Why I Continue: Ruminations on a Rainy Night

In the past few weeks, I have felt increasingly overwhelmed by the world. Instinctively, I find myself withdrawing from everything. The words of the confessional prayer in Rite I of the Book of Common Prayer seems to well describe the weight of most aspects of daily life:

“The remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burden of them is intolerable.”

And yet, my observation is that I am hardly alone in this.

I realize that part of my sense of being overwhelmed is personal. The ongoing demands of handling the probate of a beloved Father and then dismantling and disposing of our family home in Bushnell have been heavy on my mind and heart for the past year. Along with the books, photos, mementos and furniture, there are so many memories of which I am letting go. None of them painlessly or particularly expeditiously.

There is also no small amount of uncertainty about what lies ahead in my life, having just let go of my teaching and my work for the Florida Humanities Council. I become eligible for Medicare in September. I’m also completing an experimental therapy on my knees hoping to avoid surgery but not yet clear it’s working. Surgery could yet be ahead. 

I’m uncertain what, if anything, comes next. Again and again the rabbinical proverb comes to mind: If you want to make G-d laugh, tell G-d your plans.

The Glowing, Radioactive Cesspool in my Hands

 Last week I lay on the couch in my family home, front door open, screen door keeping out the bugs, listening to the soft rain on the tin roof and the sounds of the evening birds and crickets calling out their goodnights.  IPad in hand, I found myself increasingly aware of how troubling I find the contents of social media.

There was post after post about Donald Trump and his seemingly inexhaustible band of cronies. Post after post about non-issues like protesters kneeling during the national anthem at professional football games. There was but a handful of posts about actual issues like refugee children being separated from parents at our border. But there was no shortage of posts on the most trivial, superficial aspects of the largely insignificant lives of celebrities inevitably presented in the most degrading, dehumanizing manner.

These posts seem to say that the country I have long loved and served is disintegrating before my eyes. There was also no shortage of posts reminding me of how the good Creation I revere is bespoiled by we human animals who make up only a tiny fraction of its biosphere but threaten its ongoing existence for all of our fellow living beings.

Most of the posts were mean-spirited, even gratuitously nasty. Many attacked the persons rather than the ideas of those with whom the posters disagreed. I felt I was holding a glowing, radioactive cesspool in my hands.  And I found myself racing to get past those posts as quickly as possible, pausing only to post thumbs up on the snarky photos of cats and hearts on the inexhaustible posts from dachshund and beagle lovers.

Unexpected Compassion Reminds Us of Our Humanity

After a few minutes of sifting, I came to a post that stopped me in my tracks.

It was unclear to me where the post had originated but the story which reported it was translated from Russian and included an accompanying video. A small sinkhole had opened up on a public street where the steps from a building met the pavement. 



Before the hole could be repaired, a pregnant dog had crawled into the hole for a safe place to have her pups. It was not clear whether the repair workers were unaware of the dog or simply didn’t care. What was clear was that they paved over the hole with the dog inside it.

A young man heard the crying of the dog. He couldn’t stand it. And so he got a hammer and began to pry the bricks out of the newly repaired portion of the street. One by one he took them out, pulling out bricks with his bare hands. After a while, the clay foundation of the street was exposed and he broke through the foundation with his hammer to reopen the hole.

At first, the dog was afraid to come out. The man coaxed her, putting his hands into the hole, hoping she would lift her head. After a few minutes, the dog finally poked her head out of the hole, her frightened eyes wide open. The young man calmed her, patting her head, working his way down her neck with his hands, slowly, gently.

Finally, the dog gained enough trust to allow the man to help her exit the hole. She stepped out, leaving behind her earthen prison and began to receive loving attention of the small crowd that had gathered. According to the story, the dog is now at a rescue organization awaiting adoption.  

Little things can make a major difference.

The Times I Love Most

Something inside me simply broke as I watched this video. I wept for several minutes.

Outside my screen door, a gentle rain was falling.  The cicadas and the hoot owls sang a melody to the rhythm of soft drumming on the tin roof overhead. As I wept, I could feel the pain of losing my parents and giving up my childhood home all streaming down my cheeks. I knew I was letting go of all the hopes, aspirations and memories they represented in those tears. But in the process, the pain of the world I feel so intensely at times was also softly ebbing away.

  Truth be told, from the very beginning I was always out of place in this small town with its small minds and small hearts whose affection was always conditioned upon compliance with its myopic vision and its tribal values. But as much as I grated against the little town with all its constraints, I always loved this place my Dad, brother and I cleared out of a veritable thicket and the family home my best friend’s father built here even more.

These woods were my salvation. They had always been magical, particularly late in the afternoon when the sun sets across the pastureland behind our 12 acres, sparkling as it shines through the tall trees moving in the breeze. Sometimes the setting sun filters through the mist that lingers after a summer thunderstorm giving it an ethereal appearance in shades of yellow, orange, purple and grey.

These are the times I love the most.

This night it was a particular privilege to be able to just lie on my Mother’s couch, a book cradled just above my heart, engaging in the activity that my Mother had lovingly and patiently taught me by the time I was two years old, the activity that repeatedly saved me during those 11 and a half long years in that small town. By the time I would return to my home in the city the next day, I would have emptied my Father’s bookcases, loading my car with his books about law, government, history, even a little religion thrown in.

The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.

But it is a finite joy at this point. I’m at my family home to prepare it for sale, something neither I nor my siblings want to think about for very long even as we know we must. But just for this moment, it is still the place where I can let down my guard and prop up my aching knees, where the drop in my blood pressure is palpable as I turn down the canopy road to our home. It’s the place where I can read my books, revel in an evening concert outside and weep over a poignant video about a trapped pregnant dog released by a Russian Good Samaritan.

Disenchantment, Disinvestment

I haven’t really been active on social media since that evening. Perhaps not surprisingly, I find the pages of the actual books I am reading to be much more appealing than the fearful electronic sludge through which I was slogging. More importantly, I’ve had time to think about why that is.

I think my disenchantment with social media is part and parcel of my larger disinvestment from the conventions of the society in which I find myself. Truth be told, though I once was heavily invested in most of the competitive aspects of the driven young soul society in which we all live, their hold on my life waned a while ago.

I no longer care much about the sports which once commanded my attention every waking hour. I have no idea who’s even playing in “the championship” and generally care little about who wins, a real heresy in a culture whose true religion is sports. And while partisan politics once played a major role in my younger life, these days I’m a nominal Democrat on a good day. It’s the survival of my country – hardly a given in these dark days of Trumpland - that most concerns me.

I could care less about the activities of the legal profession to which I had to sacrifice much to be admitted to and to whom I still pay bar dues. And I’ve come to accept that the seemingly inevitable devolution of the educational system to which I devoted most of my adult life to an underfunded factory process of uncritical vocational training is well beyond my capacities to impact.

All of these areas were once central to my life. But I’ve simply walked away from them, more than happy to retreat to the solace of my garden, my non-human animal companions and my books. 

 The one remaining aspect of my once busy conventional life is the Episcopal Church. Even there, I am content to stand near the institutional walls (and close to the exits). It is, on a good day, a means to a deeper spiritual and a gratifying social life, but never an end in itself.

There simply are a lot of things that don’t matter to me much anymore. Increasingly I find that those are precisely the focus of a social media which increasingly makes clear that its capacity for connectedness and expansion of the mind comes at a major cost - its capacity for social disintegration (sadly, the more common expression of the Russian presence there), corporate exploitation and human degradation.

So, What’s Important Now?

Yet there are some things which remain important to me. And I am grateful to a Russian video watched on a rainy evening in the woods for helping remind me of them.

I do care about the living world all around me. The ability to recognize the imperative to rescue a buried pregnant dog is an essential reminder of our capacity for full humanity.

Loving the good Creation around us is important.

Rescuing abused pregnant dogs is an exercise in compassion. It reflects the willingness to suffer with the other, much more demanding than a common pity that inevitably contains no small amount of condescension. The willingness to recognize and respond to the vulnerability of other living beings is an important revelation of how fully human any of us really are.

It is important to call forth compassion in our own lives and those of others.

Separation of children from parents at a border is not a partisan issue. Neither is the burying of a pregnant dog beneath a sidewalk. These are human issues. At heart it is the duty to care for the vulnerable. And the way we respond to that duty reveals the state of our own humanity.

Caring for the vulnerable is important

The ability to recognize that many ideas, statements and behaviors are beneath the dignity of the human beings we were created to be is essential. The essential question is rarely whether we have a right to express ourselves in those manners, it’s always whether we should and how others will be impacted if we do.

 Encouraging - if not insisting upon - the better angels of our humanity is important.

I care about what is left of my country and its people and I continue to hold out hope that a New America can yet rise from the ashes of Trumpland. It’s important to recognize that the problems revealed by the rise of this mean-spirited authoritarianism are less partisan in nature than systemic. They have long histories that demand our attention. The pathologies we currently experience reveal that our ability to recognize and embrace the values we once held dear as a people has become tenuous.

Learning our history, owning our Shadow and reclaiming its ideals is important.

To the degree social media serves these important concerns, its potential for constructive values to outweigh its potential for destructiveness remains a possibility and thus potentially worthy of our time and attention.

Values Worth Discussing

I often remark that any of us can live as limited a life as we choose. But why would we?

There are values worth pursuing. There are values worth fighting to preserve. Indeed, there are values worth dying for. Such values rarely include those things prized by conventional societies whose shallow values of power and materialism often overwhelm deeper concerns for our deepest humanity and our care for the vulnerable. We are simply more than that and as human animals blessed with reason and the capacity to care, we are capable of better.

As long as there are pregnant dogs buried under city streets, refugee children separated from parents at borders, democratic experiments disintegrating into authoritarian nightmares and inhabitable planets endangered by the parasitic behaviors of their dominant species, there will be values worth discussing.

That is why I continue.

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Harry Scott Coverston

Orlando, Florida

 frharry@cfl.rr.com

hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993) 

 © Harry Coverston 2018

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