Could the daily news be worse? Hearing constantly about the authoritarian regime of a totally corrupt, incompetent, belligerent, vengeful, and deranged despot is taking an incalculable toll on our collective psyche and overall wellbeing. Anyone with a rational brain and a beating heart is in chronic pain due to the colossal misery this president is causing in this country (his billionaire friends excepted).
Believing that an uplifting book would cheer me and offer a sense of hope, I rather staggered into Broadside Bookshop on Main Street in Northampton and started looking for some authors and titles that I thought might provide a measure of solace. I spotted Krista Tippett’s “Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.“
“Is this good?” I asked bookstore co-owner Bill, whose advice I trust completely.
“It’s my staff pick,” he said.
That was all I needed to hear.
I left the bookstore with the Tippett book, and another that caught my eye: “The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change” by Rebecca Solnit.
Both books are great. And in some ways life-saving. Did they assuage my profound internal angst? No, not completely. But they did something important for my mind, my soul, and my emotional state. I was reminded of humans’ great capacity for goodness, generosity, care for each other, and reverence for the Earth.
The Solnit book is stirring because she writes in detail about tiny things, usually unseen and overlooked — life-giving connections among creatures, webs of relationships and energy in forests, and the ability wild things possess to survive and even thrive without our help and despite our assaults.
Solnit describes how honeybees make decisions as equals, dancing their proposals for the group until they reach consensus; sequoias, those largest beings standing on earth, only drop their seeds after a fire; and lichens are made up of a symbiosis of two different species from two different kingdoms, a fungus and an algae.
Drawing on Indigenous cultures and wisdom, Solnit quotes numerous Native American spiritual leaders, elders, and teachers who speak movingly about how to struggle on in the face of mounting odds, how commitment emerges even when hope fails, and how to replenish and renew oneself in nature far from the din of the city and the smokestacks of “progress.”
Solnit quotes Madonna Thunder Hawk, an Indigenous rights activist since the 1960s, “We are the ancestors of tomorrow, so we behave accordingly.”
Solnit often repeats the phrase that is also the title of her book: “the beginning comes after the end.” “The beginning — the next era — comes after the end of the last one,” she writes, “and in between comes a lot of falling apart.”
Solnit loves the image of the chrysalis, the beginning of a butterfly. She writes that what unfolds inside that chrysalis is not an elegant transition. “The caterpillar falls apart — it turns to goo, and something profoundly different reconstitutes from it,” she writes. “In that slurry, the dissolving caterpillar’s immune system perceives the imaginal cells as alien and attacks them. But they survive, multiply, and set in motion the instructions to become a butterfly.” The beginning comes after the end.
Krista Tippett’s book is very different from Solnit’s: It gave me the feeling that I was standing in a slow moving river with the current flowing all around me and washing over me. The current in Tippett’s book is the transcript of a series of dialogues she has had with those she calls her “conversation partners” — physicists, monks, poets, novelists, activists, neuroscientists, biologists, journalists, nuns, artists, and spiritual leaders.
The river of wisdom that flows from Desmond Tutu, Robert Coles, Vincent Harding, Walter Brueggemann, Parker Palmer and so many other deep thinkers allows the reader to metaphorically dip a cup into the clearest, freshest, purest water and take a long revitalizing drink.
Weaving in reflections from a variety of world religions, Tippett discusses faith, love, the body, death, God, and the difference between religion and spirituality. Each page of her book has so many brilliant sentences that I stopped underlining my favorite passages because by page 32, I realized I was underlining almost every line.
Here’s one passage — out of a gazillion — that I loved. It is a quote from Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom: “I think God is setting us a big challenge, a really big challenge. We are living so close to difference with such powers of destruction that God is really giving us very little choice. To quote that great line from W.H. Auden, ‘We must love one another or die.’ That is, I think, where we are at the beginning of the 21st century. And since we really can love one another, I have a great deal of hope.”
We are living through a time when our sense of decency, fairness, compassion, and care for our neighbors near and far are under assault each day. It is mind and heart-numbing, but we cannot grow numb. We must continue to care. To hope and to organize. To rise up from the depths of our despair and raise our voices, our fists, and our placards.
Whatever helps you take a breath and then carry on — do that. For me, beautiful words, moving stories, and noble lives help me rise to fight another day. Find the river that you can wade into that will provide you with hope and courage. We are in this struggle together — stay strong.
The Rev. Andrea Ayvazian, Ministerial Team, Alden Baptist Church, Springfield, is also founder and director of the Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership.