture.

In recent years, my book about the spiritual lessons behind Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels has taken me into discussion groups far and wide. My focus is on the way Fleming crafted the novels to portray his hero as pursuing the seven, modern, deadlier sins that Fleming was convinced posed the greatest evils in our age.

One night, following a talk on Fleming and Bond, a man came up to me and wisely observed, “I know your 007 book is based on Ian Fleming’s literary tales and not on the films, but have you noticed that the recent Bond films—and almost all action films these days—are rooted in one theme: revenge?”

He was spot on. We are hurt in so many ways, season after season, and our culture tells us: The solution is revenge.

But there is an alternative story—think of it as a possible surprise ending—after all the tales of vengeance on TV, at the movies and in the front-page headlines that dominate our culture.

In more than 30 years with my father-in-law, he taught me this lesson. First, Donald taught me about clearing boulders. In the latter years of his life, he and his wife lived in Pennsylvania on a wooded lot filled with trees and boulders—land that once was riddled by bullets and bombs in the pivotal battle of our Civil War. They lived less than a half mile from the Eternal Peace Light on the Gettysburg Battlefield.

Donald delighted in landscaping with trees, plants and boulders. He was always rearranging, and each time I visited, at least once a month, there were boulders to move—60, 100, 300 pound boulders. We strained, grunted, pushed, leveraged and laughed them to fit his new vision. Then we would sit on the boulders, sweating and drinking and talking about the ups and downs of our lives.

With refreshed energy, he then would jump up and say we needed to split and rack some wood for the fires, as fall was not far off.

The last months of Donald’s life were discouraging, difficult and degenerative. We were there every weekend as he declined in a nursing home. Donald’s doctor had misdiagnosed his illness as ulcers, not colon cancer. Once the correct diagnosis was made it was too late and the decline precipitous.

That’s when friends and family started talking about a lawsuit against the doctor.

I told Donald about this, but he wouldn’t stand for it. He called a couple of us to his bedside where he said unequivocally, “I will not rest peacefully in my grave if my family pursues any action against the doctor. He is human. He made a mistake. It was not intentional. I have forgiven him. If any of you continue to live with resentment or seek revenge, it will ruin your lives.”

And then he said, “Resentment is a closet full of rusty swords. If you don’t forgive; if you persist with resentment and think of vengeance, you will impale yourself on those rusty swords.”

Is it any wonder that I admired and loved him more deeply at that moment?

As Johann Christoph Arnold, the great peacemaker, puts it: “If I don’t forgive, I am a bound person. I am consumed by the person who has hurt me. I am consumed night and day by him. If I forgive, I let go of all that. I do myself a favor by forgiving.”

My father-in-law knew that. Yes, resentment is like a closet full of rusty swords.

Or, like a great big boulder we must clear to see life’s beauty again.

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

Abraham Lincoln and visions of a ‘United America’

February 9, 2014 by

(Note from ReadTheSpirit: In this sesquicentennial era of the Civil War—Lincoln scholar Duncan Newcomer is writing a series of columns about the legacy of our 16th president. Learn more about our many Lincoln resources, which you are welcome to share with friends or with your organization to spark discussion.)

By Duncan Newcomer

Abraham Lincoln understood that politics lives by talk.

That is why he was so careful with his spoken words, why he worked so hard to get his words right. He would have succeeded in averting the Civil War if more of the people more of the time had been good listeners. He said in his First Inaugural Address, “We are not enemies. We must not be enemies.” He then appealed to the “better angels of our nature” so we would not become enemies.

What shows the better angels of our nature more than our values? Lincoln appealed to our values to avert tragedy. But too many people were in what John Burt calls a “moral panic” in his new book, Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict. Despite Lincoln’s eloquent appeals, people didn’t listen, or couldn’t believe his words, or they were listening to a different set of values.

We can ask what would have happened if more people, then, knew how to talk and listen to each other from a common set of values. We can hope as a society that we have learned how to talk and listen better. We have a new instrument for achieving harmony in politics with Wayne Baker’s new book with the long title, United America The surprising truth about American values, American identity and the 10 beliefs that a large majority of Americans hold dear just published by ReadTheSpirit.

The book is chock full of up-to-date information about what we believe, accurate facts about who we have become—the true status of our values—and multiple sources of wisdom and guidance from a wide variety of thinkers, including personal stories and lots of quotes from just “the people.” But as we learn from the Preface by Brian McLaren, it is a chilling picture as well. Across the board we are failing our values.

The good news is we share those values.

WHAT WOULD LINCOLN SAY
ABOUT THE 10 VALUES IN ‘UNITED AMERICA’?

Before looking at the 10 values documented in Dr. Baker’s research, let’s consider one other point he makes in this new book: Americans, it turns out, hold “Kindness” as our No. 1 “character strength.” This finding is from a world-wide survey of over 50 nations, of whom none but the U.S. picked Kindness as No. 1. Few presidents seem as kind, even kindly, as Abraham Lincoln. He forgave hundreds of deserting soldiers often saying things like, “You can’t blame a man for what his legs do.” When kindness becomes policy we call it reconciliation. Overall, Americans tend to be hard on leaders who call us to reconcile. Woodrow Wilson wanted a peace treaty with Germany that stressed reconciliation. Lincoln wanted peace with the rebel South that built on reconciliation. To bind up the nations wounds and tend to the widow and the orphan was Lincoln’s Second Inaugural plea.

Looking at the 10 values listed in United America:

Respect for Others. Lincoln’s single deepest value was his desire to earn the esteem of his fellow citizens, and he knew to do that he needed to be worthwhile to them. He said so in his first posting for local elected office. A psychologist recently said, in a lecture on Lincoln, that his deepest need was to earn the esteem of others. People felt this, his respect for them.

Symbolic Patriotism. Lincoln became a symbol for patriotism. Everything we know about him goes into how we feel when see the Lincoln Memorial, or hear again the Gettysburg Address, or see his outstretched hand with its shiny finger tips in a small bronze statue in the rear corner of the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. Most people now love him partly because he loved this county with mystic fervor. We see him as an icon for that love.

Freedom. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master, this expresses my idea of democracy.…” That was one statement of Lincoln’s about freedom. His view of slavery was that taking away the freedom of another human corrupted the person who did the taking. Corruption—spiritual and social—necessarily would be spread by the need to use force to maintain it. The sacred canopy of Law was Lincoln’s sanctuary for freedom. Freedom was the American opposite of the oppression known from European history.

Security. Lincoln would joke about the mosquito bite wounds he suffered as a captain in the brief Black Hawk Indian War. But he became the Commander in Chief over the largest use of force ever assembled in this country at that time. The war inflicted a total of 600,000 casualties, which would be 6 million people if figured as a percentage of today’s total population. He used force in an absolute way for the single purpose of re-establishing the authority of the national government, which he considered to be a sacred trust.

Self-reliance and Individualism. Lincoln may have heard Ralph Waldo Emerson in a Chicago speech. He felt the deep call to find the force of nature that was in him and to fulfill what his partner William Herndon called “the little engine of his ambition.” He did that with extremely thorough work. Of the seven generations of Lincolns who had lived in America, he was the first to move without a relative to accompany him. When at the age of twenty-two he landed in New Salem, Illinois, in July of 1831 to start his life, he was alone.

Equal Opportunity. With those five words, “All men are created equal,” Dr. Baker opens his sixth chapter. From the time Thomas Jefferson penned that new natural law to the time when Martin Luther King brought it all home, first for Black Americans and then for poor Americans, no one lifted those words higher than Abraham Lincoln. If the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice, as King reminded us, the American crown on that rainbow was Lincoln at Gettysburg making equality the new gold to be found at the rainbow’s end. Always a matter not of social status—but of legal status—equality for Lincoln was the common doorway to opportunity.

Getting Ahead. Lincoln admitted his taste for the presidency. He was ambitious in advancing his career. He was the smartest person he knew. He worked long hours and hard ones. He was lucky often. When he saw a chance to merge his failing career with his moral passion to stop the spread of slavery, he became a national meteor. But he told his law partner that after his presidency was over, he would just come back, again, so the two of them could hang out a shingle and practice law just like before. In August of 1864 he fully expected not to be re-elected, and wrote a letter for the next president and put it in his desk drawer. He was peacefully resigned.

The Pursuit of Happiness. Lincoln made himself happy telling jokes which he need to relieve his melancholy. He deeply enjoyed the theater. As president, he learned to like opera. His chief pleasures were to read his Robert Burns and Lord Byron—and to read and recite Shakespeare. He had a frontier man’s appetite for simple food, and he did not drink or smoke or lust after women. He did make money as a railroad lawyer in Illinois and had one of the better houses in Springfield. He was proud of his social achievement, but that was not what made him happy.

Justice & Fairness. Kindness and mutual help was the way people survived and children grew up in the small settlements in Indiana when Lincoln was a boy. There were eight other families within a mile of his home in Pigeon Creek, and another six within two miles. Within four miles of his home there were 90 children under the age of seven and 48 between seven and seventeen. That adds up to a lot of people to enforce fairness and the Golden Rule. The rule of law was for Lincoln the force that made fair play and justice work.

Critical Patriotism. In a speech to the New Jersey Legislature on his way to becoming president, Lincoln turned a crucial—and critical—phrase. He referred to America as “God’s almost chosen people.” That is what separates Lincoln from the glory gluttons of contemporary patriotism. He had a mystical awe for what self-government in a free land could mean for the human race. He was not ever in favor of the nativist American movement that wanted to slam the door on immigrants. As an Enlightenment thinker, Lincoln was poised to be critical of just about everything. He and Mark Twain would have been Mississippi riverboat soul mates joking with skeptical discontent in the service of a freer humanity. While the war effort closed down much political opposition, Lincoln was never the tyrant people feared or imagined.

THE DILEMMA:
HOW DO WE ACT OUT ‘OUR’ VALUES?

We can never know what Lincoln would do now. But we can easily imagine him reading United America and “getting it.”

We know from his life and words that his appeal to values failed in preventing the Civil War. Competing values themselves made the Civil War. If there had been sociologists trained like Dr. Baker in 1860, it would have been interesting to know if they could have found a common ground in the values claimed by North and South. Could those values then have been a part of the better angels of their nature?

Certainly the values Lincoln offered as he entered his presidency, values of reason, law, and sheer common sense, were not enough to calm the “moral panic” of the extremists on both sides.

As the conflict unfolded, Lincoln pondered deeply why the war was so long and horrible. He wondered: Were there deeper demons in human nature? Was there some higher value he had yet to grasp? Finally for Lincoln, what he perceived as the mystery of God in history and Biblical justice were what defined the common ground for the North and the South.

Ironically, it was killer angels that made happen what our better angels failed to do. This was the tragedy of that failed conversation about values.

ON DUNCAN NEWCOMER

In 1999 Duncan earned a Doctor in Ministry in Preaching from the ACTS DMin program through the Chicago Theological Seminary. He is the author of Desperately Seeking Mary. He  has prepared various community resources, discussion starters and historical columns, which you can find in our extensive Abraham Lincoln Resource Page. Currently, he is working on an upcoming series of columns about the popular Western writer Ralph Moody (1898-1992), the author of the Little Britches books. Duncan currently lives and works in Maine, but travels to present talks and programs. Got questions about Duncan’s work? Email us at [email protected]

ON ‘UNITED AMERICA’

Visit our resource page for the new book, United America, to learn more about the 10 core values documented in research by University of Michigan sociologist Dr. Wayne Baker. The United America resource page includes study guides and also two colorful, downloadable charts of the 10 values.

You are free to use, discuss, share and even republish this “sample sermon,” as long as you credit Duncan Newcomer and readthespirit.com online magazine.

Dr. Wayne Baker: How 10 core values can rebuild a ‘United America’

January 27, 2014 by

Best-selling author Brian McLaren says, in his Preface to United America: “This is a book to be shared and translated into thousands of healing conversations across America. Our values matter, and you and I can help them survive and thrive.”

This couldn’t come at a better time. Dr. Wayne Baker’s book reports his conclusions from years of research conducted at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. The book’s full title is, United America: The surprising truth about American values, American identity and 10 beliefs that a large majority of Americans hold dear.

United America appears just as the Glenn Beck apologizes for “helping to tear the country apart” and says he wishes we all could focus on “uniting principles.” The problem is: Glenn Beck doesn’t know what they are.

UofM’s Institute for Social Research is known around the world for its painstaking, nonpartisan research. Now, in Dr. Baker’s book, all Americans have a roadmap to find and discuss our uniting principles.

To help promote a United America, you can …

  • Buy a copy of Dr. Baker’s book. (Click on the book cover with this interview.)
  • Tell friends. (Click on the blue-“f” Facebook icons or the little envelope-shaped email icons.)
  • Read more about the book. (After enjoying this interview, visit the United America resource page, which includes a free download of the 10 Core Values and a video of men and women already talking about this book.)
  • Read more about the 10 values. (For years, Dr. Baker has developed OurValues.org as part of his research into promoting civil dialogue. This week, he is launching a 10-part series of short columns about each of the 10 values.)
  • Plan a small-group series with friends. (This book is designed to spark small-group discussions in any community. Questions in the book are ideal for classrooms and team-building series in any setting.)

HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR INTERVIEW
WITH DR. WAYNE BAKER
ABOUT ‘UNITED AMERICA’
AND 10 CORE VALUES

DAVID: I’ve been a journalist for four decades now and I can say with confidence: This book is big news. As a social scientist, you’ve proven that Americans agree on a whole lot more than most of us ever thought possible in this era of Washington gridlock, red-blue stereotypes and angry media pundits. You’re really busting some myths here, right?

WAYNE: Definitely. The research we are publishing now in this book clearly shows Americans share more common ground than a lot of people thought possible. I have documented 10 core values that are strongly held by Americans; and we have strong evidence in support of that.

DAVID: When you say “10 core values,” you’re not talking about simple majorities. You’re talking about almost universal agreement among Americans on these deeply held beliefs.

WAYNE: That’s right. Before I could determine that something was a core value, it had to meet a number of characteristics. To include a value on the final list, it had to be held by a very large majority of Americans over a period of time. In some cases, these values are held by 85 or even 90 percent of Americans across four national surveys, conducted over a two-year period. If people felt strongly about a value in the first survey, but a later survey didn’t show such strong agreement, then it wasn’t a core value. These beliefs are stable over time. They are widely shared across demographic, political and religious lines. We agree on them whether we are conservative or liberal, young or old, rich or poor.

DAVID: This research involved a very elaborate process, beyond the four national surveys. I know that you explored nearly all of the past studies on this issue. Tell us more about how you reached the final 10.

WAYNE: Working with the Institute for Social Research (ISR), we started by looking at more than 100 questionnaires that researchers had used over the years to explore American values. We held focus groups, talking to people about values and about how they talk about values. We compiled a very long list of possible core values and then we pared down this list, further and further through these stages of the work. We actually held focus groups where we asked people to debate the values. Finally, we reached a list of 24 possible core values that we tested in our four surveys. After the data came back from the surveys, I asked our top data people to throw every kind of test they could think of at these conclusions. Was this research solid? Had we missed something? Were these conclusions true? After all of that testing, we know the conclusions are solid.

DAVID: And these aren’t your recommended values. They’re not your opinions about what values we should hold.

WAYNE: That’s right. I did not start with any conclusions about what I would find. If we had found that there are no core values, I would have reported that. If we had found a different list of values, I would have reported those. I’m a social scientist reporting the evidence from some of the most exhaustive and rigorous research ever conducted into American values.

GOOD NEWS FOR WEARY AMERICANS

DAVID: Your book, revealing our 10 core values, is going to be good news for a lot of weary Americans. Polls show Americans actually hate the angry atmosphere of name calling and gridlock nationwide. How have we gotten into such a mess?

I think we’ve got a clue in Glenn Beck’s recent apology. He now says: “I wish I could go back and be more uniting in my language because I think I played a role, unfortunately, in helping to tear the country apart and it’s not who we are and I didn’t realize how really fragile the people were.” Well, you know as a researcher, Wayne, that Americans do hope for unity. So, why did Glenn Beck do this for years? He now says: “I remember it was an awful lot of fun”—not to mention that it made him a wealthy celebrity!

WAYNE: A lot of people, today, make careers out of controversy. And, for a lot of people, these battling voices are a form of entertaining reality television. But, the polarization we see today is largely coming from media commentators and political elites in this country. And, there’s no question that the elected officials in Washington are deeply divided.

But my research was not among political elites—we were interested in what Americans really think.

TESTING OUR VALUES IN A CHANGING AMERICA

DAVID: Your findings make a lot of sense, when we look at the major trends in American life that Pew researchers have just documented. This new Pew report on “milestones” was not designed to look at values—certainly not in the way you define values. But the Pew team’s list of “milestones” did identify some major shifts underway in American culture. And, when you look at those dramatic lines moving across the Pew charts—they make sense when compared with your list of values.

Here’s an example: Pew now finds that a majority of Americans favor legalizing same-gender “marriage.” And if you describe this as a form of civil “union,” there’s an even bigger majority approving legalization. Beyond that, big majorities of Americans feel this legal change is inevitable—whether they like the idea or not. In your study, you found that “Equal Opportunity” is an almost universally held Core Value. Now that same-gender unions are largely being seen as an example of “Equal Opportunity,” the whole country seems to be shifting toward approving the practice.

WAYNE: Yes, in that milestone identified by Pew, I think we are seeing an expression of one of the values I describe in my book. Proponents are calling this a case of “marriage equality.” This change we are seeing in this issue is a good example of how people can tap into our what I have identified as Core Values to promote a particular issue or agenda.

DAVID: Another Pew milestone is the record number of 40-million immigrants in the U.S. right now. In addition to Equal Opportunity, you also name “Respect for Others” in your list of 10. Your book is going to be good news, I think, for immigrants coming to this country. But it also suggests that we are really going to be testing our values over the next few years. Can we live up to our ideals?

WAYNE: That’s a good question we all should be discussing. This Pew report also reminds us of what people around the world think about our country. Remember that the U.S. still is the global destination of choice today, if you look at the numbers of people moving around the world. Russia is second, but it’s a distant second.

In other parts of the world—think about the Middle East or Africa—immigration can result in violence, death and even genocide in extreme cases. But, in America, a very high percentage of men and women believe that we should respect others. For example, a very high percentage of Americans believe that the sacred books of any faith should be respected—and that’s not a value in many other parts of the world. Americans believe that all races should be respected—and that’s not true in other parts of the world.

DAVID: But there are big gaps between our beliefs—and what we actually do in public policy. When people read your book, they’ll find lots of examples where we’re still pretty far from our ideals. One example is racism. While most Americans say we should respect all people and provide equal opportunity—the truth is that we’re also experiencing records in the wealth gap separating rich and poor, black and white. That’s part of the discussion you’re hoping people will undertake.

WAYNE: Yes, there is an obvious gap between our values and reality. We still see vast differences in actual opportunities, by race. This is an ongoing struggle. I tend to be optimistic. I think we should acknowledge the truth about the problems we face, then talk about what we might do together based on the deep values that unite us as Americans.

DAVID: You also point out in the book that—even if we completely agree on our ideals—we will have honest disagreements about the best policies to reach those goals, right?

WAYNE: Yes, working out policies to reflect our values is the tough part. But we cannot even start on that process unless we can find common ground to talk as Americans.  The problem is that we’ve forgotten we even have common ground. That’s what Brian McLaren writes about in his Preface. One of the strong messages of this book is that we do have far more common ground than most people realize.

Usually, when we talk about the difficult issues we face, we start with disagreements and we don’t get very far. Or, we may never even bring up these issues because of the mistaken impression that we can never hope to agree.

PROVING THAT CIVIL CONVERSATIONS ARE POSSIBLE

DAVID: Readers don’t have to take your word for it. You’ve proven that civil conversation is possible—even in the Wild West of the Internet. Part of the ongoing research that went into United America is the daily OurValues.org project you’ve produced, as a department of ReadTheSpirit.

WAYNE: We have published more than 1,500 OurValues.org columns over the years. I write most of those columns. We have some very talented guest columnists who have contributed, as well. We all follow a similar approach: We take a values-related issue that’s making headlines, so we know it affects a lot of people. Then, we try to present a bit of news with each column—sometimes a new survey, or some another piece of news we’ve spotted about that issue. Then, we ask questions and we moderate readers’ comments. People who comment are not allowed to personally attack each other. If that does happen, we email the author of the comment and explain why the comment was held back. This rarely happens anymore, but when we do have to intervene, the people who post offending comments respond and agree to revise what was written. This has worked surprisingly well.

DAVID: You’ve proven the potential of civil dialogue in other was, too. In recent months, two pilot groups in two different cities helped you to test the United America book in a series of discussions. Readers can watch a 6-minute video on this page, which shows some folks in those sessions talking about values from their own perspectives.

WAYNE: The first thing we learned from those two pilot groups was: People will show up to talk about this! We had big groups show up in both locations and people were eager to talk. It is true that some people did show up the first time feeling rather anxious about what might happen. They said they were afraid this might devolve into the kinds of angry confrontations we see in the media. But people were willing to give it a try and people quickly realized that we can have civil dialogue.

It was very interesting to see how this unfolded. As we talked, week by week, people resonated with every one of these values. Most people said: “We’ve never thought about it this way before.” They’d go home and talk about this with relatives and friends and co-workers, because they were so relieved to discover that we do share core values. People kept asking when this was going to go nationwide, so they could urge friends in other cities to start discussion groups. Well, that’s happening with this launch.

In some of the discussions we held, the stories people told were very personal and very touching. A lot of people were sad to see the series come to an end. They had formed new connections with others by sharing personal stories about how these values played out in their lives. The most common one-word response we got from people in these groups was: Hope.

Help promote a United America

  • Buy a copy of Dr. Baker’s book. (Click on the book cover with this interview.)
  • Tell friends. (Click on the blue-“f” Facebook icons or the little envelope-shaped email icons.)
  • Read more about the book. (After enjoying this interview, visit the United America resource page, which includes a free download of the 10 Core Values and a video of men and women already talking about this book.)
  • Read more about the 10 values. (For years, Dr. Baker has developed OurValues.org as part of his research into promoting civil dialogue. This week, he is launching a 10-part series of short columns about each of the 10 core values.)
  • Plan a small-group series with friends. (This book is designed to spark small-group discussions in any community. Questions in the book are ideal for classrooms and team-building series in any setting.)

(Originally published at readthespirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

10 Steps toward peace with author Judith Valente

January 11, 2014 by

THIS WEEK, ReadTheSpirit is recommending two new books by poet, author, retreat leader and PBS-and-NPR journalist Judith Valente. So, you’ll want to read our full interview with Judith. In addition, we invited Judith to write this column describing some of the basic steps toward rediscovering peace in our lives. This personal story by Judith opens with a scene from her new book Atchison Blue and then shares 10 insights to ponder.

Conversatio Morum:
A Pilgrimage Toward
Peace

By JUDITH VALENTE

If we are very lucky in life, we arrive at a moment that launches us on a journey of discovery. Having grown up in the shadow of New York City and spent much of my career in Chicago, I could never have imagined that my journey of discovery would lead to a place as strange to me as Atchison, Kansas, and to a Benedictine monastery on a hill.

In the spring of 2007, I was feeling very dry in my spiritual life. Like many Catholics, I despaired over the clergy abuse scandal and the increasingly politicized statements by our bishops that seemed aimed at pointing to the splinters in everyone else’s eyes but their own. In the public arena, so-called Christians seemed bent on dividing the world between insiders and outcasts.

More to the point, perhaps, there were many broken places in my own life that needed healing. As a new wife, I struggled in my relationship with my adult stepdaughters. At work, I found myself embroiled in a silly, totally unnecessary conflict with my supervising producer. My weekends were occupied with travel to different cities to give presentations on my first book, Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul. All of these commitments left me with little time for prayer, reflection or rest.

Then a door opened. I was invited to give a workshop on “Touching the Sacred through Poetry” at the retreat center of Mount St. Scholastica, the Benedictine women’s monastery in Atchison. I arrived feeling exhausted—mentally, physically and spiritually. The morning I was to give my presentation, I sat alone in the oak-limned chapel. I wondered how I was going to speak to a retreat group later that day about nourishing the soul when I hadn’t fed my own soul a decent meal in weeks.

Sunlight streamed in through beautiful blue stained glass windows. Silence saturated the room. I happened to look up at the stained glass window in front of me. There was an image of St. Benedict with outstretched arms. Surrounding him were some words in Latin: omni tempore silentio debent studere. I reached back into my high school Latin and did a rough translation. “At all times, cultivate silence.”

Suddenly the paradox I had been living stared me in the face. I had been traveling around, talking and talking, trying to help others live a more contemplative life. But in my own life what was missing were moments of silence and solitude when I could simply listen and be. Without those moments, I was losing drop by drop the inner resources I needed to do my work well and cultivate an interior life.

I didn’t have any grand plan for changing my life. I only knew that something nameless had shifted inside of me that morning in the chapel. Whatever it was, I wanted more of it.

I began carving out a few days each month to spend at Mount St. Scholastica, learning from the Benedictine sisters what it means to live a truly contemplative life. I don’t profess to have arrived (Eureka!) at the truth. As a Desert Father once told a young monk, “The spiritual life is this: I rise and I fall, I rise and I fall.” That is also the way of conversatio morum, what Benedictines refer to as conversion to the monastic way of life. And that is perhaps what I felt the first stirrings of that day in the chapel.

Since then, I’ve come to understand conversatio doesn’t spark a sudden tectonic shift in the way we live our lives. It isn’t an earthquake, but more like the slow etching water makes on a shoreline. It is, as my friend Sister Thomasita Homan once put it, “a continuous conversation with life.”

Conversatio involves developing certain habits of the heart that then inform our daily living. Every day, as I read the newspaper and listen to NPR, I think the same thought. How different the world would be if each one of us was living out just one of these monastic habits of the heart. Would we have experienced the reckless self-interest that led to the economic collapse a few years ago if we did as The Rule of St. Benedict urges, what is best for others first? Could we avoid the vitriol that poisons our national discourse, that paralyzes our democracy if we practiced the principle: Be the first to show respect to the other. Would corporations drop their employees’ insurance coverage simply because they can, if their managers understood that the true task of a leader is the care of souls. Would the immigrant stranger be walled out, or welcomed as The Rule says all guests should, as Christ? Care of the sick must rank above and before all else, so that they truly may be served as Christ is the kind of health care reform The Rule envisions. Would the current debate over “Obamacare” change in tone if the monastic view of care of the sick became society’s as well?

It seems facile to try and reduce Benedictine spirituality and a monastic view of life to a Seven Habits of Highly Effective People-type list. Conversatio is, after all, not a to-do list, but the work of a lifetime. Still, there are certain Benedictine values I try to keep daily before my eyes, like guideposts on a long, narrow and sinewy road. It is that spirit that I offer a few of them here.

Ponder them.

See if one in particular fits your life right now. Sometimes one will speak to us at a certain time of life, others will appear more meaningful at a later period. Conversatio is never static. The way is always unfolding before us. I rise and I fall. I rise and I fall.

Listen

It has always intrigued me that the first word of The Rule of St. Benedict isn’t pray, or worship or even love. It’s listen. And St. Benedict takes it a step further. He asks us to listen with “the ear of the heart.” We tend to talk at and over one another. Just watch any cable news channel. During the government shutdown, some political leaders suggested what was needed was more talking. I believe what is needed was more listening. St. Benedict wisely suggests we listen to the youngest voice as well as the voice of experience.

Prayer and Praise

Work and pray, Ora et Labora, is the Benedictine motto. And prayer is the main work of any monastery. Monastic men and women begin the day with the moving gesture of running their fingers across their lips in the sign of the cross. They pray, “Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.” These are the first words they utter each morning and it’s a call for praise. For me, it’s a reminder that our days are made not for grumbling, self-criticism or worry, but for praise. How can we make all of our actions a form of praise? Can we make of our day one extended prayer?

Silence

In the age of 24-hour TV, silence is a disappearing commodity. E-mail, Facebook and Twitter are a form of visual noise. The Rule encourages esteem for silence. My friend Sister Micaela Randolph of Mount St. Scholastica once taught me this handy practice. Before you open your mouth to speak, she said, ask yourself three questions: is what you are about to say true, is it kind, and is it necessary? “There is so much talking that goes on that is utterly useless,” the great monastic writer Thomas Merton once said. “The redwoods, the sea, the sky, it is in these you will find answers.” In other words, in the silence, everything begins to connect.

Humility

Interestingly enough, the longest chapter in The Rule of St. Benedict is on the practice of humility. The very word runs counter to our American instincts. But humility isn’t the same as humiliation. It derives from the Latin root humus, which simply means “of the earth.” There is a wonderful custom at Mount St. Scholastica in which before they pray, the sisters bow to one another. In the land of the easy handshake and the quick hug, the bow says, “I recognize the gifts in you, and I acknowledge my own limitedness.” There was also an old and beautiful custom at Mount St. Scholatica in which a group of sisters, assigned to a task, would first bow to one another and ask, “Have patience with me.” I often muse how pleasant my work day would be if at the start, I bowed to my colleagues and they to me and we asked each other to please have patience with our human failings.

Balance

Like many professionals, I suffer from a chronic condition: over-achieverism. That is why I’m so drawn to another Benedictine motto, succisa virescit: cut back, it will grow stronger. Whenever I visit Mount St. Scholastica, I love to visit the vineyard. The grapevines are wonderful plants. They will grow and grow without much outside help. But they won’t produce much of value without the careful attention of the vinedresser, who must periodically radically cut back the vine’s branches. For someone like me, always trying to accomplish five tasks at once, it’s a reminder to regularly survey my life and cut back on excess activities so I can re-focus on what’s essential. Succisa virescit. Cut back, it will grow stronger.

Stability

Our society puts a premium on mobility. Perhaps because of our frontier history, mobility often equates with progress. Monastics turn that idea on its head. They each take a vow of stability to remain at one monastery for life. As someone who’s lived in four U.S. cities and three European cities over the course of my adult life, I’ve developed an appreciation for stability. It’s the idea of grow where you are planted. Or as a Benedictine friend once told me. “You do not need to go elsewhere because everywhere is here.”

Hospitality

There was a lovely tradition in ancient monasteries that whenever a stranger appeared at the door, the gatekeeper was to respond, “You blessing, please.” Visitors received this greeting regardless of whether they were perceived as friends or suspected of being enemies. Of all the mandates in The Rule of St. Benedict, the call to treat all guests as Christ is one of the clearest. No matter what our politics, The Rule calls us to respect the immigrant, the refugee, and all of society’s marginalized people. Hospitality in The Rule also extends to a compassionate concern for the sick. But hospitality does not end with works of mercy. The Rule also calls us to a hospitality of spirit and of mind. Can I be hospitable to ideas that don’t fit neatly into our established world view? Can I listen with the ear of my heart to people with whom I don’t usually agree?

Beauty

Often you will find lovely gardens surrounding monasteries. I once asked the prioress of Mount St. Scholastica why that is so. Benedictines have always cultivated gardens, she said. Gardens remind the world of the need for beauty. Gardens require care and The Rule asks us to bring that kind of careful attention to all areas of our lives. Regard all utensils and goods of the monastery as sacred vessels of the altar, aware that nothing is to be neglected,” St. Benedict says. It is a reminder that everything we encounter deserves our attention. Our natural world, most especially, is ours in trust. As the writer John McQuiston notes, “Everything we have is on loan. Our homes, our businesses, rivers, closest relationships, bodies and experiences. Everything we have is ours in trust and must be returned at the end of our use of it.” Nothing is to be neglected, most especially, beauty.

Community

A recent study found that America is becoming a politically segregated society. Red states are becoming redder, blue states bluer. Americans increasingly live amid others who look, think, and vote just as they do. St. Benedict eschewed the solitary life as a hermit in favor of living in community, but the kind of community he envisioned was quite different. It was one where members checked their wealth and pedigree at the door. Age and education didn’t matter either. What mattered was that a person was willing to join hands with others within community in seeking God. Each was to receive according to his need, bearing each other’s weaknesses with patience. It is what still matters in monasteries today. Is each member seeking to build the others up, rather than tear them down? Are decisions made through consensus, not conflict? Is each member helping the other find the true self? St. Benedict recognized that we don’t become fully ourselves alone, or solely in the company of like-minded individuals, but in a community of many different kinds of people, each adding their own foibles, perspectives and strengths to the mix.

Contemplation

We know it when we experience it. But contemplation is one of those words so hard to define. “Living mindfully, looking beyond the obvious” is how the Benedictine writer Joan Chittister once defined it. For me, the life of contemplation is a lived life. It’s a promise of not arriving at your death bed wondering what the heck this life was all about. “Be where you are and do what you’re doing” is the description Mount Sister Imogene Baker once assigned to it. I like what my friend Brother Paul Quenon of the Abbey of Gethsemani once said. “Contemplation is just a big fat word for gratitude.”

Care to read more?

ReadTheSpirit magazine is recommending two of poet, author, retreat leader and PBS-and-NPR journalist Judith Valente. You’ll want to read our full interview with Judith to learn about these two inspiring books.