Wendell Berry, the farmer-poet, prophet and activist who pleaded with us all to know, love and preserve this Earth, died in his beloved Kentucky home on August 31^st. He was 92 years old.

This is how, fifteen years ago, I met Wendell Berry:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.1

I was immediately seized by his vision.

Maybe it was how literally I had lived those lines—awakened in the night in fear, worrying, dreading. Here was a spiritual guide who didn’t tell me to “live in this present moment” or teach me to meditate, but who took my hand and led me down to the water. There was no book to read, prayer or mantra to recite. I was only to lie down with the wood drake and the great heron, “come into the peace of wild things [and this next line slew me] who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” The world was already full of grace, and for a time I could simply rest in it, and be free.

With a kindly smile, my old mentor used to chide me about my “negative predictions.” I am so good at imagining future grief, and the way out of this suffering is modeled for me—Berry says—not by saints but by wood drakes, not by heroes but by herons.

Wendell Berry was deeply religious, worshiped at Port Royal Baptist Church where his wife played the piano, but his spirituality was so deeply and essentially integrated into his life that it just disappeared. (Oh, Lord, don’t we need more saints like that.) There was no chapter and verse, no God-talk, no creed, no secret knowledge. Just a deep conviction of the obvious: that holiness is everywhere, in everyone.

There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.2

I found Wendell Berry at a time in my life when the sell-by date on my faith had about expired. This happens regularly to many people, but it hits clergy especially hard because we spend so much of our lives selling pre-packaged religion and propping up collapsing theology. We have to explain some things and explain away others.

I dream of a quiet man
who explains nothing and defends
nothing, but only knows
where the rarest wildflowers
are blooming, and who goes,
and finds that he is smiling
not by his own will.3

In a world of political, economic and social brutalism—when so much of the church goes happily along with it all—Wendell Berry was that “quiet man” who showed us how to live a deeply human life. He lived a small life, a slow life. He pulled us away from wires and cables and screens, away from machines. He beckoned us toward old things, familiar things, toward the land with its ponds and rivers and oceans, its trees and flowers, its corn and wheat and (especially in Kentucky) tobacco, its hills and valleys and plains.

When we return to the sacred life of all Creation, we wonder,

What more did I think I wanted?4

We know:

What we need is here.5

On August 10^th there will be a funeral in nearby Vine Grove. Then the earth he so loved will open and receive his body.

He goes free of the earth.
The sun of his last day sets
clear in the sweetness of his liberty.

The earth recovers from his dying,
the hallow of his life remaining
in all his death leaves.

Radiances know him. Grown lighter
than breath, he is set free
in our remembering. Grown brighter

than vision, he goes dark
into the life of the hill
that holds his peace.

He’s hidden among all that is,
and cannot be lost.6

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Here’s Wendell Berry reading the little poem that first captured my heart.

Sometimes you can’t see the tree for the forest.

I haven’t noticed this slender Maple, even though it’s right along a path I always walk in our woods. It is bent over, crooked, and it’s been that way for a few years at least, because its stout branches are growing straight up.

I stop to look fully at this sapling. What happened?, I wonder. What pinned you down? What did you endure? A regular Maple would hardly take my attention, but this one seems to be not so much a plant as a creature. In its irregular formation, it seems to be striking a pose. I see a torso and uplifted arms. It speaks to me.

We read in Exodus that when Moses saw an irregular tree in the desert—this one on fire yet unconsumed—he said to himself, “I must turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.” The real miracle, it seems, is not the tree burning without burning, but the man who stops to see it. So my standing here listening, talking to this leaning tree is miraculous. Grace makes me stop.

Francis Bacon wrote, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.” The twists and torques of my Maple are strange indeed, and yet they are the very thing that draw me. It becomes, in my seeing, a being of fateful beauty.

I am attracted not simply to the contorted proportions—but to the way the undaunted tree has simply gone on living, growing, unashamed. It’s this fearless beauty that makes my tree burn. When you have been bent back, she seems to say, bent back for so long that your bones can’t remember another shape, glory in what you are becoming.

There was a crooked man, and he walked a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.

We spend a lot of time and a whole load of money trying to straighten all our crooked stuff. Our lives are shaped powerfully by the early forces that pushed and twisted us into whatever shape we were supposed to hold. “As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” And then our own choices became that shaping force.

Some of that can be bent back, and there are green, bending seasons of life. But then a time comes when we have to accept our given form. We can send our new shoots and branches straight up, but they will always be nourished and supported from the crooked trunk below, which is our wild beauty.

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Have you ever had this experience?

You watched a movie years ago and loved it, and you think it would be great for your kids. Besides, you’d love to see it again too. So you cue it up, and about ten minutes in you realize that there’s actually a lot here that isn’t appropriate for little kids.

Something like that happened last week—and I wrote about it. Pam and I wanted to include our grandchildren in our morning ritual of sacred reading, but we wanted to find something they could understand. We thought instantly of parables. I mean, the One Lost Sheep—that’s a perfect kid story!

What we forgot is that Jesus’ parables are almost exclusively stories that—below the surface—

subvert every revered tradition, every absolute certainty. You must be ready to receive a truth that will set you free . . . but not before it pulls from your grip everything you were clinging to.

Of course, kids aren’t prepared for that. In psychological or spiritual terms, they’re just not developmentally ready for such a surrender. Later, though, it occurred to me that most adults aren’t either. Why aren’t we? I wondered.

That’s when I remembered the “Three Layers of Life,” the brilliant little schema of mythologist and storyteller, Michael Meade that I encountered a few weeks ago. It goes like this.

The First Layer. This is the plane where we learn the rules of life in a civil society. How to be polite, on time, respectful, decent. It’s where we learn how to be what they call a success. Here, the idea is just to keep regular life moving along. The deeper questions of life are avoided.

Well, not quite. Because those deeper issues erupt even in this first layer. Moments of overwhelming beauty and wonder, terror and awe sweep us into some realm beyond this pedestrian layer. It may last only a second or a minute, but when we return to the law-and-order world we can’t help remembering that this isn’t the only layer of life.

Everyone makes these episodic trips to that world beyond, as if we have walked through the wardrobe and into Narnia. Experiences of love are often the wardrobe door. We “fall in love” in the hopes of finding transcendence, bliss, union, joy. We follow a religious path in the same hope, that it might just be that door.

What we’re yearning for so deeply is . . .

The Third Layer. This is the place of universal love and acceptance, a place of shared humanity—even strangers are our kin. The third layer enshrines beauty, union, peace, joy. Here we fall into selflessness and seek some way to serve others.

“Finally!” we say, “this is the place I want to live.”

But it’s not so easy. Michael Meade explains:

“The problem is that in order to move from the surface layer to the deep ground of unity, we must pass through the second layer of life. If the first layer is mostly superficial and polite and the third layer involves universal acceptance, then it follows that the second layer contains all the ashes of life and the exiled feelings, all the wounds of the soul and the troubles of existence. The second layer includes all the injustices and betrayals of life, not just the wrong turns but also the roads of exile and the streets of desperation. The second layer burns with extreme emotions and fumes with resentments and angers that will not end. The second layer broods with negativity and fosters all the shadows and shady feelings of life. It festers with the sores of the soul and rankles with all the bigotries and treacheries of existence.”

We hear that and think, Why do we have to deal with all that? I thought third-layer living finally put an end to all that festering and rankling.

But, it turns out, third-level living isn’t an escape from human life. It doesn’t “move beyond” the basic law-and-order demands of layer one. It just knows that’s the foundation, not the castle. And third-level living doesn’t escape the suffering of layer two, when things fall apart and we lose sight of the center. It’s simply able to make St. Paul’s astonishing realization: “for when I am weak, then am I strong.” The third layer dawns with the tear-stained recognition that we don’t find salvation by getting life right, but by failing and falling . . . into the everlasting arms. As Carl Jung put it, “Where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.”

We start noticing that we tend to drop into the third layer when we quit trying to win, to be right, to be vindicated, to be the control master, to be beautiful and worthy and awarded.

Which brings me back to my grandchildren and those parables, where we are lured in by once upon a time, and then the trap door opens and we fall into level three. Those two children, happily ensconced at level one, had no capacity to ride the story all the way down.

But the rest of us, slogging through layer two, are in the best possible place for transformation. We are fussing and festering and rankling right over that trap door.

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Someone can hand you a parachute while you’re standing on the ground, but it’s useless until you are falling to your death. Then—it’s a gift.

All the transformative spiritual truths are like that. They don’t “work” on the ground. They open and release their power only under certain circumstances, by which I mean: falling to your death.

Last week I had an aha moment about just this reality. Pam and I had our two grandchildren with us—just the four of us for a week. A girl, seven. A boy, eleven. We decided to find some way to include them in our daily morning rituals—tea, sacred reading, meditation & prayer. We could make a cup of tea for them; they both like tea if you add enough milk and honey. We couldn’t read our usual daily inspiration from Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr, so we decided to offer a parable each morning, read from the accessible “Message” translation by Eugene Peterson. And at the end we could all offer up our thanksgivings for this day, and remember any friends and family in need.

Seemed like a great idea.

We all had our tea on day one as we sat on the deck, and I started to read the parable of the One Lost Sheep. I knew of course that no shepherd in his right mind would leave the 99 and go in search of the one idiot lamb who wandered off against all warnings and attempts to stop him. That’s the fastest way to lose half your flock to predators and end up bankrupt.

Once you know that, you’re onto something. You understand that Jesus’ first listeners—who knew a bit about the sheep business—would have laughed the rabbi to scorn. Until one day, after maybe thirty or forty years, after their perfect life-plan has blown up and they find themselves totally lost, alone, betrayed, high or drunk or stoned or strung out. Then those laughable words come tumbling back like a profound torrent of shockingly unconditional love, the only kind that can reach them, save them.

You try telling that to a seven-year-old girl, to an eleven-year-old boy.

We didn’t, of course. We pretended that it was a story about a really nice shepherd.

And we kept it up all week, reading them the parable of the wheat and the diabolically sown weeds, the tale of the talents, and the one about the workers in the vineyard who worked different hours but were all paid the same wage. We made hermeneutical small talk, the way we do in church. We found an age-appropriate “life application” for a story intended to make the hearer so angry he might just crucify the teller.

This, it turns out, is the greatest gift of love we can offer children—give them a parable like a parachute, a little squib of a story that lodges in their memory, that haunts the attic of the soul. So that one day, when they are falling and falling and have no way of saving their own life, the parable might just deploy.

And lest you think this is only for kids, I remind you that we are all children here. We are unprepared to receive nearly every spiritual message because it requires the surrender of our will, though it often happens that we only surrender our will against our will. Until then, we say thank you for the parachute, pull the ripcord and watch the lines, the canopy puddle at our feet. It doesn’t work. All these transformative truths—being still, letting go, dying to live—are just religious claptrap. Pinterest platitudes.

C.S. Lewis once observed, “The process of living seems to consist in coming to realise truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. They cannot sound otherwise to those who have not had the relevant experience.”

Unfortunately, the “relevant experience” required is usually some end to what Thomas Merton called our “false self.” It can hurt. As it did for Robert Persig, the author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” who described it like this:

“A kind of chaos set in. Suddenly I realized that the person who had come this far was about to expire. I was terrified and curious as to what was coming.”

You don’t wish such “relevant experience” on anyone you love, least of all your grandchildren. But because it happens even to the luckiest among us, I will keep telling them little, seemingly harmless upside-down stories, secretly packing them a chute that opens only in free fall.

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Last week I was doing my rain dance. Things were dry, and I was tired of hauling hoses all over the place, rescuing wilting camelias and sagging foam flower. There are nine saplings scattered deep in the woods, where the only way to get water is by bucket. By late July I am tired of it all. I just want a good soaking from heaven.

Then the rain came—and kept coming in battering waves.

About 8 o’clock that night, I pulled on my slicker and went to check on the stream that wanders through our property. It was swollen, but the banks were holding. I went to bed thinking I had gotten a soaking and escaped a flooding.

In the morning, I could see I was wrong. The stream had breached its banks in the night and swept through a garden we had just planted last September, flattening waves of flowers. On top of that, this spring we ordered tons of pea gravel to re-pave the winding path through that garden. Because the path was so heavily worn, weeds pushing through everywhere, we laid it on thick—four more beautiful inches of the dove-grey stones. Now the path was washed out, in places obliterated, and pea gravel had swept into the gardens and finally dumped a massive pool of gravel out on the lawn, five inches deep. I was heartsick. How do you even begin to clean up a mess like that?

But here’s a worse realization: this will definitely happen again. The stream has flooded before, sometimes worse than this. We’ve cleaned up, started over, built back. We love the brook that winds through our landscape—it’s one big reason we bought this piece of land when all we had was a home-dream. But if you’re looking for a low-risk plot of ground, this wouldn’t be it.

We could clean this up. It would be hard, cost some money, but we could do it. But should we? That whole acreage was a mess until we cleared the riot of weeds and invasive enemies and planted that garden a year and a half ago. How many evenings since had we stood looking out over the emerging green glory and said to ourselves, Remember what this used to look like?

Maybe we just have to let it return to riot. Maybe we forget the path. That meandering lane through new Eden was what made the garden walk a kind of meditation on beauty and the interplay of sedum and stone. But perhaps we just can’t justify the effort anymore. Let it go.

I seriously considered it. After a loss, we often feel deep sadness, anger, fatigue and weariness. Never again, we sigh. To work that hard, create something so beautiful, and then see it wiped out.

Years ago I read “The Courage To Create,” Rollo May’s insightful revelation of the barriers that block authentic creativity. But as difficult as it is to create beauty, I think it takes even greater courage to re-create beauty that has been lost or destroyed.

Re-creators understand, amid the tears of loss, that we cannot let chaos have the last word. We cannot live without beauty because, after all, “God is beauty,” as the great John O’Donohue assures us. We make beauty with our lives, with our loves, because to do so is to co-create with God. Beauty is not an add-on, a nice-to-have. It is essential to the fullness of life, and we create it (we might say) because we must.

And when it fades or decays or is somehow swept away, we understand the evanescence of all things. We don’t expect it to last forever. It must continually be re-created, over and over.

A few years ago, I spent some time at a Buddhist monastery and observed a quiet cadre of monks creating a mandala of colored sand. Perhaps you’ve seen these intricate creations—monks with tweezers, painstakingly placing grains of sand to form an exquisite blueprint of the universe. I wasn’t there at the end of the week, when they ritually destroyed their work of art, sweeping the sand into a bucket, then walking it down to the river and pouring their artwork into the relentless current. It’s their version of Ash Wednesday: Remember, all life is ephemeral.

In my life I have been privileged to witness so many re-creators, people who have been wiped out and then come back to offer something of beauty to the world. People who have lost everything to fire and flood and who did not bow to chaos but rose up to build something new and remarkable in its own way.

I’ve known people who’ve had to re-create a life that was wiped out by disease or swept away by a marital storm.

I’ve lost track of the people whose beautiful lives were destroyed by addiction—and who went on to create their most graceful edition yet.

I’ve known painters and poets, writers and singers who never published or sold a single thing they created, and yet they kept making beauty for its own sake.

So then, how could I not defy chaos and clean up the wreckage of my garden? How could I not re-create that dove-grey pea gravel path?

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If you’d like to see how the monks ritually destroy their exquisite mandala creation, you can watch it here.

When he called me about two weeks ago, we had just returned from our family reunion—a gathering of 95 of us that prompted me to write a reflection on blood and water, and what’s thicker. I figured it was something to do with the reunion, maybe the expenses. But it wasn’t. My younger brother was calling to tell me that a recent scan had identified a malignant tumor. Surgery in two days.

These are the calls where the floor under your feet ripples a bit, as if water. The room wobbles slightly and the light from the window warps. What is bending is the shape of reality—or at least the reality we have mapped out, established, nailed down in our heads: this is the way things will go.

We keep talking, but I’m only listening with ten percent of my brain. The rest is surveying all the broken storylines—my crumpled assumptions—and computing hundreds of different narratives that could play out instead. Anxiety creeps over me, fear of the unknown. He didn’t tell us at the reunion, he says, because he didn’t want a lot of worry about him to dominate the happiness of our biennial get-together. So like him.

Hard as it was, that phone call was a blessed revelation—of how much I love my younger brother. And when I quickly called my older brother, because I needed help dealing with this, I realized what an extraordinary gift I have in two brothers.

My best friends are my brothers. I used to feel like that was cheating—that brothers didn’t count as “friends.” But then I decided to just accept my friend fortune and stop quibbling about the criteria.

Men, as everyone knows, struggle to make friends. They may have buddies at the gym or on the links or at work, but when a crisis hits, it is as if they have no one. Usually they turn to the women in their lives to do what women always do: explain emotional, relational, spiritual realities to their men.

But, thank God, I have brothers to turn to.

We have our own text thread. Two of us always organize a shared gift for the one celebrating a birthday. Every year we get together for a four-day Brother’s Retreat. We choose a book we’re going to read. We bring playlists of great music we want to share. We make sure we have whatever we need to make Boulevardiers. My older brother, himself a gifted poet, makes sure we read some great poems. We sit in coffee shops for hours and hours. We set aside dedicated time to talk about where we are in our lives—what we believe anymore, where we’re struggling, where we’re finding delight, how we’re doing as husbands, fathers, grandfathers. Four years ago, we wrote down the commitments we wanted to make to ourselves. We put them in a bottle and buried it on a hike in the mountains outside Tucson. This year we dug up the bottle, opened and read.

So now you know why that call hit me hard: I have a brother—two brothers—like that.

“A man that hath friends must show himself friendly,” we are told in Proverbs, “and there is a friend that sticketh closer than a brother.” My guess is, that proverb works on the assumption that a lot of brothers aren’t that close, that sibling rivalry and geographic distance kill deep affection, and so it’s not that hard sometimes to find a friend that bests your brother. But I haven’t found that to be true.

Over the course of our lives—with hundreds of choices—we unwittingly choose the manner of our heartbreak. The phone rings, your brother or your sister tells you they’re battling cancer, and your heart is going to break, one way or another.

You can feel a sadness, that you don’t really know your sibling, that you allowed childhood conflict to drag on into adulthood, that you forgot your own blood. And that, let me tell you, is a bitter, knife-twisting heartbreak.

Or the phone rings, you hear the news and you want to cry and maybe you do. Because he is so precious, she is so rare, so close to your heart. You know him intimately; you know her thoughts. This is a deeper pain, but a beautiful form of suffering. It is love’s motherlode and you feel humbled and honored to bear it.

This second option is the heartbreak to hope for, especially for a man—since many men wind up in the first. And it’s only possible for me because I happen to have the outsized, overmuch blessing of not one, but two brothers who are my friends.

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Not every danger appears with the face and fangs of a monster. Some present themselves with a smile, a welcome, an invitation to sit, relax, enjoy yourself.

On Saturday I watched Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” which, in true Hollywood style takes us through extended combat scenes of the Trojan War, heart-stopping battles with the Cyclops Polyphemus, the deadly Scylla and Charybdis, and the cannibalistic race of giants called Laestrygonians.

But the most fatal foe in Homer’s epic isn’t any of these monsters. It’s the most beautiful and luscious flower you can imagine. The Lotus.

You may have forgotten this episode, but it begins like so many in the 3,000-year-old poem. Odysseus and his men, blown off course and lost, land on an island, and a search party is sent to scout the place, while the rest stay to guard the ships.

...So off they went and soon enough
they mingled among the natives, Lotus-eaters, Lotus-eaters
who had no notion of killing my companions, not at all,
they simply gave them the lotus to taste instead …
Any crewmen who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit,
lost all desire to send a message back, much less return,
their only wish to linger there with the Lotus-eaters,”
                 - Robert Fagles (The Odyssey, Book IX)

When the advance party does not return by sunset, Odysseus takes a few men and goes to find them. He comes ready to draw his sword and rescue his men, something he’s very good at. But none of that is necessary here. Odysseus has walked into a Zen zone. Everybody here is chill. No chains. They’re all eating the Lotus flower, an addictive substance that produces a state of blissful apathy and dreamy amnesia. The men are feeling no pain, and they’re not in any mood to get back on the ship. Shocked, Odysseus asks, “What of your families?” They can’t exactly recall any family. “What of the years fighting in Troy?” Nothing. “What of your homes?” Blank stares.

Odysseus responds by physically dragging the men back to the ship and lashing them to the rowing benches to keep them from returning for one more hit.

The insidious threat of the Lotus-Eaters is this amnesia (if you’ve seen Nolan’s “Memento,” you know the director loves this theme, and Matt Damon lovers will also hear echoes of his “Bourne” amnesia and his quest to discover his own history.)

Odysseus realizes, to his horror, that his Lotus-eating men have forgotten their past and—worst of all—their home. The whole point of this saga is—the overwhelmingly powerful urge to return home. Homer’s hero understands that if this is lost, the odyssey is over. The honeyed petals can do what no monster can: end the quest.

Now, interestingly enough, none of this shows up in Christopher Nolan’s version. Well, not quite. Even at three hours, there’s not enough time to include every episode in Homer’s poem, so Nolan deletes the Lotus-Eaters scene, but not the Lotus flower itself.

After Odysseus is shipwrecked and saved by the nymph Calypso, Nolan has Calypso offering him the memory-erasing petals to ease the pain of his injuries, but also to trap him in her bed (though in Homer’s telling, Calypso has no Lotus on her island). The King of Ithaca wafts away into forgetfulness and spends seven mindless years with the nymph.

Even after 3,ooo years, “The Odyssey” still speaks powerfully to our age. We are a people with home-amnesia. The Greek idea of nostos, or “homecoming” is not just getting back to where you started, it’s reclaiming your place in family and community, your honor and identity after a long adventure (think of Bilbo or Frodo in Mordor, longing for the shire). It’s being changed. As is so clearly seen in Homer’s tale, it’s about the hero or heroine on a journey to some earthly place—which is also a journey to the center of the soul.

If we have forgotten our past, where we came from and the people who mean the most to us; if we have forgotten where we were going, or we’ve ceased to believe there is any home worth longing for, we’re eating Lotus.

Lotus is comfort food. It keeps us satisfied with a “comfortable life,” where safety and security become our highest good.

Lotus is a memory thief. It robs us of the sacred remembrance of those formative years when we were not embarrassed by high ideals, when we were willing to ditch security for some great quest, when we believed there was something worth suffering for, when we knew the world was meant to be different and that we were too.

Lotus is a spiritual Dementor. In Harry Potter’s world, the Dementors are wraiths who overtake the unwary and plant the horrid “Dementor’s Kiss”—latching onto the open mouth and sucking out the very soul of the victim. Lotus is a soul-suck like that. It kills our yearning for God as our ultimate home.

We were created “in the image and likeness of God,” and for a time that hidden glory is our natural birthright. Yet we lose sight of that image and doubt that likeness, until one day we find ourselves lost, adrift, feeling far from glory. We can’t exactly name what’s wrong, but we feel a deep longing to belong once more in the realm that transcends this world. The rest of our lives is an odyssey, a long journey to find our place in that kingdom we know so well yet have never fully seen. The way is long and sometimes treacherous, with plenty of dragons and monsters, but the only thing that can prevent our arrival is to forget who we are, where we have come from, and the place we are going.

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My mother always reminded us kids that “Blood is thicker than water,” by which she meant that we ought to be loyal and faithful to our family, because in the end they’re the ones you can rely on.

Those words echoed a lot this past weekend, as ninety-five of us gathered for our family reunion in Sandusky, Ohio. There are seven of us children—in order: Karen, Michael, Kathy, Jeanne, David, John, Susan. We all have kids, we all have grandkids, and some have great-grands, so that our number stands at an astonishing 117. And growing.

Back in April I wrote about fellow Nebraskan and former Senator, Ben Sasse, who—facing his inevitable death from pancreatic cancer—was passionately advocating for what he called “thick” families and communities, where people know their grandparents, their aunts and uncles, play backyard baseball with their cousins. There was a lot of thickness in Sandusky this past weekend, and that felt good. Maybe because our family has had some thin seasons as well, times when our differences and geographical distance kept us isolated. We were cordial and polite to one another, but there was Coumadin in our blood. It wasn’t very thick.

This variability in family “blood” got me thinking about that phrase of Mom’s. What did it even mean? What water? When you Google the origin of “Blood is thicker than water,” it’s not exactly clear. Some people believe the original saying was, “The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb,” which means the opposite of my mother’s admonition. That is, the original phrase means that the ties that bind people who have a blood covenant—who have shed blood in battle or mingled their blood in some ritual—are stronger than the ties formed merely by “the water of the womb.”

This is the argument made by people who have been disappointed (or worse) by their family, and who believe that the relationships we choose—the covenants we freely make—trump the “water of the womb” ties that are simply a given.

I’m skeptical of the attempt to elevate individual choice over the biology of origin (that is, I favor family Thanksgiving over Friendsgiving). As I get older, I believe the main task of life is to love those we have been given to love, rather than finding people who are easier to love. Our closest relatives are often the hardest to embrace, but divine providence gives us the very people we need to learn how to love.

I guess that means I side with my mother and the popular sense of that saying. I have no idea what the “water” is that blood is thicker than, but I know that mysterious strands of DNA hold us in a powerful web of blood-belonging, and we detach from that web at our own peril.

I have no illusions about this being easy. As the American aphorist, Mignon McLaughlin put it, “There’s an awful lot of blood around that water is thicker than.” Many families are just thin. It’s unfortunately true that some people need to separate from their families because of abuse. But most of us just have plain, ordinary, sometimes ornery brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, people who are trying to love us in their own, half-defective ways. The reason our shared blood is so thick is because it’s teeming with patterns of love and sacrifice, conflict and secrecy that stretch back generations. We inherit more than physical traits: all of that is carried in our blood. And we pass it on.

My mother wouldn’t have said it like that at all, but I’m pretty sure she knew exactly what I’m describing and how tempting it is to try to get free of all that history glug-glugging through our veins. That’s why she always said, “Blood is thicker than water.”

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I was in England to officiate at a wedding, and the bride’s family had booked us a room at the Chapter House in Salisbury. We had spent a few days in London as soon as we arrived, then took a train to Cardiff for a week because—well, because we’d never been to Wales and because Dylan Thomas, I guess. Last stop, Wiltshire and the wedding.

We checked into our 14^th-century inn and looked across the road. The sign over the gate read “Cathedral Close.” To my surprise, we were across the street from Salisbury Cathedral—a place I last visited forty-four years ago. We had only two days here, and we had figured it would be taken with wedding events, so we never planned anything to see or do. But we had to make time. The next morning we walked through the gate and followed that sky-piercing spire until we stood in its presence.

Maybe because we had come early, the place was quiet. Only a few other visitors. We walked the aisles of the 800-year-old masterpiece of English gothic architecture, stopped to pray in the chapel where the sacrament reposed, strolled the cloisters. After forty-four years, it felt as if nothing had changed.

We were on a nostalgic roll. I knew Stonehenge was somewhere close—on that first trip to Salisbury we had also gone to see that marvel. Turns out, it was just twenty minutes away!

If we got up early again, we could pop up and revisit that astonishing array of Neolithic stone. We didn’t have long, but it was so close. For old time’s sake.

It was a mistake.

Parking. It felt like I parked on the grass the last time I was here, or maybe it was gravel. Now, acres of asphalt. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” I have to download an app to pay for my parking, but this is Salisbury Plain, after all, in the middle of nowhere, so there’s barely a faint cell signal. The app won’t load. Time is short. We were just going to “pop in” here for maybe an hour, so I start to worry.

Did I mention the massive “welcome center”? I give up on the parking and get in the queue to pay our $50 entry fee. Let them ticket my car.

I am disoriented. Where is Stonehenge?

You get that later. First you watch a 360-degree video presentation on the history of the site, get through a maze of smaller kiosks with video tutorials, then walk through a full scale re-creation of the village where historians believe the workers who built the thing lived. After that, a path opened beside a road, and people were walking up to the site. It wasn’t visible as far as I could see—but it couldn’t be far. A bus passed us. We paused—should we go back and hitch a ride? We looked back and saw a crowd in line. Probably faster to just keep walking. Besides, it felt a little more authentic.

The path stretched on. Over a mile. Huge buses whizzed by, coming and going. I looked at my watch. We had to be on the road in 45 minutes and it was taking 25 minutes just to walk there. We weren’t going to make it in time. We picked up the pace. It must be just over the top of that hill.

It wasn’t.

Then the megalith appeared. OK, I thought, we won’t have long, but we’ll at least be able to see Stonehenge again and catch a quick bus back.

Silly me. There was already a long queue for the return buses. There was no way.

There it was, still maybe 200 yards away, but even at that distance I could see the massive circle of upright stones and the lintel slabs, completely surrounded by a ring of hundreds of gapers. That would have to be good enough. I told Pam to go on closer and get a better look, while I took my place at the end of a very long line of bus waiters.

I can’t remember a more absurd experience. Waiting in that bus queue, I felt foolish—the “quick trip” was all based on a cherished memory, not reality. Everything had changed and I hadn’t bothered to check.

But I also felt angry—mad at whoever Disneyfied this place. Years ago, we could walk among the stones, even climb up on some of the fallen rocks. Now it was all video and selfies and—of course—exit through the gift shop.

Some time later, when my anger subsided, I realized that I had fallen into an old, old trap: making your memory of something or someone the ideal or only-acceptable reality. Older people do this a lot. They get angry when things they first experienced an age ago change beyond recognition, when loved ones grow into people they hardly understand or approve of anymore. My indignation (you should have heard me when we finally got in the car and drove away) was just another version of Make Stonehenge Great Again!

The Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw once said, “The only man I know who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measurements anew each time he sees me. The rest go on with their old measurements and expect me to fit them.”

That’s true of the ever-changing world, and all the people in it, and all the places we come to love. We have to keep taking new measurements.

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Last week on the way over here I wrote about liminal moments in travel—watching a movie thirty thousand feet over the ocean—and the threshold moments have continued as Pam and I have wandered and hiked over southern Wales.

When I discovered that Tintern Abbey was just a few miles from our cottage, it seemed like fantasy had become real—like finding out that the Emerald City or Hogwarts was just down the road. In grad school, 1979, I had first read Wordsworth’s account of his visit to the 12^th century Cistercian monastery. Over the years I have come back to that poem many times—it was the centerpiece of a Lenten reflection I wrote just a few months ago. But I never thought I’d visit that storied place. It was already in ruins when Wordsworth beheld it in 1798—it seemed like Camelot, lost to the ages. But there it was in the guidebook. Latter-day Wordsworths were still contemplating the remains of the place.

After 800 years and the ravages of Henry VIII’s brutal disestablishment of English monasteries in 1536, the place still looked pretty good. It’s hard to bring down tons of stone, however delicately carved. We walked through the ruins of the kitchen, refectory, infirmary, lavatory, the cloisters, and then the massive nave of the church, the stone tracery of the rose window still intact.

Past became present. It took little imagination to see the high altar, hear the chanting of a hundred monks, and wonder at a world where places like this—set apart for endless praise—were a part of everyday life.

Then we left the crumbling abbey, crossed a little footbridge, and walked up along a path beside the Wye river. We were all alone, no one else in sight. Wordsworth’s poem is entitled, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798.” Somewhere about here, we said, is where William sat—actually, the poem says he “reposed” under a dark sycamore. But we sat down on a low wall under a riot of vines and nameless trees and I read his poem aloud.

It’s a romantic reverie on youth and aging, beauty and nature, a meditation on how the passing of time shapes callowness into wisdom. I’m reading the lines and thinking how very young I was when I first read them. Wordsworth remembers his boyhood, when “like a roe/ I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides/ Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,/Wherever nature led.”

“That time is past,” he goes on to say, “and all its aching joys are now no more.”

I had a childhood like that—a favorite Mulberry tree I loved to climb, a creek I waded in search of crawdads, a verdant baseball park in town, my own Field of Dreams. And overlooking this ruined monastery, I can’t help but see my church—the little white clapboard Swedish Baptist church of those halcyon days. The ease of belief. The certainty of heaven. That time is past, yes, and all its aching joys are no more.

About now a red tractor comes putting down the path, and I pause my reading as the farmer passes by, on his way to one of the many fields on these green hills. I smile. Here I am trying to recreate a scene from 1798 and the modern world crashes the set. The world churns on, undoing every effort to regain the past, to feel again those aching joys.

But I resume reading aloud because the interruption is the point. Wordsworth goes on to say that for all those losses, aging brings with it “abundant recompense.” He can never recapture his careless days, but the passing years bestow a deeper vision of life.

For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

That, or something like that, is what I have found—a “disturbing joy,” a peace that isn’t in denial about all those losses and yet still persists. At least on my good days. On my bad days I lose the joy and am just plain disturbed. But there are moments when, like T. S. Eliot, I catch just “a tremor of bliss, a wink of heaven, a whisper.” And I am learning to let that be enough.

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Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798

By William Wordsworth

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit’s cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

                                    These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.

                                                    If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!

And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompense. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue.—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
                                               Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e’er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!

Watching a movie on a transatlantic flight is a liminal experience. Quite apart from the pull of the story into that rarefied space, I am also suspended thirty thousand feet above the open ocean, moving from my world to another realm. In that in-between space, whatever I watch or read has an outsized impact on my mind, on my soul.

On the long flight from JFK to Heathrow on Monday night, I am watching “Midwinter Break.” Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hind play an Irish couple, Stella and Gerry Gilmore, forty years married, needing some time away. They seem faintly in love, but they also seem—uncoupled.

Stella and Gerry are living in a Victorian flat in Glasgow. Decades ago they had fled Belfast to escape the Troubles, and in dream-like flashbacks we get images of a young pregnant woman walking in a sunlit park when hell is unleashed. We don’t find out until nearly the end that Stella is the victim of a random shooting. Yet miraculously, the bullet pierces her abdomen and goes clean through her body without touching the child.

In an early scene, we see Stella talking on the phone to her son Michael. He is grown now and lives far away. Because she was unable after the shooting to conceive another child, he is her only. Now all that is left is her marriage to Gerry, who, we notice, loves his Irish whiskey perhaps a little too much.

Stella plans a trip to Amsterdam, ostensibly as a pick-me-up for their marriage, but her real destination is a place she once visited, a convent for women. Because what we find as the story unfolds is that Stella is in deep spiritual crisis. She tells her husband she can’t go on living their meaningless life, adrift without a spiritual anchor, but he doesn’t get it. She goes to midnight mass on Christmas Eve and he stays home with his whiskey.

The crux of Stella’s crisis, we discover, is that when she lay there bleeding all those years ago, she prayed that if God would spare her baby, she would devote her life to God. The miracle happened, Michael was born, and yet, she acknowledges with grief, she never kept that vow.

Stella wants a conversion, she wants to live now in the light of that miracle moment. Gerry listens, but he cannot grant the premise of her plight—he does not, cannot believe that any “miracle” happened to his wife. It doesn’t stand the test of reason, of logic, of the science of probability.

I watched Gerry’s refusal and thought of that line from G.K. Chesterton. “There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. People do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets.”

Why are we like this? Why do we argue with our hearts and deny what we know in our guts? Turns out, this liminal flight would lead me to another story that shed a brilliant light on this question.

After the movie, after dinner and a quiet rest, I read an interview with the poet Christian Wiman. I had read his now-classic memoir, “My Bright Abyss,” telling of his flight from the Pentecostal religion of his Texas upbringing, his finding a love and marriage that broke open his heart to the presence of God, and—almost immediately—his cancer diagnosis that brought him three times to the threshold of death. Through it all he finds a powerful faith—it is both self-transcending love for his wife and daughter, and bitter suffering that bring him directly into the presence of God.

And then came the light, the words that I wanted Gerry to hear—and the Gerry in me.

The interviewer presses Wiman for how he can know these things that defy reason. After all, this isn’t sweetness and light he’s talking about. It’s love—but the kind that nearly obliterates the self in service to something greater, higher. And it’s intense suffering! How can he be so sure of that transcendent, divine presence? Here’s Wiman’s response:

There’s a wonderful novel by Jon Fosse called “Septology.” The protagonist is an artist, and a Catholic, who’s lost his beloved wife. At one point he’s listed some theological things, just like I’ve just done, and then he stops himself and he says: That’s not it at all. I don’t think it’s true; I know it’s true. I think it is untrue, but I know it’s true.

That happens to me all the time. My thoughts tell me it’s not true. But my gut, which is how I’ve lived my life, how I have written my poems, how I’ve fallen in love, how I’ve done every single thing that’s mattered, tells me this is true.

This is how Stella knows her truth. Her gut tells her. There is a scene early in the movie, before we know all that’s happened, when Stella is getting ready for bed, standing in front of the bathroom mirror, and she runs her finger across a small scar on her stomach, almost like a second navel. The path of the bullet. And she knows in her gut, literally: what happened was a miracle.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, the dull roar of jet engines like white noise in my ears, I think to myself, I want to know like that. When the thoughts of our monkey minds tell us it’s not true, we can know with our guts. We can fall in love and lose that little, brittle self, the one that wants to verify every revelation. We can say, with Stella, with Chris Wiman, “I don’t think it’s true; I know it’s true.”

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When I started high school, there wasn’t an official Father’s Day. It wasn’t until 1972 that it became a national holiday. If you’re thinking Father’s Day is such a late arrival because nobody really thought about it until Richard Nixon was president, you’d be wrong.

When Sonora Smart Dodd, of Spokane, Washington, heard a Mother’s Day sermon in 1909, she wondered why we weren’t also honoring our fathers. The following year she worked with area churches to create a Sunday to celebrate fathers. The special observance of Dads was met mostly with ridicule and the idea fizzled.

But Sonora kept at it, and by 1913 a bill was introduced in Congress to make it a national holiday. Despite President Woodrow Wilson’s support, however, the bill failed. Ten years later Calvin Coolidge tried to gin up support, to no avail. It wasn’t until 1966 that Lyndon Johnson bypassed Congress and issued a proclamation that the third Sunday in June would be Father’s Day. And it didn’t become a national holiday until Congress acted in 1972.

By contrast, almost as soon as Anna Jarvis envisioned a Mother’s Day in 1908, voilà —there it was. Sort of like [forehead slap], Why didn’t we think of this until now?!

This probably isn’t surprising. The market for Father’s Day cards is nearly half the maternal version. Same for what we spend on flowers and gifts. And while Mother’s Day cards tend to traffic in deep sentiments and heartfelt poems, the ones for Dad just try to be funny. It’s a little awkward to talk about—you know, love.

Clearly, men are an outlier; fathers are a special case.

By the way, did it surprise you that the long struggle for Father’s Day was the work of . . . women?

I don’t mean that mothers carry no relational baggage, but we struggle in a different way to approach our fathers. That’s often simply because he’s not there. Fathers tend to disappear at odd moments. They can run when relationships fall into conflict. Or if they’re physically present, they are often emotionally absent, harshly critical or even abusive. It’s called the “father wound,” and it injures both boys and girls. They grow up with this man in the house who can’t really be trusted, relied upon. Or he’s already moved out and they have only an aching hole where Dad should be.

I don’t want to ruin anybody’s Father’s Day, but I think we should be clear about the issue: men are a special case. Maybe a few years ago that wasn’t obvious, but now everybody knows we’re struggling to turn our boys into men, and our men into husbands and fathers.

There’s a lot of debate these days about masculinity. How can we create the sorts of jobs that used to give men a purpose and a paycheck? How can we reverse the male academic decline? And of course, the culture war has one side insisting that our men be macho, and another side pleading with men to choose deep relationships, empathy and service to family and community.

I don’t have answers to any of these issues, but I believe that manhood and fatherhood come down to one word: Faithfulness. That of course is the hallmark of God’s own love. Psalm 136 says it 26 times. “The steadfast love of the Lord endures forever.” What makes divine love so divine is just that: utter faithfulness. No matter what, God’s love never wavers. We make mistakes, God makes mistakes (yes, if you read your Bible, God often “regrets” what he’s done, or “repents” of an action). But God picks up the pieces and creates something new, something deeper, a more powerful bond because of the break.

Men are mistake-makers. Maybe women are too, I don’t know because I’m not one. But I know men are mistake-makers. It’s how we figure out life. We grow not by getting things right, but by getting things really wrong. Young men chafe at limits and test boundaries. They defy their father’s authority and brush off their mother’s love. They’re loners, even if they’re in a pack of loners. Young men do insane things, literally, and middle-aged men are almost as bad—the kinds of things that make people ask, What was he thinking?

That, for me, is the reality of masculinity. I’d go further and say it is the necessary reality of masculinity. (If I’ve overstepped here, you can note that in the Comments below.) The limb may already have broken off behind me, but I’ll keep going and make another claim—that wise people know this about men and do not hold them to a “higher” standard. What they do hold them to is faithfulness.

That is, wise or seasoned souls know that men will always screw up, in ways that forever mystify women and children, and yet if they come to their senses, like the Prodigal, and embrace the ones they are given to love, that’s all right. If they take responsibility for their children and their home, it’s ok. Women know this about their men. Children, especially adult sons and daughters, know this about a Dad who has made his mistakes but has never stopped holding them. This is not about excusing bad behavior or saying boys will be boys. It’s about understanding how men operate, how they fall, and how they rise.

I don’t know why, but women and children know instinctively that fathers are a special case. If they can’t trust him, or if they are afraid of him, or if he’s a goner, they will either pity or despise him. But if that wonderful mistake-maker, who spends all his time in the garage or in the basement or on his zero-turn mower, is open-hearted and faithful, they will love him like some kind of hero, I’m telling you. Because when we’re good, when we’re right, there’s nothing like a father’s love.

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When I retired three years ago, I had an initial phase of blissful disbelief—that people were paying me to do nothing—which lasted about three months. After that I endured anxiety attacks that forced me back into therapy, something I thought I’d never need in the hammock of retirement. When my wise counselor, Beth, asked what I was anxious about, I fumbled for words. Eventually I settled on this one: irrelevance.

As much as parish ministry wore on me, especially after 30 years, it was always engaging, exciting. I was meeting new people, traveling for conferences, counseling people in every imaginable strait, speaking, writing, strategizing for congregational vitality. When my first pension check arrived, all that was gone. I felt irrelevant.

Like most retirees, I had plenty to do. How, I wondered, did I ever have time to work? But my new interests and commitments were much smaller. I took road trips to spend time with family and friends I never had time to visit when I was working. I started gardening, building elaborate stone walls and terraces. I could read and research for hours. Some weeks my car never left the garage. Pam and I began taking our grandchildren for two weeks each summer. In the winter we took them on cruises. This year I’m coordinating our family reunion.

In other words, my ambit is much smaller. In time, I have come to love this new life I inhabit—smaller but richer—though that’s not how it felt at the start. In those days I looked at my shrinking life and felt pointless.

As we age, our life gets smaller and more domestic. We spend more time at home, more time with husbands and wives, more time with children and grandchildren, more afternoons in the garden, mowing the yard, doing ordinary tasks we once paid others to do while we did more “important” things.

In all that domesticity, we sometimes find it difficult to spend whole days with the people we’re supposed to love. That’s one reason for the rise in gray divorce—splitting after 50. While overall divorce rates have fallen, the rate for Americans over 50 has doubled since the 1990’s and tripled for those over 65.

Sometimes the irrelevance, or whatever the demon, is too much to bear. Older Americans have the highest suicide rate of any age group, and men over 85 seem to have it the worst. Their suicide rate is seventeen times higher than women of the same age.

Somehow, it seems, we must come to accept the contraction of life. Our bodies may decay and betray us, but all the outward diminution is pulling us into a place of inner maturity, which is the loving acceptance of limitation.

More than anyone, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung pointed to the reverse power of our later years. He wrote:

Ageing people should know that their lives are not mounting and expanding, but that an inexorable inner process enforces the contraction of life. For a young person it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself: but for the ageing person it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself. After having lavished its light upon the world, the sun withdraws its rays in order to illuminate itself.

In place of all the early-stage emphasis on externals—“lavishing our light upon the world”—the later stages of life trigger “an inexorable inner process” of examining our lives. What matters now? How can I stop trying to redeem my past—and let it be? How can I welcome this contraction of life? Why am I afraid of what is small and close and precious? That turn inward is “inexorable”—coming no matter how we continue our “mounting and expanding.”

And this, I believe, is the cause of so much elder suffering. When we reject what is inevitable, we can only dip into depression or anxiety. Jung saw what happens when we can’t find a way to flip the externalizing script and turn the light fearlessly upon our souls.

. . . many old people prefer to be hypochondriacs, niggards, pedants, applauders of the past or else eternal adolescents—all lamentable substitutes for the illumination of the self, but inevitable consequences of the delusion that the second half of life must be governed by the principles of the first.

The reason ageing people are obliged to turn inward and know themselves is the same reason we must put on our oxygen mask first, before we try to help someone else. Whether we invite it or not, younger people are looking to us. The people we mentored are watching us, to see how to make this transition. Our children and grandchildren are looking to us. If we are so needy, so anxious for our own “success” or importance—long after these things should matter anymore—we become those “eternal adolescents” Jung spoke of.

Our calling is to let our lives naturally contract, shed, diminish, efface until we are nearly transparent, so that our inner Light shines like a glowing lantern. I wish I could say that process is quick, easy and fun. It often feels like we are disappearing, becoming nothing. We have to remind ourselves that this emptying is the divine pattern of life: God enters only empty space. And this later phase of life just happens to be the one where that emptying occurs naturally—if we let it.

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[Today’s newsletter is a follow-up to last week’s essay on Pope Leo’s powerful challenge to AI and the titans of Silicon Valley.]

It was a quiet day in Japan, when on July 8, 1853, four vessels appeared on the horizon. Belching black smoke, the hulking ships steamed into Edo Bay—present-day Tokyo. The people were terrified. The smallest ship was three times anything the Japanese had built, and these were half clad in steel, something they had never seen. They called them the “Black Ships,” because of their “evil mien.”

This was not the first incursion to confront the Japanese. Centuries earlier they had traded with the Portuguese and other Western countries, but with trade came foreign ideas and ways—and missionaries. The Japanese felt their way of life, and their religion, was ebbing away. So the shogunate closed down the country, expelled all foreigners, and told the world, in essence, that they wanted to be left alone.

And it worked. For two hundred years, Japan lived as a feudal society with time-honored traditions held within tightly structured hierarchies.

Until the Black Ships arrived that summer morning. The fleet was under the command of Commodore Matthew C. Perry, and he had come for one reason: to open Japan to American markets. He carried a letter from President Millard Fillmore, but he also carried a massive battery of cannons. To demonstrate his power, Perry fired huge, high velocity Paixhan guns, exploding a few small buildings along the harbor. Writer William Gibson suggests that Perry’s landing was something like an alien invasion. “Imagine,” he wrote, “the Roswell Incident as a trade mission.”

Despite their feeble attempts to prevent him, Perry came ashore and, after offering a few gifts, read his President’s letter. Fillmore was polite but forceful. In a spirit of goodwill, he said, he had sent only four of his smaller ships. But if the shogun refused to open his country to American goods, a quite larger and more seriously armed fleet would be coming.

That fleet did in fact return in a year, but by then Japan had folded. The era of global trade had begun, and participation was not voluntary.

That is how the approach of AI feels to many of us. It is coming, by force if necessary. I don’t have a choice; you don’t have a choice. And, like Perry’s ultimatum, this one is basically economic. Artificial Intelligence can perform advanced, human-like functions far faster than any human, and that potential promises “breakthroughs” in everything from healthcare, finance, education, transportation and just about everything else you can imagine. All of these advances fuel economic growth, and that is the holy grail, an ever-greater GDP. And if you question that as an ultimate goal, you are basically unAmerican.

If you ask if such AI-generated “growth” is worth the human cost, you just don’t get it. We have all agreed, in this society, that growing an ever-bigger economy—even one that now enriches only a few—is our manifest destiny. So we don’t ask, What kind of families is this economy creating and sustaining? How much pollution is it creating? How much crime is it fostering? Is our infant mortality coming down and our life-expectancy going up? Is it providing a decent house for every working family? Compared to other similar countries, are our people happier and healthier? We don’t ask the question the Iroquois asked of any new “advance”: “What will this mean for the seventh generation?”

The cold and very harsh reality, as cruel as Perry’s Paixhan guns, is this: None of those questions can matter. It’s not that they don’t matter (no moral person would say such); it’s that they can’t matter. Once a people have all agreed to be led by the divine and invisible hand of the market, they simply cannot entertain such questions. All of that is collateral damage, unfortunate but unavoidable.

Unavoidable.

The Black Ships.

Last week I confessed that I don’t know exactly where I am going in this struggle against AI. I’m not naïve, I know it’s coming. I know AI is already embedded in technology I am now using, and in the future it will be even more difficult to live separate from its tendrils. But that has always been the case for people of faith and hope, living in cultures that did not support their way of life. They could not control what the empire imposed. They had to pay their taxes—with all that entails—but, as Jesus told his disciples, they could still “render to God the things that are God’s.” That is, they could not escape every imperial dictate, but they could hold their ultimate allegiance to heaven.

That’s what we can do. Even as AI seeps into everything around us, we can keep our eyes fixed on artificial’s opposite. Every beautiful new day, we can ask, What is real and true and good? We can keep asking those questions that cannot matter, keep protesting the harms and depredations of inhumanity, refusing to call it collateral damage.

What the Gospel writers call the “world-system” operates on a well-worn playbook. The world-system presents itself, in all its shock-and-awesome power, as the only game in town. You might have reservations, you might have other allegiances, but they will be crushed in the pitiless advance of Leviathan. This is your last chance, the system announces, without exactly saying so. You can hold onto your contrary beliefs and get crushed anyway, or you can get on board now and things will go well for you.

I don’t know what your contrary beliefs are. On the subject of AI, we are all over the map. That’s Ok. But whatever your beliefs, don’t be afraid to live them and share them openly. In this way, buffeted by the tide of artifice, we will not lose our very real souls.

If you missed last week’s piece, Pope Leo Just Threw A Rock Through “Overton’s Window,” you can read it here.

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What “window,” you ask, did Leo just shatter?

Named for policy analyst Joseph Overton, the “Overton window” is the range of subjects that are politically acceptable to mainstream society at any given time. According to Overton’s theory, when subjects or proposed policies are considered “unthinkable” or “radical,” politicians and social leaders can’t even bring up the subject. But when such ideas and arguments become “acceptable,” sensible,” and “popular,” then the window of opportunity opens. If that window isn’t open, addressing the issue will make you seem radical or naïve or just out of touch with the “real world.”

On the issue of artificial intelligence, any discussion of shutting down AI (my own view) is not acceptable to the mainstream. It’s laughable. Even discussions of pausing AI development until we can listen to people’s concerns, evaluate environmental impacts, study its effects on employment, consider its impact on marginal and vulnerable communities, decide whether we really want robotic warriors who make their own killing decisions, and a host of other grave concerns—these are not quite laughable, but people hesitate to raise these issues for fear of being called a Luddite, a heretic who questions the divinity of the “market economy,” or a traitor who can’t see that if America doesn’t embrace AI—especially in the military—we will be crushed by the cyborg armies of China.

In Overton’s terms, for people who have grave concerns about AI, the window of acceptable discussion is closed.

In his new encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas: On safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence,” Pope Leo blows a God-sized hole in that window. The Vicar of Christ is bold enough to stand athwart technological “progress” and ask the profoundest question, announced in his very title: What about our “Magnificent Humanity”? What if our very humanity is what is lost in the rush to merge humans with machines? For that is the stated goal of AI developers. The effort to enhance or perfect our bodies with tech is already well underway, but the ultimate hack is known as the Singularity—that miracle moment when flesh and cobalt merge into a superhuman, god-like creation. Most experts predict the moment of transcendence will occur between 2035 and 2045.

And, in this merger, our flesh is ultimately left behind. In the Transhumanist vision, the dream is to transcend the body, to live forever in a digital realm beyond this broken-down world—just like in “The Matrix.”

Humbly yet insistently Leo asks, Is that really where we want to go? What about this magnificent humanity of ours?

You may think this is all a lot of Chicken Little and no one is actually going to merge with a machine, but farmer-philosopher and poet Wendell Berry—whom I often quote in these pages—takes it quite seriously. “It is easy,” Berry writes, “for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”

I don’t think anyone in Silicon Valley will pay the least attention to Leo’s plea for a future that is truly human and humane. Big Tech and its millions of breathless sycophants believe that AI is quasi-divine. As Bill Gates said, “You can almost call it a new religion.”

G. K. Chesterton once wisely noted, contra Marx, that the real opiate of the people is irreligion. “Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world,” he explained, “they will worship the world. But above all, they will worship the strongest thing in the world.” The staggering wealth and political power of AI is clear. It alone is enough to lift an otherwise listless stock market to dizzying heights. Ordinary citizens who try to put up roadblocks are steamrolled. Everybody wants in on the money. Nobody wants to be left behind in the race to a holographic paradise. AI is “the strongest thing in the world.”

So let’s be clear: this is a religious and spiritual battle. Pope Leo vs. Big Tech is a contest between two religions, and it doesn’t look like much of a fight. Indeed, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and all the rest will hardly take note of “Magnifica Humanitas.” They preside over the more dominant religion. Their wealth and power dwarfs that of many nations. They control Overton’s Window. And they are telling us it’s closed and locked. (Of course, their PR and communications people don’t say that. They say things like, “We understand people’s concerns, and we’re working to make AI safe and efficient. In fact, we have whole departments dedicated to ensuring a more moral and ethical AI.”)

We cannot wait, then, for the high priests of AI to unlatch that window. Like Pope Leo, we must break it open, plead for another vision of human flourishing. AI promises to fix the “problems” of human life—give us freedom from everyday tasks, cure our diseases, boost the human body’s performance, and eventually vanquish death itself. Leo believes that is all a massive mistake. He writes:

“Everything that appears as a ‘limit’ — incapacity, illness, old age, suffering, vulnerability—tends to be seen primarily as a defect to be corrected, rather than as a reality through which our humanity matures and opens itself to relationship. And yet we must remember that humanity flourishes not despite limitations, but often through them. For this reason, humanity—in all its grandeur and woundedness—must never be replaced or surpassed.”

That “grandeur and woundedness,” of course, is best seen in the image of Christ, who humbled himself and submitted to every limitation of humanity in order to show us the magnificence of our ordinary lives.

That is a vision worth sharing with the world, even if we have to break a few windows to do it, now.

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P.S. This complex topic is the greatest issue of our time, one that affects all of us, our children and grandchildren. And it is, as I’ve noted, an explicitly religious issue. So I’ll be coming back to the question of AI next week, for Part 2.

This spring came with an extravagant, even profligate outburst of beauty. A week ago, wild phlox by the thousands threw open their petals and splashed the woods with white and purple as far as the eye can see.

Last year the phlox were lovely—but they had never taken over the whole woods! Pam was overjoyed because she makes it her business to uproot invasive plants so that just this kind of propagation can happen. She even weeds the woods, crazy as it seems. And so this outbreak of wild winsomeness is like a blessing on all her slightly monomaniacal uprooting and weeding missions. It was worth it!

One early morning this week, we walked into the woods just to revel in the breath-taking scope of it all. We walked—as it were—into an impressionist painting, waist high in blossoms, wading through drifts of purple as the morning sun slanted through the trees and the world was afire.

I struggled to comprehend this burst of beauty in my own back yard. Hundreds, thousands surrounded me, and I felt overwhelmed. For a moment it seemed almost strange, other-worldly. What was the purpose of such delicate beauty at this vast scale?

The standard scientific answer is that plants developed flowers to attract pollinators, and the more brilliant and showy the advertising, the better. I’m sure that’s true, but not anywhere near sufficient. In fact, the appearance of flowers in the fossil record also bedeviled Charles Darwin. He struggled to understand the sudden, rapid explosion of flowering plants. Why did they spring up out of nowhere, he wondered, and in such rich diversity? Their sudden appearance did not sync with his theory. It was, he said, “an abominable mystery.” After all, for millions of years plants did just fine without blossoms. Why all of a sudden this birthing of beauty?

For the moment, let’s grant the evolutionary botanist’s explanation: plants needed to attract bees and other pollinators in order to reproduce and survive. When one did it, they all had to put up gaudy advertising or get left in the Cretaceous dust.

Fair enough.

But then why, every spring, do 250,000 humans descend on the Philadelphia Flower Show? We’re not pollinators. Why do millions of us grow flowers for the pure joy of it? Why do we spend two billion a year on bouquets and vases of the things? Our near-universal fascination and delight in flowers does nothing to help our reproduction (well, maybe all those bouquets on Valentine’s Day boosts propagation) or to ensure our survival.

Again, the botanists have an answer. They posit that early humans learned to associate flowers with fruit, a necessary food for survival. The sight of flowers, then, triggered a visceral and powerful attraction. And that is why, even millions of years later, we think flowers are beautiful.

There are many problems with this theory, but I don’t want to get into the weeds (that inevitable pun was low-hanging fruit). It’s just this: such reductive “explanations” simply can’t account for the astounding state of bliss I felt in that endless field of phlox.

The beauty that overtook me was not just exquisite but excessive—more than was “necessary.” Hearing the botanists’ explanation reminds me of scholar and author Catherine Bly Cox, who confessed after her first daughter was born, “I found I loved her more than evolution required.”

I loved those blooms, surging purple and white, more than evolution required.

Don’t you think Georgia O’Keefe would agree?

Beauty can never be explained. That’s because it is not of this world. Our encounters with beauty are so inexplicably powerful precisely because they point to a realm beyond this one. When we encounter something so completely and perfectly beautiful, it is not merely pleasurable—it can impale us with a kind of pain. It actually hurts. That, as C.S. Lewis suggests, is because it proffers just the faintest glimpse of glory, of that place where the partial is made whole and perfect. Such a fleeting vision on this side of the veil makes us want to weep for sorrow and joy at the same time.

And that, I believe, is why I was overtaken by the glory of those wild phlox, and not because they gave me a vague, vestigial assurance that fruit was near at hand.

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Somewhere back in college I read Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” though like most of the books I read in those days, I didn’t have the experience to understand it fully. Back then, I thought it was about a man who made a strange choice to leave society and go live in the woods—which, given the state of our world, doesn’t seem so strange to me anymore.

Maybe that’s why I was drawn to watch Ken Burns’ new PBS biopic, “Henry David Thoreau.”

Thoreau was living in a time of tumultuous change. The Industrial Revolution was forcing people off farms and into cities, into the brutal factories that William Blake so memorably called “these dark, Satanic Mills.” Science and technology were teaming up with capitalist industry to create what we now know as consumer culture. Thoreau watched as the pleasant folk of Concord, Mass became bedazzled by things and doodads that everyone suddenly had to have. They worked in increasingly mindless, degrading jobs to get money to buy the latest thing. But they weren’t happier. Looking at this emerging society, Thoreau observed, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

That’s when he walked out of Concord and built his little one-room hermitage on a piece of land given him by his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wasn’t fleeing society. In fact, he was often in town, buying his supplies. He hosted plenty of visitors who made the long walk out to his cabin, and his annual melon parties overflowed with townsfolk. Thoreau walked out of civilization because he was in too close; he couldn’t see what was really happening. I think he also left town because he was afraid the consumer culture might gradually seem “normal.” He did not want to be lulled into the narcotic sleep of shopping.

And more than just the churn of materialism, Thoreau could see that the mass movement off the land was eating away at the human soul. There was a natural and sacred connection, he believed, between the wildness of nature and the interior wildness of the soul. Break that tie, and two calamities begin simultaneously: people’s rich inner life shrivels, and the earth becomes merely a profane collection of “natural resources” and is soon degraded and abused.

Watching the PBS series, I could see clearly: Thoreau was right about 1845 and right about 2026.

I don’t know where this essay is going, because I’m not sure where I am going right now. Let me explain. I feel certain that the seismic shifts that began with the Industrial Revolution—the massive, combined forces of science, technology and capitalism—are about to explode in our time, and I’m not sure what I need to do in response. No one wants to be a Luddite. No one wants to call a halt to progress. I certainly don’t want to locate our redemption in some Golden Age of the past. But it’s also clear to me that the story of reason, progress, the triumph of science, and our (eventual) redemption by technology—that story has no next chapter. It’s gutted our hearts, hollowed out our homes and families, our communities, our nation. We can see what it is doing to our children, and that alone should cause us to take at least one tentative step toward Walden. But what can one person do? Where do I draw the line?

I’m not sure about all that, but there’s something about Thoreau’s walking out of town that intrigues me. It feels like a version of St. Anthony the Great (251-356), known as the Father of All Monks, who walked out of town—out of church—because even 1700 years ago he knew he needed to get perspective on what was real and true. It echoes the paths of St. Benedict (480-547), Hildegaard of Bingen (1098-1179) and Clare of Assisi (1194-1253)—all who chose to live apart from the regnant culture. These early monastics didn’t abandon society, they just settled on the periphery, on the edge. They were in the world, but not of it.

Something like that is what is drawing me. I’m thinking that anyone who wants to critique the present system with all its assumptions about power, wealth and authority (and the discrimination and violence it takes to sustain it)—that person is going to have to move to the edge.

Maybe I’m drawn here because when I read “Walden” I start to recognize modern-day Thoreau’s. I’ve been reading a lot of Wendell Berry the last few years. He was born in Kentucky and made it big-time in the New York literary scene, but he felt empty. There was something unreal about it all. So, despite the warnings of his literary agent, that it would end his promising career, Berry moved back to Port Royal, Kentucky, bought a farm next to the one he grew up on, and became a farmer-writer-philosopher-poet. He had all of Thoreau’s reservations, especially about the great divorce of people from their ancestral land, and the soul-deadening effects of rationalism, materialism, and scientism.

I think, too, of John Moriarty, born in Ireland, who became a star in the academic world until he came to the end of himself. He left his teaching post in Canada and returned to Ireland with the intention of finding what he called his “bush soul.” He spent his first years trying to “baptize himself” out of Western culture and into a wildness of mind and heart in the mountains and lakes of Connemara.

People in Concord thought Thoreau was a little loopy, living in his spartan hut in the woods. Wendell Berry, farming with his team of horses, seems like a harmless eccentric. Same with Moriarty, leaving the high life for a forgotten hillside, lost in Connemara.

But maybe they know something. Maybe they’re like the animals who sensed the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami long before it hit. The elephants who moved inland, the birds who fled coastal regions.

We don’t have to leave town, but if we know something is not right at the center of our own version of Concord, we’re going to have to move out to the edge, pitch a tent for our “bush soul,” be in it but not of it, watch and pray, make sacrifices to preserve eternal goods, look out for the vulnerable, and find a way to stay in the wild. That, anyway, is my hope.

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Some years ago I was having a beer with a friend of mine who was also a parishioner at my church. We got to talking, and Tom starts to tell me about a situation at work.

Things were not going well. His department was melting down. The boss had just axed another senior exec, and everyone was full of fear. Tom said his colleague Bill came to his office and sat down. He was so wrought up, so worried. Would he be next? He was in his fifties with a kid in college. He was terrified that if he lost his job he might never get another one.

Suddenly Bill started to cry. Put his head in his hands and shook.

So, Tom says, “I just reached in my pocket, and pulled out one of these.” As he is telling me the story, he reaches in his pocket and pulls out two of the little crosses we give people every Ash Wednesday—to keep in their pocket or purse for Lent. Tom carried his year-round and always asked me for extras—to give his family and friends, anybody in need. In a year, he’d find homes for scores of these little crosses.

“So,” Tom continues, “Bill was sitting there, distraught, and I offered him a cross with the word Peace on it, and I said, ‘Here—take this cross and just hold onto it when you think there’s nothing else you can hold onto.’” Bill looked at Tom, “That little cross? That’s supposed to work?” He didn’t take it.

Tom called into the next office and said, “Mary Jane, come in here!” A woman walks in. Tom says, “You have that cross I gave you a while ago?” She reaches in her pocket, says, “Right here.” Tom takes Mary Jane’s cross, gives it to the weeping man, and says, “I gave this one to Mary Jane—she can tell you how it’s helped her. So I want you to take this one. It’s been beta tested. Mary Jane—I’ll give you a new one.” Bill put the cross in his pocket. Peace was possible. He wasn’t alone.

Tom’s personal mission of sharing hope with the hopeless and his story of Bill always delights me. I know plenty of people who are ordained who don’t have such a powerful ministry! And I think I know why.

Tom isn’t timid about sharing the power of the cross because has been ordained by his own suffering and redemption. He knows bitter divorce and the blessing of another marriage. He’s lost a son to a tragic accident, and nearly lost another son to alcohol but tough-loved him to sobriety. And . . . he’s lost a daughter to suicide. He’s acquainted with deep suffering and deep joy. He knows death-and-resurrection.

These are the kind of people who can hold out a lifeline to desperate people. People like Tom. They’re not hiding behind a scrim of respectability and the blithe appearance of aplomb. They are the wounded healers, and other people know it, trust it.

This week, when I reminded Tom of that story he told me years ago over a beer, he wrote back.

“Bill was dealing with alcohol addiction for which his supervisors were NOT supportive! He still has his cross and is 12 years into sobriety.
After his first year Bill ‘earned’ his first coin of sobriety, and he gave it to me as a thank you for the cross and my support.
I keep his coin AND my HOPE cross in my pocket every day.”

He also sent me this pic—his latest stash of peace, hope, and love had just been delivered.

And if I know Tom, it won’t last long.

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On Monday my sister would have been 79, the one who died ten years before I was ever born. Sharon has always been a phantom sister, someone I know only from family lore. She had a heart defect, the kind that nowadays is repaired in utero, but back in 1946 it went undetected until all my parents could do was watch their infant daughter slip away. She lived just 26 days.

This was just after the war. My father came back from the Pacific theatre on a troop ship. I remember him telling me once that after the hell of battle, holding dying comrades in his arms, and seeing so much death, all he could think of on that ship was having a baby. Life, life, he wanted life.

He married my mother in 1944 and two years later my sister Karen made them a family. A little more than a year later, Sharon was born. My Dad was getting his wish.

But he would soon have to hold another dying soul in his arms. My mother rarely spoke of her lost daughter. But late in life, Dad told us about the night Sharon was hardly breathing, and he and my mother took her to Sacred Heart Hospital. They rushed in the door, he said, and the first person he saw was a nun in a black and white habit, who looked at the baby cradled in his arms and quietly shook her head. She was strangely like a prophetess, wordlessly foretelling the infant’s doom, and so it was. My sister died that night.

I don’t know exactly when I learned that I had a big sister I never knew. My parents were typical of their generation—they didn’t talk much about their pain and struggle. They didn’t see a therapist at the time. They just moved on. When you’ve lived through the Great Depression and lost everything, when you’ve watched the world burn up in a global war—and seen it all up close from your foxhole, you’re just glad to be alive. Besides, no one wanted to hear your pain. They were Norwegian and Swedish, after all, the most stoic people on earth.

So they didn’t talk much about Sharon Kay. But even as a boy I was taken with a kind of ghostly wonder. Who was this person, and could I be related to someone I’d never laid eyes on? On paper, yes, but could there be an actual, living relationship? I struggled to imagine what my sister’s voice sounded like. How would she call my name? Using my four other sisters’ faces as models, I conjured a young woman—ten years older than I—who had sparkling blue eyes, blonde hair and an unquenchable smile.

In 1985, Pam and I had our second child. We named her Sharon.

On Monday, my older brother dropped a note in the text thread shared by all seven of us surviving siblings. “Our sister, Sharon Kay, would have been 79 today,” he wrote. “I’m thinking of this sister I never met, and the impact of her birth and death on Mom and Dad, but especially Mom.”

And now of course, we’ll never know. My mother never said a word about the trauma of losing a 26 day-old infant. She would talk about the facts of the matter if you asked her, but never about the experience. And until later in life, Dad said nothing. “The Lord giveth,” their silence maintained, “and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

It is easy to point out the malign effects of emotional repression, and in fact I have often wondered if my mother’s later bouts of severe depression sprang from the seeds of this tragedy. But here’s what I’m sure of: my mother and my father shielded us children from the sting of this death. Often a lost child destroys a marriage; the ghost of the dead child lays heavy on surviving children. But there was none of that. I believe my mother, especially, sacrificed her grief for her marriage, for her children. Grief, for her, was an indulgence she could not afford. Again, I go back to the aftermath of the war, when a woman like my mother, then 30 years old, had to find a way—any way—to go on. I don’t mean that she was some lone, heroic figure. It’s just what everyone was doing. They were sacrificing their lives for the next generation in the only way they knew how.

All of that swirls within me when I say the name, Sharon Kay. She is almost vaporous because my parents buried her, both in the earth and in their souls. I can wish they would not have had to dig either of those graves; I can blame them (and when I was younger, I did) for quashing their grief and making as though—emotionally, at least—Sharon never happened. But the truth is, I am alive because of it. Mom went on to bear six more children, though in her anguish she could have given up on fragile babies like me. And the truth is, my sisters, brothers and I were given a pretty healthy and happy childhood, and no matter how I think it should have been done differently, better, it seems churlish not to kneel in recognition of such sacrifice and its undeniable benefits.

After my older brother remembered our sister’s 79^th birthday, my younger brother suggested we might all make an 80^th pilgrimage next year to her grave in Milwaukee. She’s buried there because my father was attending the Milwaukee School of Engineering on the GI Bill. They soon moved to South Dakota, where we all grew up, so none of us have ever visited her grave. Though we do have this picture, sent by the cemetery.

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And to Adam God said, “Because you have … eaten of the tree of which I
commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall
bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. -Genesis 3:17-18

Let me tell you, when you’re going to war against Japanese barberry, you believe in the Curse. This is “thorns and thistles” gone nuclear. First brought to America in 1875 as an ornamental, Berberis thunbergii quickly became a plague. Like a cockroach, it can survive most anything—drought, blasting sun, deep shade—producing thousands of seeds, so it easily overwhelms native plants, often infesting forests and woodlands. Its thorny branches repel the deer that happily munch on more delicate native plants.

This week, Pam and I set out to create a path in our woods. Within minutes we have met the enemy. Luckily, we have armored up. We wear thick leather gloves and (even in summer heat) heavy jackets to protect against the thorns. And we are armed. Pam brandishes a shovel and a pair of loppers, and I wield a six-foot steel pry bar, the weapon I use to unearth half-buried rocks and boulders. Years ago, we thought we could just cut these barberries back. They laughed and thanked us for a good pruning that accelerated their growth. Now we must extirpate, root and branch.

I start with a shovel, but often the roots are wrapped around rocks or giant tree roots. So I drive the steel bar deep underground and pry up rocks and roots and all. Sometimes, the roots go too deep and the best we can do is lop off the tentacle as far back as possible. Some people burn the roots. Others lash out with Round Up or other lethal herbicides, which we have forsworn.

We successfully dig up five underground Kraken, but the next monster is hugging a sturdy Maple. I jab at it with my bar, but the roots are woven into the rock held tightly by the tree roots. Nothing doing. All I can do is cut it at the base. It will be back.

I’m sweating, just like Adam. After the curse of thorns and thistles, the next verse promises, “In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.”

Leaning against that Maple, I can’t help wondering, Why? Why do thorns like this barberry rape and pillage my woods, when the things I lovingly plant, tend and protect can hardly hold their own? It’s a vegetative version of the problem of evil. Why? Why is there a Mile-a-Minute weed that grows six inches a day, and for all my trouble I can’t get a little Lady Fern to grow one inch all summer?

Let’s call it the Curse. As much as I wish things were otherwise, Genesis 3:17-18 is an irrefutable description of harsh reality. You may argue the cause of such a curse—Adam’s defiance of his boundaries—but you cannot gainsay the evidence. For some reason, weeds have it all over water lilies. Chaos takes no effort, while order requires daily vigilance. Ugliness is self-seeding, but beauty must be breathed into life. Whatever is rough and unsightly survives a seven-year drought, while dahlias must nearly be watered with tears.

Gardens have always been images of the soul. The immense work of creating and protecting ordered beauty is a natural metaphor for the difficult yet delight-filled work of inner transformation. One reason, I am sure, is that gardening—any cultivation and nurture of natural beauty and bounty—is clearly hard work. I grew up in farm country. My uncles and grandparents lived and worked on farms, and their work weighed on them, sometimes broke them. No one needed to convince them of the Curse.

If gardening, then, can save us from illusion and convince us clearly that we live and work under conditions that are not ideal, that is the best introduction to the spiritual life we could ever hope for. If it teaches us simply to expect the weeds to run circles around the Tea roses, we’re better for it. If by it we are forced to declare ourselves, either in or out, ready for this daily struggle because we love it that much, that is better than any catechism.

There is ratio between ecstasy and anguish, and Emily Dickinson knew it well.

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.

For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years,
Bitter contested farthings
And coffers heaped with tears.

I don’t like the sound of them odds, and I don’t much like working under the conditions of the Curse. But the sooner I make peace with Dickinson’s ratio, the more resolved I am to dig out every last Japanese barberry on these eleven and a half acres, the more grateful I am, sitting on the deck at day’s end, enjoying my ecstatic instant.

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