Come Together?

We spend the summers at an old family cabin in the mountains of rural northeastern Oregon. Last week while there, we went to an open forum sponsored by a local church. The purpose was to give people a chance to talk about Charlie Kirk’s murder and where we’re at as a community and nation.

In Seattle, where we live in the winter, a lot of people have never heard, or heard much, of Charlie Kirk. They don’t get the furor. Or they are critical of Kirk’s message. But in reddish rural America where we were, Kirk seems to have been a kind of hero. Young people especially seemed to look up to him. The first who spoke, a young woman, tearfully described Kirk as a “martyr.”

At the gathering, maybe two dozen folks sat more or less in a circle to share their feelings of sadness and anger, to listen and to seek hope. After some initial sharing, a common sentiment expressed by several people was “we need to come together.” We need to come together to save our country.

It’s a good thought, and it was heartfelt. With all due apologies to the above commercial from 1971, seeing how that happens in our divided land is not easy. Each side has a different idea of what “saving America” involves, and for some on each side it means total victory over the other side, which will never happen and never work. Strangely, “coming together” pretty much depends on figuring out how to live with people with whom we don’t see eye to eye, with whom we may deeply disagree.

Often in such settings, I don’t speak. That’s partly because I need to think about things, to “process” as we sometimes say, before I speak. Maybe I’m also afraid of making a fool of myself. But I was moved by the honesty and vulnerability of many who spoke, and so I decided to put my oar in the water with my half-formed thoughts and troubled feelings.

When I did speak, I said that I wondered, “Are we — as a nation, a people — in the position of an alcoholic or addict showing up to their first 12-Step meeting, a ‘first-stepper,’ as we say in such circles?”

That first step is deceptively simple. “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol — that our lives had become unmanageable.”

It is the second part of that step — “our lives had become unmanageable” — that rings truest for me in this moment. What else can you say about a nation where kids get shot in schools on a regular basis (there had been another school shooting the week Kirk was killed), where the mentally ill and addicted wander the streets in rags, where people locate the problem in some “them” that is not them and think the fix is to “purify” the country by wiping the bad “them” out, and where anything and everything is turned into fodder for the stupid, (anti) social media-fueled culture wars.

We seem pretty powerless over it all.

We are addicted to conflict, to fear, to rage and outrage, to violence. A first step is, more than anything else, an admission that we need help. Help from beyond ourselves. Is this where we are at, I asked?

And yet, as Americans there is no adage more dear to us than “God helps those who help themselves” (which is not, incidentally, found anywhere in the Bible). No, God is the help of the helpless, the powerless, the completely desperate.

Of course, Step One is a beginning, not an end. It leads to Step Two, “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity,” and to Step Three, “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.” You might say that these steps are all about opening, opening our hands and heart for help. “My life is a mess. I need help.”

But just now we are a people of the clenched fist, which can feel pretty good. The only problem with the clenched fist is it cannot accept a helping hand.

I take that image from the writer Frederick Buechner (RIP). I hold close a quote from Buechner in his autobiographical book, The Sacred Journey. It comes from the point in his life when he (a teenager) and his mother and brother are trying to recover after his father’s suicide. Buechner wrote,

When it comes to putting broken lives back together — when it comes in religious terms to the saving of souls — the human best tends to be at odds with the holy best.

To do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do — to grit your teeth and clench your fist in order to survive the world at its harshest and worst — is, by that very act, to be unable to let something be done for you and in you that is more wonderful still.

The trouble with steeling yourself against the harshness of reality is that the same steel that secures your life against being destroyed secures your life against being opened up and transformed by the holy power that life itself comes from … the one thing a clenched fist cannot do is accept … a helping hand.

Another way to put this in more familiar terms might be to say that the DIY approach — “to do for yourself the best that you have it in you to do,” with gritted teeth and clenched fist — is to take the road of a “high anthropology.” We can do this. Just try harder. Be more resolute in our determined opposition to the depravity and stupidity of those idiots on the other side who are destroying the country.

I don’t see a lot of “coming together” there.

A low anthropology approach would be one that acknowledges we aren’t God, that every one of us is in desperate need of help, that our common life is a mess, and we all bear some responsibility for that.

It would mean confessing that our understanding of others (and ourselves) is limited and fallible, that we are highly capable of rationalizing our own failures while putting a laser focus on the failures of others, and that when we say “we see clearly” we are likely blind (see John 9).

We might have a chance of coming together, that is, when we acknowledge our own need for grace, our need for the God whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55).