I am preparing to spend a few days in the West Virginia panhandle, mending a broken leg. Our house along the Cacapon River is always a quiet sanctuary, settled deep in a valley without television or radio reception. This weekend should be particularly quiet. Not many weekenders brave January and February in the mountains. The early morning temperatures will dip into the twenties, and the forest floor will be covered with a fine coat of frost. The last of the perennials will have blackened in the deep cold. Winter has come.
The Appalachian Mountains have gone to sleep. The bear that troubles our trash cans won’t return until spring. I’ll miss the pileated woodpeckers that bore holes in my deck railing. Even the deer and geese are less active. This world is at peace.
The news in Washington is much the same. The dollar is falling, forcing oil prices higher. Investors are jittery. The war is going badly or victory is in sight — depending upon whom you listen to. I marvel at the number of people who tell me that one presidential candidate or another is the savior of the world. One woman in her 80s tells me that if a Republican wins she will be forced to flee back to Chile.
I have become too cynical, too old, or both to believe that any one party or individual holds the key to some future utopia. Looking to a Huckabee, a Romney, a Clinton, or an Obama for the answers to the world’s problems seems to me to be childish. Certainly, we baby-boomers ought to have seen enough by now to be skeptical, to be more discerning when we hear the promises made by candidates. History has taught us that the world is just too complex for the populist platitudes and simple solutions we are fed in campaign speeches.
What is also clearer as I age is the degree to which we each contribute to our national problems. Chinese quality is certainly troublesome, but as long as you and I demand $9.99 coffee makers from Walmart, we won’t see quality American goods in a box store. The sub-prime fiasco has undermined our faith in the economy, but thousands upon thousands of people have lost their homes to foreclosure because the financial institutions that could have helped these people abandoned them rather than helped them to refinance. They did so to protect their standing with investors — that is, by the way, you and me and our pension funds. We helped put these people on the streets. We don’t want immigrants in our country, but we we want cheap labor to build our houses, clean our office buildings, and blow the leaves out of our yards. We have forgotten that our ancestors, people like my grandparents, didn’t speak English in their homes and on their neighborhood streets, either.
I am reminded by this season of Epiphany that Jesus came to us as one of the poor, that he fled his home, in the arms of his parents, as a migrant fleeing political oppression (the government did want to kill him, after all), and that he grew up not in a privileged middle-class suburb but in a working class neighborhood. He was what we call blue-collar.
We don’t need a savior of the world. That job is already taken. Jesus has taught us that the really important changes are within us. Until we understand that, until we take loving our neighbor as ourselves seriously(not to mention loving God), it doesn’t really matter what structural changes we make to our government or our economy. The world will just go on the same, only the names in the newspaper change.
As we approach Lent, why not consider a really big Lenten discipline. How about trying to live the Sermon on the Mount for just 40 days? Since Sundays technically aren’t Lent, y ou get one day a week off.
We need to pay careful attention the coming election. Certainly we need to participate in our democratic government. While we are at it, though, why not make the changes we can in our own backyards? Then we might have a better idea of what to do on a national level.
I think I’ll just leave it all for a while. Its time to build a fire.
