فصل 90

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فصل 90

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90

If our expectations—if our fondest prayers and dreams are not realized—then we should all bear in mind that the greatest glory of living lies not in never falling, but in rising every time you fall.

—Nelson Mandela Resilience Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind.

The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind.

—Henry James Love and Kindness

Politics has always been a rough business. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams hurled insults at each other that would make today’s nastiest politicians blush. It’s just how the game is played: Every campaign seeks to draw contrasts with opponents and the media want to cover conflict. So it’s not surprising that two words you don’t hear very often in our knock-down, drag-out political brawls are love and kindness. But you heard them from our campaign.

It started as something I’d occasionally mention at the end of speeches, how our country needed compassion and a spirit of community in a time of division. It eventually became a rallying cry: “Love trumps hate!” Partly this was because the race felt ugly and mean and we wanted to be an antidote to that. But partly it was because I’ve been thinking for a long time about how our country needs to become kinder and all of us need to become more connected to one another. That’s not just a sweet thought. It’s serious to me. If I had won the election, this would have been a quiet but important project of my presidency.

A few weeks after the election, I picked up a copy of a sermon called “You Are Accepted” by Paul Tillich, the Christian theologian of the mid-twentieth century. I remembered sitting in my church basement in Park Ridge years ago as our youth minister, Don Jones, read it to us. “Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness . . . Sometimes at that moment, a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: ‘You are accepted.’?” Years later, when my marriage was in crisis, I called Don. Read Tillich, he said. I did. It helped.

Tillich says about grace: “It happens; or it does not happen. And certainly it does not happen if we try to force it upon ourselves.” This stuck with me. “Grace happens. Grace happens.” In other words, be patient, be strong, keep going, and let grace come when it can.

Now I was sixty-nine and reading Tillich again. There was more here than I remembered. Tillich says sin is separation and grace is reconciliation—it’s “being able to look frankly into the eyes of another . . . understanding each other’s words . . . not merely the literal meaning of the words, but also that which lies behind them, even when they are harsh or angry.” After a divisive election, this resonated in a new way. A lot of Americans were estranged from one another. Reconciliation seemed far away. The whole country was seething. Before the election, it felt as if half the people were angry and resentful, while the other half was still fundamentally hopeful. Now pretty much everyone is mad about something.

Tillich published his sermon the year after I was born. Sometimes people describe the postwar years as a golden age in America. But even then, he sensed a “feeling of meaninglessness, emptiness, doubt, and cynicism—all expressions of despair, of our separation from the roots and the meaning of our life.” That could just as easily be America in 2016. How many shrinking small towns and aging Rust Belt cities did I visit over the past two years where people felt abandoned, disrespected, invisible? How many young men and women in neglected urban neighborhoods told me they felt like strangers in their own land because of the color of their skin? The alienation cut across race, class, geography. Back in 1948, Tillich was concerned that technology had removed “the walls of distance, in time and space” but strengthened “walls of estrangement between heart and heart.” If only he could have seen the internet!

How are we supposed to love our neighbors when we feel like this? How are we supposed to find the grace that Tillich says comes with reconciliation and acceptance? How can we build the trust that holds a democracy together?

Underneath these questions are ones I’ve been wrestling with and writing and speaking about for decades.

It started in college. Like a lot of kids, I felt stifled by the conservative, dollar-crazed conformity of the Mad Men era. That scene in The Graduate where an older man pulls Dustin Hoffman aside and, with great seriousness, shares the secret of life in one word—“Plastics”—made all of us groan. It’s no wonder so many of us were looking for meaning and purpose wherever we could find them. As I put it in my Wellesley graduation speech, we were “searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” (Yes, I’m aware of how idealistic that sounds, but that’s how we talked!) I didn’t know quite how to put it into words, but what many of us wanted was an integrated life that blended and balanced family, work, service, and a spiritual connection all together. We wanted to feel like we were part of something bigger than ourselves—certainly something bigger than “plastics.”

Surprisingly, I found some of what I was looking for not in a New Age manifesto but in a very old book.

In one of my political science classes, I read Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville. He came from France and traveled across the United States in the 1830s trying to understand what made our young nation work. He was amazed by the social and economic equality and mobility he saw here, unheard of in aristocratic Europe, and by what he called our “habits of the heart,” the everyday values and customs that set Americans apart from the rest of the world. He described a nation of volunteers and problem solvers who believed that their own self-interest was advanced by helping one another. Like Benjamin Franklin, they formed volunteer fire departments, because they realized that if your neighbor’s house is on fire, it’s your problem, too. Middle-class women—including a lot of Methodists—went into the most dangerous nineteenth-century slums to help poor children who had no one else standing up for them. Those early Americans came together, inspired by religious faith, civic virtue, and common decency, to lend a hand to those in need and improve their communities. They joined clubs and congregations, civic organizations and political parties, all kinds of groups that bound a diverse country together. De Tocqueville thought that spirit made America’s great democratic experiment possible.

Those “habits of the heart” felt distant to me in the turmoil of the 1960s. Instead of pitching in to raise a barn or sew a quilt—or clean up a park or build a school—Americans seemed always to be at one another’s throats. And a pervasive loss of trust was undermining the democracy de Tocqueville had celebrated 130 years before. Reading his observations helped me realize that my generation didn’t need to totally reinvent America to fix the problems we saw and find the meaning we sought, we just had to reclaim the best parts of our national character. That started, I told my classmates in my graduation speech, with “mutuality of respect between people,” another clunky phrase but still a pretty good message.

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