Characters and Compassion

Like a totally normal person (😉), I’ve been thinking lately about one of the essay questions on an English exam my senior year of high school.

The internet helped me find the exact wording.  Here it is: 

Discuss the notion of morally ambiguous characters—those whose behavior doesn’t allow readers to categorize them as purely good or evil. Choose a novel or play where such a character plays a central role, and explain how that character’s ambiguity is significant to the work. 

For teaching the virtue of compassion, morally ambiguous characters in world class fiction is a fine tool.

The point is not to become morally ambiguous ourselves, but to see the ways in which we already are.  When we acknowledge our own capacity for deception, destruction, and the like, we can move more wholeheartedly toward a virtuous life and accompany others on the same journey.

(The six short stories that start A Table for Two have a fine cast of characters for this purpose.) 

Tracks in the Wrong Direction

Near the end of one of Wendell Berry’s finest poems comes the advice to

“…Be like the fox / who makes more tracks than necessary, / some in the wrong direction.”

The status quo may expect us to seek to maximize our waking hours for pleasure and profit, to always think and speak like our tribe.

Life is richer (and more fun), though, when we are led by the Spirit to walk a perhaps unpredictable path, making tracks in the “wrong direction”.

The Edge of the Margin

Near our home is a building boasting a large-lettered sign with the name MarginEdge on top.

I assume this is an office of some sort and I have no experience with with them other than seeing their sign, but what a curious idea that sign calls to mind. 

The demands of life (both real and imagined) can lead us to the edge of the margin of our strength and our time.  This is not where the spiritual life thrives.

Our story is better written when we are not pushed to the very edge of the paper.

Adversary or Enemy?

So, consider for a moment that person one might disagree with… How we engage them and the story we tell about that interaction turns them into an adversary or an enemy.

An adversary is a sparing partner, a worthy rival.

An enemy is someone you behold with hostile contempt from whom nothing can be learned.  

Adversaries can work together to build a healthy community or nation.  I doubt that enemies can accomplish this.

A final point: It is difficult to behold someone as an adversary if they behold you as an enemy.  It is hard, but it is a grace that we can ask for.

Healthspan

I recently heard “heathspan” (how many years one is healthy) contrasted with “lifespan” (how many years one is alive). 

It’s a generative distinction, helping us focus on the health and quality of the years we live.

And what kind(s) of health are we talking about? Bodily, certainly. That is the assumed definition. But also spiritual health?  Relational health?  Mental health?

In each of these areas, do we yet want what we want to want?

The Confederacy of the Humbled

Count Rostov, the uniquely charming protagonist of A Gentleman in Moscow, experiences the loss of stature, influence, and the world he has known.  (Not a spoiler!  It begins on page 1.)  By way of recovery from this loss, he casts a new narrative and describes his inclusion in the “Confederacy of the Humbled”: 

“a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings, but who know each other at a glance. For having fallen suddenly from grace, those in the Confederacy share a certain perspective. Knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed, they are not easily impressed. They are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers in search of their own names. They remain committed to living among their peers, but they greet adulation with caution, ambition with sympathy, and condescension with an inward smile.”

When live’s losses come for us, we have a choice.  We can rehearse and resent them, living within their confines.  Or we can pray for the grace to acknowledge and integrate them, reengaging life as wisely as the Count. 

God Made That!

For me, one of life’s finest joys is to be so thrilled by the creation of a book that I can’t imagine how it did not exist before.  

With unique thoughtfulness and passion, Kat Hoenke and Bill Jacobs, both professional ecologists and lay Catholic leaders, invite young people on a journey with the saints and through the bioregions of North America, in God Made That!. 

(Oh, and they also lead St. Kateri Conservation Center, championing biodiversity on church land.)

Thank you, Kat and Bill, for this generous work.

Missing the Meaning

It is possible to have an experience that means to teach us – be it something wonderful or something difficult – and to miss its meaning.

Maybe our attention is fragmented or stretched too thin.  Maybe we willfully resist the lesson. 

We should not be surprised if life keeps offering us this lesson because we have, as yet, been unable or unwilling to learn it.