The Blessing Gift of Common Grace

The parks were a refreshing amazement. Even the people who visited them alongside of us.

In Vermont, the state parks beckoned our hiking - well-conceived, well-maintained, and well-augmented for varied physical abilities. We trekked through forests, along streams, below waterfalls. There were boardwalks strategically placed, interpretative signs at provocative intervals, and when we bumped into other tourists they were invariably kind, helpful, interested - and interesting. Public restrooms were matter-of-faculty and plainly marked “gender free.” The parks and their facilities were conspicuously free of subtle barbs or swipes or ideological shade. Instead, they were simply and self-evidently provided, by the taxpayers of the state, for everyone and anyone. They weren’t “gold-plated,” they were simply nice and freely available. The “Commons” here occupy a place of respect.

Similarly in Maine where the National Park is the draw. Here the offerings are not free, but affordable to most. We were surrounded by patient drivers, respectful crowds, congenial and well-trained employees, an army of volunteers, and of course the national and natural treasure that is Acadia. Animating our experience was the palpable demonstration of the good that philanthropy can serve.

As with so many other special places around the world, Rockefeller money is behind the park, but other benefactors have followed their lead. I know there is much to critique about how all their money came to be amassed. I don’t cite the benefits of their benefactions to cancel out those issues, but to stand these shiny actions alongside those tarnished ones where they simply exist in tension. Whatever social and environmental atrocities those family empires might have committed - the self-interested appetites they may have fanned - I am deepened and enlarged by the common blessing they, along the way, bequeathed.

It has, then, through trail and queue and road and shared experience, alongside tour buses and cruise ship shore excursions and fellow-hikers, been a heartening couple of weeks. So much about America has appalled and embarrassed me in recent years - its malignant penchant for suppressing and repressing; its inflamed racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and sexual inflexibility; its matter-of-fact willingness to cage children, demean immigrants, weaponize religion, and simply walk around angry with a perpetually teetering chip on our shoulder. I honor and revere the noble ideals that animated this country’s founding, even as I ache over the ways our founders violated those ideals even while trying to embody them.

At least they tried to embody them. On paper.

Now, we largely can’t be bothered. “For” apparently nothing, while “against” virtually everything; with our petulant self-interest ascendant, common interest is an annoying bug we gleefully and aggressively squash.

Except, that is, in the parks of Vermont and Maine and, I suspect, beyond. There, civility and civilized generosity, alongside ordinary mutual respect, prevail.

Maybe it’s nature’s influence.  

All I know is that it’s beautiful.

 In every way.