Dear Reader: This is a reposting of a reflection originally posted June 20, 2020. It is as timely now as it was then. In fact, “timeless” would be a better word. Hope you enjoy it.
“Desiderata” is Latin for “things desired.” Often in difficult times, the thing we most desire is peace.
Max Ehrmann. Fair use.
The prolific, inspirational writer Max Ehrmann (1872-1945) of Terre Haute, Indiana, penned a prose poem that was published as “Desiderata” in 1948. It is the only one of his works to achieve enduring fame, and that only after his death.
For its tone and diction, and because it once appeared in a church publication with the legend, “Old Saint Paul’s Church, Baltimore AD 1692,” it is often assumed to be ancient, maybe even Scriptural in origin. “1692,” however, meant the date of the church’s founding, not of the poem’s writing.
Inspiration
“Desiderata” is neither Biblical nor liturgical nor even very old. But, like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, it stakes a claim to an authenticity of its own. It swept the nation in 1971, when a voice artist named Les Crane released it as a spoken word recording. That was at the height of our nation’s internal turmoil over Civil Rights and the Vietnam War. The serene, contemplative tone of the piece may have boosted its popularity.
Today we are again in a time of stress and conflict. Perhaps Mr. Ehrmann’s poem will be of some use to you. At least, it constitutes good advice.
Desiderata
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexatious to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.
Love . . . is as perennial as the grass. Photo by Мария Волк on Unsplash.
Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.
Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
Dear Reader: My apologies for postponing “Way Out West, Part V” for the second week in a row. It’s just that something came up. Next week, back to what passes for normal around here.
Charlie Kirk and former President of the United States Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida. 15 July 2023. Photo by Gage Skidmore, licensed under CC-BY-SA-2.0.
I came home from an appointment Wednesday afternoon, and my wife asked from the kitchen if I’d heard somebody had been shot—I didn’t quite catch the name.
“Who?”
“Charlie Kirk,” she said. “It’s been on TV.”
“Oh. Charlie Kirk was shot. I’m very sorry to hear that. Who is Charlie Kirk?”
She pointed toward the livingroom, where the television spewed forth the stew of messy details and somber speculation that it always serves up at times like these. It announced in due course that Mr. Kirk had died from the single bullet he received in his throat.
It turns out Charlie Kirk was a conservative political activist, a debater in the political arena, a Trump acolyte, the organizer and head of a huge student movement called Turning Point USA—in all, a Very Big Deal.
I suppose that’s why people, adrift in the rip currents of our era, have been treating his death as a Very Big Deal. The airwaves abound with post-mortem speculations and virtue-freighted posturings. The social media, too.
Charlie Kirk’s fans certainly knew who he was. His critics likewise were very much aware of him. Perhaps I was the only person in America to whom he was not a household name, but then, I’m often accused of not paying attention. It’s really just that I pay attention to other things.
My wife pointed out to me that Kirk’s death cannot be dismissed as unremarkable, having played out amid a crowd of thousands. Kirk was killed at a political event while delivering a political message. The assassin meant the slaying as a political statement.
Before the echoes of the gunshot faded, all sorts of people, speaking or writing in public media, began testifying that the central meaning of this event is political.
Some say, “A man speaking his mind peacefully has been silenced. This is a threat to our First Amendment right of free speech.”
Some say, “His views were reprehensible. He deserved what he got.”
Some say, “When will we learn? We must re-establish civility in our public life.”
Some, like the governor of Utah, see this moment as a possible inflection point—an opportunity to change course as our nation struggles with divisive ideologies.
All these diverse voices place the problem and the solution in the realm of politics.
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I think it goes deeper.
A man took a high-velocity bullet in his throat. His lifeblood poured out and his life was ended. His wife was widowed, his children left fatherless. The act was done by a man in the grip of powerful emotions he could not, or did not, control. His rage was murderous; he took it out in violence.
The ancient human drama of killer and killed is the primary meaning of this event. The beliefs and polemical effectiveness of the victim, the beliefs and operational effectiveness of the assassin, are secondary.
Our dogged insistence that the main meaning is political keeps us from seeing the real problem.
It leads our spokespeople to say fatuous things time and again, things that we know are not true, are meant only to assuage our sense of hopelessness. “We’ve got to understand the killer’s motive, so we can make sure nothing like this ever happens again.”
Really? How has that been working out?
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We in our oh-so-enlightened society are loath to admit the flawed nature of human beings. It used to be called Original Sin, back when we believed in sin. But to believe in sin, you have to believe in God, for sin is a crime not only against one’s fellow man but against God. And we have no room for God.
Instead, we assume we are naturally good, or at least neutral, beings. We do evil only because we are influenced by a negative environment. If only We—that is, Society—learned how to take the right approach, We could eliminate crime and violence. We need to educate people better.
If only Charlie Kirk had embraced a more enlightened political viewpoint, he would not have invited his own destruction.
If only the shooter had understood the First Amendment, he would not have sought to win his argument through violence.
If only we all took lessons in tact and diplomacy, this kind of existential conflict would be avoided.
What a mighty opinion we have of our human powers!
If any of us are grown-ups, we should know by now that none of these things are true; that our powers and our understanding are limited; that even our internal will to do good is apt to falter in the face of felt needs and fears.
Think of all the people you know. Surely you know someone who embodies, in one person, both saint and sinner: the best kind of person and the worst kind of person, inseparable and unaware.
Not many of us are prepared to take the thought further and examine ourselves for signs of this saint/sinner dichotomy. Maybe we’re afraid of what we’d find.
My point is, we are mixed beings, both good and evil in one sweet package. Education will take us only so far. We need firm guidelines, if only to protect society. And because even those boundaries will never completely rein in our waywardness, we also need forgiveness.
There is a Stoic in me who says, “Do not expect much of people. We are weak reeds, unreliable stanchions. When people deliver goodness, be agreeably surprised. When they deliver badness, do not condemn but look to yourself and straighten out your own inner being.”
There is also a Christian in me who says, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me. I am only human.”
What Society needs is not some miraculous, altogether unattainable, political accommodation. People have been wrangling over divergent interests since the dawn of history. We haven’t got it all worked out yet, and we never will.
What Society needs is humility. We need, for starters, the simple recognition that Man is not perfectible. We need some firm guidelines enforced socially, and we need a spiritual basis for hope.
For me, it’s enough to trust that God has the answers, which must remain to me mysterious. I can live with that, but then I’m old.
A church can be the voice of God in our bewildered lives.
Movie poster. Fair use.
In 1950, when Your New Favorite Writer was only five years old, along came The Next Voice You Hear, a film in which God breaks into radio broadcasts, leading people to re-examine their lives.
Its title came from a standard radio-era trope: A staff announcer’s preparation of the audience for an important message by saying, “The next voice you hear will be . . . .”
In this case, the movie implied, the next voice heard will be God, with a message for the world.
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The Christian church has always struggled to embody the voice of God for people on Earth.
In the High Middle Ages, people seemed to accept the notion that what the Holy Roman Catholic Church said, through priests and prelates, was God’s voice. If a pope said, “Go to Jerusalem and conquer it for Christianity,” that’s what people did. It was the voice of God.
Before long, people began to question that equation—mostly because, in the Reformation, “the Church” became two churches, then three. Then a thousand.
With a thousand churches saying different things, how could they all be the voice of God?
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Today, we have a different problem. Church membership, attendance, and affiliation by any metric you may choose, have all declined—inexorably, year by year, decade over decade.
In today’s society, it is inevitable that people will say, “Can any church speak for God?”
I am here to affirm, Dear Reader, that it can. See my statement above: “A church can be the voice of God in our bewildered lives.”
I’m not talking about doctrine. It was once common to suppose that a church could be exactly right—fully orthodox—in its theology. In which case, of course, it spoke with the voice of God.
Few people buy into that kind of thinking anymore.
Today, Christians are more likely to hew to an old biblical standard: “Ye shall know them by their fruits,” words spoken by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
Permit me to amplify.
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The church where I worship may serve as an example: Heritage Congregational Church of Madison, Wisconsin.
Heritage was founded by a group of high-minded civic Christians in 1968. At that time approximately half of all Americans attended church, normally wearing their Sunday best. It was the classic 1950s church. Heritage had about three hundred members soon after it opened its doors.
Almost immediately, erosion began. Over five and a half decades, our membership dwindled until we are now down to 51 members, theoretically. That translates to an active core group of about two dozen who show up regularly for Sunday morning services and other church events.
Most of us are old. We have three “young” families—mom and dad in their early fifties plus children in their late teens or early twenties. The rest of us are in our seventies and eighties.
We are not getting any younger. By most reckonings, we ought to be what one old-time member used to call “tired roosters.”
Surprise: We are not.
I do not mean we never get tired. We do.
I do not mean we are whirling dervishes of liturgical and evangelical activism. We are not.
We are calm. We are patient. We are methodical.
We are full of faith, hope, and love.
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We were not always that way. We got to be that way. God made us that way.
Five years ago, we were a dying church.
We struggled to maintain a huge building far in excess of our needs for worship or any other purpose. Just to keep snow and ice from demolishing the roof was a serious drain on our energies. We always worried about money, mostly money to keep the building going.
Then covid hit. We couldn’t even use this enormous building to gather on a Sunday morning and worship the Lord. We worshiped by Zoom while the building sat empty. That in itself was some kind of revelation, to use a biblical term.
We offered the building for sale. To our amazement, it was snapped up quickly by another congregation at a very fair price.
Suddenly—SHAZAM!—we were awash in cash. We had no money worries for the first time in anyone’s memory.
But now we had a different problem. Covid was over. Masks were becoming optional, then rare. Life was back to normal, sort of. And we had no place to meet in person. We deeply yearned to meet again with our loved brothers and sisters face-to-face.
We rented a storefront in the conveniently-named Heritage Square strip mall. We chose the location because it was central and available. The echo of our church name was just a stroke of good fortune.
Our storefront worship space.
We thought the storefront would be a temporary location. But you know, we like our new space. We’re in no hurry to move on. For the next few years at least, we can afford the rent.
Free of the institutional concerns that used to tie us in knots, we have begun to relax.
We concentrate now on simply holding good, restorative worship services in our new space. Our music director, Robert Eversman, has even built a small pipe organ into our little storefront, making it seem kind of churchy, if you know what I mean. He gets a good sound out of it, too.
There is a small kitchenette, adequate for staging our weekly after-worship coffee and refreshments—a key hallmark of our fellowship.
And some wonderful things have happened:
The Madison Theater Guild, always hungry for rehearsal space, discovered us. We have hosted their rehearsals for three plays in the last year or so, and they’ll be rehearsing Arsenic and Old Lace at Heritage on weekday evenings early in 2025. We don’t charge any rent or facility use fee. We’re just glad there is something nice we can do for the community.
Some folks who enjoy line dancing use our space on Tuesday afternoons. There is a mah-jong club on Wednesday afternoons. A women’s bridge club may start using our space as well. It’s nice these groups can enjoy a cozy and comfortable space for the things they like to do.
Has all this activity increased our membership? No. But that’s no longer what we’re about.
The church is becoming relevant to our community.
We collect items for a nearby food pantry, and one of our pastors delivers them there on a frequent basis. Some members volunteer there. It’s something we can do for our neighbors.
Pinball machines in the back room.
One of our members enjoys rebuilding or reconditioning old pinball machines. He places them in commercial spaces where they generate a bit of revenue. It’s a side gig for him, outside of his regular job. He was running out of space in his basement to store machines, so we said, “Sean, why don’t you put a couple of machines here?” So he did. We don’t know what we’re going to do with them, but there they are. What will God do with them?
Who knows what comes next? We’re in an experimental frame of mind.
We do not need to hammer our church into a success story. God might plan for our church to die. If so, he hasn’t told us.
Food supply is one way we have been entrusted to feed his sheep. Play rehearsals, line dancing, mah-jong, bridge, and pinballs might also be ways to feed His sheep.
We don’t know and we don’t need to know.
We are calm. We are patient. We are methodical.
We are full of faith, hope, and love.
We’re just doing our thing.
Could that ever add up to the voice of God in somebody’s busy, distracted, vexed, and bewildered life?
Our church, like a lot of churches, has shrunk. So we sold our big meetinghouse and started holding services in a rented storefront. Our worship is now simpler, more informal.
Our music director plays an electronic piano, not a multi-manual pipe organ. Today’s prelude was Fond D’Orgue by Guillaume-Gabriel Nivers, 1632-1714. It must have been composed for organ, but now it was played on a single keyboard, boiled down to a simple melody.
As usual, my mind was on other things—mainly the progress of my historical novel, which I am now revising. I was thinking about changes I would make in Chapter 22, when Nivers’s tune broke through.
The simple fall of pure tones stopped me cold. In a startling moment, the tune became an attribute of the Divine.
It is more my style to cast God as a supporting player—essential, yet secondary—in my own grand maneuvers.
What is God for, if not to support me?
Along came Nivers’s tune, a pure thing, existing in its own plane, its link to a long-dead Frenchman moot.
My work—no matter how worthy, no matter how inspired—is a hardscrabble of striving and becoming, a smudged object of trade.
But a tune, a color, a shape, a tree, a stream—is all being. Is God manifested.
God dwells at the heart of things, always in flux yet never changing. The facets of God’s transformation flash like signboards on country stations at night as we go barreling through on the fast express with rarely a glimmer of recognition.
But the God of tunes and colors and leaves and fishes is always accessible. Is present to us in that sabbath state when we hear music and forget our customary concerns.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
