The Lost - reviewed

A Review of:

The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn

Reviewed by Dan McDonald

 

            I have finished reading one of the best books I’ve ever read. Daniel Mendelsohn’s book The Lost captured my attention from the opening page to its final words, which is an accomplishment for a book a little over 650 pages long. The book begins by telling us of a boy listening attentively to his grandfather’s stories of distant places and people in the old country. The grandfather’s stories began and finished where the grandfather intended, but between beginning and end they took in a number of features and remembrances on their way to their finish. There was a story that didn’t fit the tendency of having additions. There was a story almost always cut short and filled with pain. The boy’s grandfather had a brother, Uncle Schmiel. Uncle Schmiel had a wife, and as the story goes “four beautiful daughters” in the old country in Bolechow. They were lost to the holocaust. The actual words that summed up the Grandfather’s story in a single sentence is something I felt had more of an impact on me because I read them the first time from the book. As tempting as it is to simply quote them I hope many of you learn the words in the often enough repeated sentence I am describing around those words rather than with them. A man, his wife, and their four daughters – they were the lost family of six from among a lost population of six million. There was something about the briefness of his grandfather’s stories about this family of six which inspired and haunted the boy who as an adult searched for clues wherever he could find them so he could know more about the story of Uncle Schmiel’s family. This book written by the adult version of Daniel Mendelsohn, the boy who heard the stories, is the story in part of Uncle Schmiel and his family but also a memoir of Daniel Mendelsohn’s search for clues about how this now lost family had lived, what they were like, and what were the details as horrible as they might be of their deaths.

            The book tells us of how the young man in search of the story of his grandfather’s brother’s family set up a method to his seeking the truth about the family. He would interview people who knew something of the family or knew some of the family members personally. There was a race against time for the lost family’s lives had ended more than fifty years earlier. People who actually knew them and could remember them had to be at least seventy years and older. Many had already passed away and some were losing their memories if not their lives, and in a few years all would be gone. So if he heard of someone who might have known them or had information about their lives he went and sought their permission to be interviewed and recorded. He found many who were willing. For some it was horribly painful to remember but they spoke. Maybe they spoke because they wanted to tell the story since it was getting late in life and not much longer would they be able to speak about that time. He wanted the stories to be authentic, so with each person he tried not to let information slip about what others before them had said about incidents, or things they had heard, or of what they had seen so long before that might no longer be remembered with as much clarity as if they had told the stories closer to those original days. It would be difficult to get a full story but in a few years it would be impossible to get anything of the story. With urgency the author began his search.

            In addition to discovering a story of Uncle Schmiel’s family, the village where the author’s maternal grandfather had originated became in the book the context for so many people with memories, the place where it all happened. If the Jager family had attention focused to it, then Bolechow became the unforgettable setting at the center of the story. Bolechow was a small town, along the borders of Eastern European national boundaries. It was a town where someone might be born in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, go to school in Poland, get married in Germany, go to work in the Soviet Union, and retire in Ukraine. A person could do this without ever taking a step outside of the small town of Bolechow. It had been a place where for nearly three centuries, Polish, Ukrainians, and Jews lived in equality under the law. All that ended with the coming of the Second World War.

            We are given the chance through this book of being invited on a virtual global exploration for hints at the story of Bolechow and Uncle Schmiel’s family. There are stories in Bolechow. There are stories in Scandinavia, in Denmark, Australia, Israel, and in an apartment in upper Manhattan. When the story seems to have reached a point where nothing more will be learned then a new lead emerges promising fresh information. Slowly a story of the years of the lost family and the painful era emerges. Can everything be known? No, somethings remain uncertain. If we could know everything, there would still be the emptiness of knowing that what we really crave when we hear of lost lives is that we could meet the persons living in their own human bodies, seeking simply to be themselves in front of us. History is the craving for stories of the lost that reaches a place where we can rejoice in finding something new and find sorrow in that we are not the ones who can breathe life into the dead bones.

            When Daniel Mendelsohn traveled to discover the stories, he took others with him. He credits his accompanying people with helping the search to succeed better than if he had gone alone. Some of his fellow travelers asked questions of people he hadn’t thought to ask. Sometimes his accompanying travelers would press people in ways the author would not. Perhaps something is to be learned. Search for a lost family, for meaning, for any number of things while so obviously personal is almost always better done with other travelers sharing the journey.

            One feature of the way the book’s chapters and stories are presented is an interesting parallel story within the story. The author tells the story with stories he draws from the Book of Genesis. The Genesis stories are presented with brief comments from Raschi, a Medieval Jewish commenter or Friedman, a more modern Jewish commenter. The stories from Genesis are not used to give authoritative credence to the story being developed by Mendelsohn, but are simply tapestries of human testimony and experience that seem to give a parallel décor to the story being told. We have the story of holocaust seen in the background of Noah’s flood, not necessarily a parallel message, but a story describing whole populations swept away except for a few fortunate hidden survivors. There is the story of wandering seen in Abraham, or looking back seen in Lot’s wife. It is like seeing the story with a parallel but separate story that touches on but does not equate the story the book is telling. Perhaps this is how we see times and places in history, whether family, national or global speaking to us. There is the family story, the national story, the specific time history seen in relationship to a history progressing either randomly or with purpose from the ancient lost civilizations to the yet unfolding future.

            The book presents us with a story that is haunting, painful, and yet in a strange way beautiful. The testimony of the few Jewish people who escaped Bolechow tended to be that things were complicated. It was a time when to collaborate with murderers was to seek security and to give aid to the innocent was to endanger one’s own ability to survive. It was a time when people betrayed their own and when strangers risked the very lives of their own family members in order to hide someone at least for a time until someone’s eyes saw someone bringing food to a house at night and the questions began to be asked. When authorities executed whole extended families for one member’s choice to give comfort to the refugee, it was understood why so few wished to help. It was also seen to be so amazing that some did look at their own family members and determined this is what is right I will help. In the end, the holocaust was something that involved the Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians of Bolechow. There were the Jewish police who hoped that for their service they would receive an escape from the evils of the Nazi regime. There were Poles and Ukrainians more energetic than Germans in carrying out the actions against their Jewish neighbors. But also there were Polish and Ukrainians with nothing to lose who decided to be willing to lose everything to help their neighbor in need. This all emerges from the ordinary lives of ordinary people caught up in a time where the forces of war and injustice swallowed up a village before anyone knew how to prepare a stand against what had come. It is simply spoken one of the best books I have ever read.

Some Problems better than others

Some Problems Are Better than Others

"Immigration Problems"

By me

The Panhandling Philosopher

 

            Some problems are better than others. Illegal immigration is a problem. Not just in the perspective of nationalists who wish to preserve their culture. There are real problems associated with a flood of undocumented immigrants.

            The desire to secure boundaries and protections for cultures is understandable. When American Indians resist a pipeline going through their historic area how much are their protests concerns about big oil spills, and how much are the protests rooted in the frustration of a history full of having land allotments once granted and later taken from them? Their concerns about the pipeline, whether real or hyped, are rooted in their history of having badlands given to them only to have prime lands taken from them. It must be frustrating.

            I came from a Midwestern town that once had a patchwork of various immigrant neighborhoods. Many of the older cities of the northern regions of the United States were once able to be mapped into zones of where immigrant communities lived. New York and Chicago histories are full of such stories. In my smaller Midwest town, Painter’s edition was where the Italians had once lived, Old Number 3 which was named for the number of the shaft which went down to the coal mines was where many Slovaks lived. Old Number 3 was also sometimes called “Goosetown” because many Slovaks and Polish living there had geese they raised and butchered right there on their little lots in town. By the time I was growing up, the immigrants’ ways were disappearing. Still, as long as the older generation still lived the congregations regularly stipulated that priests and ministers should be able to preach a sermon in Polish, Slovak, or Italian. This was because for older people, even if they had lived in America for decades, the language in which they thought was often the language they had known when they had been boys or girls growing up in what they described as “the old country.”

            By the time I was growing up their grandchildren were my friends. By then we were all part of a community. My father had once lived along the edges of “Goosetown”. Later he moved to our small farm seven miles away. Once he had a hickory tree. It was such a sight. It had grown tall and strong along a small creek in our pasture. But the creek was cutting a new channel because even streams live like immigrants changing their places where they live. The old hickory tree was now on a bank being cut away as the stream carved away at old banks and created new ones. The roots of the hickory tree had been uncovered by the stream as if the stream was desirous of letting us see what was beneath the skirt of the beautiful hickory tree. There was a strange beauty of a tree now mostly uprooted and extending away from a bank almost wholly parallel with the stream intent on tearing the soil away from the tree's roots. As the little war was battled between the upstart stream and the majestic tree holding the soil of the bank progressed, it was the upstart stream that won with persistence and steady effort. The majestic hickory tree was doomed. My father remembered the store owner who sold meats he butchered in Goosetown. He stopped and visited Fialko’s. The little store also had a little bar. It was a family owned butcher shop, canned goods store, and neighborhood bar. Just enough to pay a family’s mortgage, bills, and put food on the table and maybe finance the family’s dream of seeing their child have a better life and maybe even get to send a child off to college. So my Dad asked if Mr. Fialko would like the hickory tree to smoke the sausage he made. He paid a nominal fee for the old doomed tree and we were gifted with fresh made sausages on yearly intervals for several years. The immigrants made by with little things that made the difference; from keeping a goose in the yard to be butchered, to gathering the dandelions for salads and making wine, to a community buying a steer to be butchered and celebrating the butchering with blood pudding for a week. Those were days in the process of being forgotten when I grew up. Those were the ways of immigrants, despised by the cultured people who felt threatened by them, and despised even more by the children stigmatized by old world ways for which they were stigmatized. I mostly knew the old grandparents, the original immigrants by reading the newspaper’s obituaries and seeing someone passing away that had been born in Italy or in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 1890’s or early 1900’s. They were passing as I was growing up. But they had been part of our history. Now their grandchildren who didn’t speak the language of their grandparents were often my best friends. I was a social disaster in high school. The ethnicities remained family points of identity even though we were all Americans now. But somehow I noticed one day that I usually had a crush on a Polish girl, an Irish girl seemed to like me as a friend, and somehow I managed to ask out a German girl and my best friend was Slovak.

            My friends’ grandparents had been legal immigrants. Still there were fears that they were changing our nation. These hordes of legal immigrants who were Slavs, Italians, Greeks, Catholics and Jews were threatening what was good about America. So we began to reform the immigration laws to reflect the United States population as it had been in 1890, Protestant with a whiter complexion. Reformers also noted that these Jews and Catholics often routinely used alcohol. If we couldn’t make an Italian or Greek or Slav look American, we might be able to do something good for the lesser races by prohibiting the sale of the alcohol they consumed. You know these immigrants were such an appalling feature of our beloved America. But the immigrants remained and had families and eventually the grandchildren of the immigrants and the children of favored tribes that had come to America a couple of generations before the less favored tribes all played together, fell in love, had arguments, played baseball, rooted for the Cubs or Sox or were traitors to their geography and pulled for teams like the Mets. P.S. I sometimes have been known for saying "Let's go Mets!"

            Today there are new waves of immigrants. Some are legal immigrants coming from new lands with strange religions and frightening histories. Their people are associated with terrorists and jihad. Sure probably some are simply looking for a place to be free, where instead of being constrained by societal limitations they can pursue their opportunities like the people who come to America from the Middle East and end up having the highest percentage of college graduates within any American ethnicity. But some are bad apples. We need to do vetting. I am not contradicting that. I am acknowledging yes there are some who want to come to our land to do evil. But for many they come because they believe in America and that their children will enjoy a better way of living than they and their families had known in the old country.

            The same is true of the illegal immigrants in our midst. They risk a lot to come here. They know that they are not always welcome, but there are opportunities for their families that they will have here and that their children especially will have here that they don’t feel they can hope for in their old countries. They risk a lot and sometimes the bad people in that old country take advantage of the undocumented. The drug trade which we once smiled at in the days of Al Pacino playing a Latino in Scarface, or on Miami Vice when doing lines of cocaine was treated ambivalently as a delightful evil; has tempted some who imagine a shortcut between entry level American life and the dream of upper middle income level privilege. They risk a lot trusting the two-legged coyotes that will bring them to the north. They don’t think of themselves so much as law breakers as they regard themselves as providers for families whose lives will improve because they make the choice to get their families to a place where they can have opportunities.

            I know there are a lot of ways we can deal with these situations. There are legal solutions and human ones and arbitrary ones. I don’t know the answers. I am not inclined to thinking the off the cuff simple solutions will prove to be the best.

            I have written all this to simply say that this morning I woke up thinking that some problems are worse than others. As we are thinking about building walls and measures to keep people out I want to remember that there are worse problems than when people want to enter our country. I can remember a wall built to keep people inside a place they wanted to escape. Governments are funny that way. They will build walls as easily to keep people out or to keep people in. I want us to be interested in creating the sort of society where other people want in. It seems a lesser problem to me than changing ourselves to make people to no longer want to come in. Somehow it doesn’t seem to me to take long from working to keep people out until we will become a place where people don't want to come. From there it might not take long for people here to want out. I know that the same government that spends a lot to build walls to keep people out can someday want to build walls to keep people in. In won’t be as expensive to build a wall to keep us in once we have built a wall to keep others out. Once the wall is built to keep people out, they will only need to change the direction where the guns are pointed to keep people in. Some problems are better than other problems. I want the problems associated with people who have joined together to make our nation and society a place where people want to get in. It will always be problematic when we do that, but it’s one of the better problems to have. When we get them to not want to come, then we will really have problems.

 

Silence - Movie Review

Thoughts on the Movie

 “Silence”

            Silence, directed by Martin Scorsese is based on a book by Japanese Christian Shusako Endo. Scorsese, a practicing Roman Catholic, read the book long ago and has been thinking and working on bringing an adaptation of the book to the screen for twenty years. It may be the work that he personally views as his most important. As a director he is one of the more profound directors of recent decades having directed such movies as Taxi, Raging Bull, Gangs of New York, and The Wolf of Wall Street.

            Many of my readers are Evangelicals, and for many Evangelicals, watching Scorsese films seems questionable. This is probably due to how his films can be brutal, and also how he tends to use movies to ask questions rather than give answers. An Evangelical sermon somehow does not seem complete if the audience is left contemplating a question. We Evangelicals concentrate on showing how Jesus is the answer and the reason for the season. Questions often rattle us in our search for a secure faith. The story shown in “Silence” is a story of a brutal time of Japanese persecution of Catholic Christians in and around the city of Nagasaki. It is a story in which many unannounced questions are raised in the mind of the film goer while watching the movie. There is little if any sermonizing – the questions rise naturally from the scenes and plot. They linger. To me, that is the genius of the film, In real life spiritual issues rise from events and they linger within us.

            I would recommend this film to mature and thinking movie goers who don’t mind coming out of a theater a little bit provoked, and perhaps left unsettled by a sense that sometimes our ideals are going to be tested in ways we didn’t expect. This is how this film develops. It begins with two priests getting off a ship along the shore line. Historically, the area around Nagasaki doesn’t have great harbors, so the movie captures this with the priests coming ashore making their way walking towards the beach in the shallows some distance from where they come ashore. There are rumors of persecution of the Christians. There are rumors that a missing priest has apostatized. The priests hope to prove the rumors wrong, for the priest is someone they admired, whom helped them to choose to devote their lives to being missionaries.

            Once ashore they are happily rewarded with the enthusiastic greetings they receive from the Catholic Christians seeing a priest having come ashore. Soon they meet with other Christians and enjoy pleasant fellowship with simple believers, mostly people of limited means but who eagerly desire to partake of the faith.

            The initial phase of the film is agreeable to our Christian ideals. The missionary priest or minister lands ashore, meets believers, strengthens them with the Word and sacraments, and begins to proclaim the message freely to all who will hear. But then the opposition comes and changes the picture. The reality of persecution meeting the weakness of human fresh begins to become real. There are people who feel the anguish of conscience for failing to stand firm when the trial of persecution began. Such a person feels himself outside of the community of the Christians who treat him with suspicion and outside of the Japanese culture resisting the spread of Christianity on their isles.

            Many questions confronted me as I watched the film. They would rise unspoken in the moment of a scene. I would wonder what I would do if I were caught in the reality of this scene caught in a passing frame of film. Is persecution ever only about our faith? Did the Japanese reject the spread of Christianity on their shores because they rejected the message of Jesus or of the Jesuit priests who brought the message? Or did the persecution arise because beyond the shoreline, but connected to the missionaries were the European ships that brought not only priests and a Christian message, but connections to the rising European powers who were staking out claims on ports and territories throughout the world? The Japanese rulers knew that Portugal had taken control of the Chinese city of Macau, and that the Spanish had taken control of the Luzon region of the Philippines. The English and Dutch were latecomers in the establishment of colonies but wherever European ships came to port, European claims of supremacy and the right to rule would soon follow. These questions are not set forth as much in dialogue as understood as the movie goer is drawn into the scenes of the film flickering in and out of our sight.

            There are scenes where we are called on to ask what constitutes actual faith. There were problems translating the Scriptures into the Japanese language expressed by representative characters. Did the Japanese believers suffering to death in the persecution actually understand the message of the faith? Or did they remain naturalists worshipping the power of nature through the symbol of Jesus like the sun rising from the night of darkness? Priests are urged to believe the people are dying not for their understanding of a Christian faith not meant for the Japanese soil, but for their willingness to die for their loyalty to these human priests. How do we know when one has begun to believe in Christ? Are these peasants dying for the faith or out of simple human loyalty to the priests they have come to respect and admire? In the world where God has become flesh, can one’s embracing of the Christian priest or messenger show a connection to the incarnate Christ before one understands the basic creeds of the Christian faith? I recall a story I once read of Adoniram Judson. He had landed in what was then Burma. Passing through the crowd Judson spoke kindly to a woman as he moved around her in the crowd. She was moved by the way he carried himself and the kindness in his voice. Her instant thought was that “his god must be the god.” At what point are we joined to Christ? Is it when we intellectually understand the creeds of the faith, or can it begin at an earlier time in a much less conscious manner? Can the Christ of our creeds and doctrines be separated from the Christ who fills the Church, and might a peasant who sees divinity in a representative of a church already have be connection to the Christ of the Church communicated through its members united to Christ? Conversely, could some seemingly strong connections to Christ be simply the expressions of simple and ordinary human affections having little or no actual spiritual communion taking place? Such questions plague the devoted educated priest as much as the struggling believer with a lack of solid instruction to battle our human tendencies to superstition.

            There are questions of what attracted the foreign people to the European messengers of the faith. One apostatized priest tells how though he lost his faith he still had a mission to the Japanese, since they were eager to hear about matters of science that he understood which had not yet been discovered in the Japanese world. Life is complex. In our Western world we invariably compartmentalize the complexities into separate spheres. When we come with our Christian message to another island, or approach the island of another individual, we imagine bringing our Christian message in its own separate sphere to the people to whom we bring it. But they see our Christian message in the package of our humanity and cultural influences. They see us and our message in a single unified manner. The Japanese rulers who saw a European missionary, saw a European ship not far from the shoreline hoisting a flag of a nation actively building an empire of colonies around the globe. They saw valuable trade and new understandings of science that might with wisdom be pried from the traders without the loss of their national independence.

            There was another question I was confronted with in this film worth pondering.At one point it is said in reference to a character in the film, “This man is strong, he wall fall easily.” Strength of faith, strength of purpose - what is it? When does the seeming strength of our inner purpose actually more a frailty ready to be exposed than a resource to help us through the coming trial? We fortify ourselves hoping to become strong only to discover that our fortifications were the one weakness that became the reason for our downfall.

            I suppose there is a movie-goer who will see “Silence” and grumble on the way out about a movie presenting a wishy-washy perspective regarding the Christian faith. But I think for others it will highlight questions needing to be contemplated, which have always silently plagued us, that somehow we could easily ignore. But the scenes of this movie and of life itself have a way of bringing such questions vividly before our eyes when we are least expecting such questions to have any relevance to life.

            I wish I knew how to recommend this movie to the specific people who would find this movie as enriching to understanding life as I have found it. I can't do that. I can't even predict the people I know who will like or dislike the movie because you never know which people will thrive facing questions or shrink at the questions. Sadly this movie did not remain in theaters long. After two weeks in my Tulsa area, the closest theater showing the film is slightly over 100 miles away. Most of you will probably have to wait until it comes on Netflix or is sold as a DVD. If there remains a theater near you showing it, I recommend it. I don’t understand why the marketing for this movie seems to have been done so poorly. It seems like instead of a movie one of film's great directors worked on for decades, it was simply treated as a film no one would want to see. I think we underestimate how many people are interested in a realistic film about faith and doubt that ponders the great questions that plague us even if regarding those doubts we simply speak in "Silence".

Manchester by the Sea - review

Review of

Manchester by the Sea

Reviewed by Dan McDonald

 

            Manchester by the Sea is a well-made movie which explores the difficulties that arise when someone experiences a second chance. The movie’s focus is on the character of “Lee Chandler” presented by Casey Affleck. Lee Chandler is the brother of “Joe Chandler” whose role is played by Kyle Chandler. Lee Chandler is not the only one troubled by a past and given the hope or troubling responsibility of a second chance. Michelle Williams presents the character of “Randi” whose difficulties seem to be opposed to Lee Chandler’s while mirroring his own difficulties.

            In clichés we say “Past failures don’t define you.” In real life, past failures become the demons, or are used by the demons seeking to define us. In American film, movies are generally made to show us that if we play our parts right there will be a happy ending. In “Manchester by the Sea” the suspense lingers as we hope for a happy ending and yet things happen that show us it is not going to be easy for all the characters to discover a happy ending. Perhaps the reality of it, whether or not we believe in a hope of redemption is that there are chapters in each of our lives that shatter our self-images and come partially or substantially to own and possess us, and our knowledge that this is so only deepens the sense that we are seriously broken and might well be for a long time, and maybe throughout our lives.

            Manchester by the Sea is a movie where a boat has a motor about to go out. Each trip to sea reminds those in the boat that the defective motor might fail and leave them stranded. That is the perfect symbol for most of the characters in this movie. They feel that within themselves they have a failing motor, and now they must struggle to figure out if they can set out to sea or insulate themselves in some sort of safe lives.

            I loved this movie but it is one of those movies where certain profane words fill the script. My life has never been far from such a lifestyle and perhaps I have given in to the words too much myself. I can understand why a movie goer who doesn’t wish to give himself into a film using that one four-letter word as an adjective to be used in every other sentence. As I seek to inform people interested in seeing the film of this and also some uncomfortable situations morally speaking, I found myself lead to think about how the film uses these situations.

            Lucas Hedges plays the role of Patrick, a son left behind by his mother’s troubles and his father’s death. Now he is trying to grow up when the man appointed his guardian seems like he hates Patrick’s presence. Patrick’s actions seem like the proverbial son who asks for permission to do things wondering if the person he is asking will ever care enough to say “no” to the things he asks. Growing up is not learning to do everything one wants to do as an adult, but learning to navigate life by the boundaries of wisdom or learning to treat others with respect. Patrick is testing boundaries wondering if anyone even cares to talk to him about what he is doing.

            After watching the film and wondering what I would say about all the profanity, it seemed to me that when we explore people who have given up on themselves or have consigned themselves to the role of the eternally broken, we should not be surprised if their language is filled with profanity. Most of us use profanity the most at some point in our lives when we are trying to be adults. Adults say the words we are not supposed to say as children. But when we get through the phase of adult language being cool we find ourselves less comfortable using the profane words. There are reasons adults taught us as children not to use the words and there are reasons why adults end up falling into relying upon the words. It is not so much hypocrisy of adults, as it is the failure of adults to be true to their own better understanding. The use of profane language by a parent or guardian who knows better is sometimes less explained by hypocrisy as it is by surrender to the demons that plague us.

            I’ve learned in the aftermath of watching this movie to think about our use of profanity differently. The reasons we try to teach our children and ourselves to not use or to limit the use of profanity is that profanity so often is used to express either bitterness or hopelessness. Both of these attitudes need corralled and overcome. It seems to me that there is another reason why profanity is to be avoided. Profanity should be avoided because ultimately our profane words become mere clichés which express and communicate virtually nothing. To give in to profanity when bitter or hopeless is to give up on seeking answers to the questions that plague us. Human beings are reflective creatures who use their minds and seek language to explain their trials, to express their hopes, and to seek the meaning of things in their lives. So often the f--- word no matter how momentarily satisfying is in the full analysis an announcement of an end to our dealing with what plagues us. The f--- word is not the word of our human language we are seeking to understand our situations or to find the wherewithal of moving forward. The forbidden word merely becomes the conversation closer so that we quit looking for words to better understand our plight. Film-makers have understood that is how we so often speak when instead of looking for answers we are pulling ourselves away from the possibilities of seeking, understanding, and discovering whatever answers we might be capable of finding.

Tradition and Ownership

Tradition and Ownership

By the Panhandling Philosopher, Dan McDonald

 

            Hooker’s formula for remembering and moving forward in the truth was a three legged stool of authority set in Scripture, tradition, and reason. Tradition was that heritage of faithfulness in which the truths of Scripture had been held by the people of God in the many times and places which God’s people have inhabited. We learn important values by realizing they have been valuable to generation upon generation of people. Holy or Sanctified reason was a way of thinking through issues which percolated up from the soil of fertile thoughts trained by the teaching of Scriptures and the absorbing of those timeless values reinforced by the ancient traditions expressed over many generations. Hooker understood Anselm of Canterbury’s appreciation that when we become believers it is not because we have learned everything and can therefore choose the faith, but rather it is because we have tasted something and now enter the faith and live among the people of God that from henceforth we might learn about what we have come to believe. We do not understand so as to believe as much we believe so that we might come to understand. We are those who know in part while being fully known, and so we seek from that point of initiation to learn, and to progress towards  understanding.

            During the past few weeks I returned home for Christmas. Home is a flexible concept, and I use it as such. I returned home, meaning to be with the family and its offspring that was of the family of which I grew up. I returned home and drove through the town where I once went to grocery stores with my mom, or to the barber shop, hardware store, or Snyder’s Tap when I went with my father. I returned home to drive by the house where I grew up on a small farm. I do have a home where I now live in Tulsa, but sometimes I leave that home to return home.

            I grew up on a farm, but I grew up during an odd season in my father’s farming career. Modern farming is constantly winnowing the number of farmers. Modern farming has from generation to generation required fewer farmers to do what many farmers were once needed to accomplish. My father came to realize that he was being winnowed out of the farm business. He never much sought to invest farming into me. In a few years the amount of farming done on our farm changed. We quit raising hogs. We quit raising chickens. We sold the dairy cattle. Eventually he gave up farming some pieces of land in the neighborhood. He was a good welder. He had welded during the war in the shipyards. He could weld using mirrors. He never taught me welding. Late in life I asked him why he never taught me welding. He simply said, “You already had bad eyes you didn’t need to weld.”  I grew up not learning a lot about the farm, not being encouraged much, and maybe on my part not having the hunger or thirst. But still where I grew up and how had an impact on me for my entire life. There is an old saying that a boy can leave the farm but the farm never leaves the boy. I think that is true of history, tradition, and heritage. We can never live in the past, but neither can we fully keep the past from living on in us. I left the farm that I learned so little of, but it never left me.

            I know there are people that rebel who hate the entire idea of tradition. But tradition is everywhere. It is stored up in a word like “conservative” where people hope to conserve the values they believe made us great, or if not great, at least contributed aspects of meaning to guide us in our lives. Tradition is the material we pass along in education, learned from one generation and taught because of its value to another generation. Tradition is contained in science as Newton stood upon the shoulders of giants, and as Einstein paid homage to what he had learned from Newton and James Clerk Maxwell. Tradition is also learning from the past to understand a vision for the future. To progress within a tradition is as much a part of being traditional as to conserve the lessons learned from tradition. We learned to value freedom and liberty and began to imagine a day when there would be no slaves. We learned the advantages of literacy and began to envision a day when all participants in society would have an opportunity to be educated. We began to lengthen lives for those with the ability to be treated with medicinal breakthroughs and began imagining a society where all its members would have access to affordable health care. Tradition allows both the conserving of the valued lessons of the past and a vision for the possibilities of the future.

            Cultures grow when they believe in a past within tradition to be conserved and the promise of a future to which they may progress. In 2016 our American culture seemed to have separated the concepts of progressing and conserving even as we separated politics along the fracture lines of the urban left and the rural right. Personally, a couple of days after Christmas I went home to drive by the house where I grew up and to take a drive around the city where we had shopped and as often as any identified ourselves as being from the city of Streator, Illinois.

            I quickly felt melancholy as I drove towards the old home place, seeing houses that didn’t look like they did when I was sixteen, now that I am sixty-one. I was stunned to see the old house gone that had stood just east of our home place. It once had a historical marker set on the highway nearby its location. The house had been built in the 1840’s. It was a two-story, with a cellar. It didn’t have extraordinary architecture.  It was remembered for the history that took place within the home. Either an undertaker or a carpenter lived in the house. In any way there was always a storage of coffins kept in the place in its younger days. The coffins were sometimes used for burial, and at other times they were used for the hiding of what in those days before the Civil War were called “colored” people. An abolition minded family lived in the home and used the coffins in the cellar to hide runaways fleeing southern slavery and headed to the promise of liberty in Canada. It was a hush hush operation for not every neighbor would approve of breaking the laws requiring slaves to be returned to masters. But this was a house where those seeking freedom by leaving the land of the free, might escape the land altogether to find liberty in Canada which had refused to seek American liberty during the American Revolution or the War of 1812. Now the house and the historical marker of that house used to support runaway slaves to make their way to freedom in Canada were removed from the present landscape even if their memories were perhaps buried in archives somewhere or in the mystery of what a prairie soil might have witnessed. I am not sure it is good for that house and marker to have been removed from the nearly completely white community in which I had grown up. I fear communities such as mine live believing that they are kept a safe distance away from injustice. We can remain unmoved by another’s injustice if we feel we are separated by time and space from the injustice we simply choose to ignore. There used to be a sign of someone who did something about injustice. The sign is removed. The community I fear imagines itself separated from pockets of injustice in places like far away Chicago.

            I then came by my father’s house. Everything had changed. I felt the melancholy of having lost the past. The house had been thoroughly remodeled. It looked more impressive. I bet they even had heat in the upstairs bedrooms where I remember winter nights when we slept under piles of quilts and maybe even in a sleeping bag. I remember taking a thermometer upstairs to see what the room temperature was during a stretch where outside it never made it above zero for a few days. Inside my unheated bedroom the thermometer showed just 20 degrees above zero on the Fahrenheit scale. The property had been changed with old buildings torn down and new ones built. The buildings were built in a well-planned layout rather than the haphazard look that had characterized our property’s building arrangement in my youth.  The property looked attractive.  I felt melancholy all the same. The past I came to see one more time was now nearly gone.

            Then I noticed the trees. They were there. I was in high school when my Dad decided to plant a line of evergreen trees north of the house and more trees to surround the house. The Evergreen trees to the north would add beauty and provide a wind break when the howling winds of winter would drive the cold deep into the old house. The trees around the house would provide shade from the summer sun. It was one of the things he did for the property with pride and joy. He would die before the trees were fully grown to bring his initial vision to fullness. It wasn’t that he died particularly young. It was simply that trees like he planted took more years to fulfill a vision than one often had to live when the trees were planted. He wouldn’t have been surprised to die before the vision was fulfilled. Perhaps there was something inspiring about planting a tree that wouldn’t fulfill its purpose until years after one’s passing. A vision that cannot live past one’s own life seems a pretty inconsequential plan to pursue in one’s grey-headed time of life.

            My father’s birthday was January 4. I think he would have enjoyed the fact that most of the trees he planted remain on the property even when everything else seems thoroughly changed or gone. I think he would have missed the familiar look of the house and older buildings where a family of children once grew up. He would look on the property I am sure with a sense of melancholy. But I think unlike me, he perhaps might have knocked on the door of the house and said to the new owners, “I am glad you kept the trees I planted, and how you have built the buildings and arranged them – I can tell that you have shown your love to the property and to the land. It is your land now, but in case you wanted to know I love what you’ve done with it.”

            I think through all the melancholy I now better understand tradition. Tradition is not a slave owner. Tradition is like a house trying to lead us on a journey away from slavery. Tradition is not the past holding us in chains. Tradition is not a demanding property that does not allow us to reimagine what we have received. Tradition is simply a past speaking to us saying, “I know you have loved something valuable you found on this property where I live, but it is yours now and if you show by your ownership how you have cared for the past living here and have shown you have loved this piece of land in your possession with your vision for this property how can I tradition be anything but joyous over your stewardship.” In the end we are stewards who own our places on earth for a short time and then ownership reverts to the tradition of the generations with its influence upon human life. Tradition is not our seeking to live in the past but our past seeking to live within us. We can fight it but it will still live. The boy can leave the farm, but the farm will never leave the boy. We can view tradition with contempt but one day we will be driving down a road and will see what we have lost and we will realize that we left the past but the past never has left us. We felt tradition didn’t matter but it dwells within us waiting for the moment when we will listen to what is important for us to pause and give place and space in which it will graciously teach us.