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.

Recovering the Verb in the Noun

For 21 years now my birthday has been a complicated celebration.  The first 45 years of my existence I had rocked along, blowing out candles on this favorite day, and tearing off wrapping paper.  And then terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center towers in New York City.

On September 11, 2001.

My birthday.

Dimming the candles.  

Staining the fancy paper.

Depleting some of the sugar from the cake.

I was still here, of course.  Nothing had changed about the fact of my birth.  It was still the anniversary of the day I emerged into the world.  The truth was simply amplified, from that day forward, that the world into which I had been birthed is many things - including dangerous - and is infinitely larger than me.

This most recent birthday turned the speakers of that amplification in still another direction.  September 11 came, as it always does, a short three days after September 8, which this year transformed into the day my Mother died.

It is a clumsy and disorienting juxtaposition - sadness and joy, an ending and a beginning, loss and gain.  While birthdays are commonly hours filled with the celebration of being, deaths foment a flurry of doing.  There are phone calls to make, arrangements to conceive and set in motion, household spaces to reorder and travel schedules to negotiate and book.  The trailing days of death are a cascade of minutiae that therapeutically distract and physically occupy.  Very little space remains for candles and cake and singing.  A birthday, suddenly inconvenient, is a discordant non-sequitur. 

Unless, I realized, the death in whose context that birthday occurs, happens to be your Mother.

Suddenly, the initially discordant notes resolved into a different kind of harmony.  The subject of both the life and the death aligned as the same.  What more perfect way to observe a birthday, I realized, than to elevate the one who occasioned it?  And how, I wondered, had attentions so dramatically veered away from this gratitude in the first place - layering frosting and fondant on the birthed, rather than the birther?

The attentions, I realize, are not mutually exclusive.  There is room to celebrate both.  Perhaps I am only speaking confessionally that heretofore I haven’t.  My attentions and my indulgences have focused exclusively on me.  I have taken the day off. I have unwrapped gifts and, in those occasional years when I was alone, even bought them for myself.  The pronouns were “I”, “me”, “mine”.  The circumference of the celebration was that I had been born.  For 66 years I have been well-celebrated and more than adequately feted.  The focus was limited to the noun of my being.

I’ll not make that mistake again.  It was, after all, an act in which I exercised no agency, and was only passively involved.  The hard work - the contracting, the dilating, the pushing and panting and rupturing - was not mine.  There was a verb behind my noun.  If anyone deserves a song and a celebration it is my Mother who accomplished the “doing” of my “being.”

The best I can do is to try to be the gift.  

The birthed, living gratitude for the birther.