Hope for Us All

Our orchids are just beginning to bloom,

thanks to Wade's year-round care.

At a time when many of us are discouraged in making the world a better place, a recent email I received may revive our hopes:

Long ago, you came to speak at Presbyterian College in Clinton, SC. It was 1996, I believe. I was a sophomore back then. I was a conservative activist with the College Republicans. I made fun of you and your message during your visit with all the courage of a modern internet troll. I remember we (College Republicans) had a meeting to discuss how to pressure the school to disinvite you.

I wanted to say that I am deeply sorry for the stupidity of my youthful immaturity. I am grateful for your perseverance all these years, despite the harshness inflicted by people like me. I want you to know that I am a completely different man today. I know the worldly news is otherwise discouraging here in 2019. But there are people positively changed, even if it’s cool to be an ass again. Be encouraged.

You may imagine how moved I was to read these words. When I read it aloud to Wade, my voice broke and tears came. When I decided to write this post, I intended to paraphrase the email and obscure the venue. But the power of this person’s words should not be muffled or muzzled. I’ve been given permission by the writer to use the email in this post.

I wrote back,

Thank you, ----, for a most amazing and encouraging email such as this! I am grateful for your change of heart, and for your taking the time to write to me. When I was young, I too had views that I can’t imagine having today, so I understand. You have made my day! I cannot adequately say how much your email means to me!

After his grateful response, I wrote that “I may use this occasion of our recent exchange (anonymously) as a sign of hope for us all.”

God is good, all the time—even when we are not.

And then there were three...

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Copyright © 2019 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.

"Darwin's Epiphany on the Meaning of Flowers"

Our orchids are budding and blooming

this month thanks to Wade's care.

I confess I am approaching Oliver Sacks’s posthumously published book, The River of Consciousness, as a sacred text. The richness and depth of both his writing style and his content made his articles in the newspaper favorites of mine in the years preceding his death.

The first essay, “Darwin and the Meaning of Flowers,” which I anonymously alluded to last week, has not disappointed. Darwin observed that flowers and insects co-evolved, and he once  contrasted his (in Sacks’s words) “frontal assault…on creationism” in On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection to his subsequent work with flowers.

In Darwin’s words, “no one else has perceived that my chief interest in my orchid book has been that it was a ‘flank movement’ on the enemy,” the opponents of evolution. As Darwin’s botanist friend Asa Gray suggested, if his book on orchids “had appeared before the Origin, the author would have been canonized rather than anathematized by the natural theologians.”

In other words, we human beings would have felt less threatened understanding how flowers and insects evolved characteristics over eons that were mutually beneficial. The evolution of mammals like us threatened our sense of superiority, our presumption that we were made ex nihilo in the image of God, not descended from other animals.

The second but more ancient Genesis creation myth that describes Yahweh shaping the first human being from earth is closer to Darwin’s own observation in The Descent of Man, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.” Dust we art, to dust we shalt return.

Sacks writes, 

The notion of such vast eons of time—and the power of tiny, undirected changes which by their accumulation could generate new worlds, worlds of enormous richness and variety—was intoxicating. Evolutionary theory provided, for many of us, a sense of deep meaning and satisfaction that belief in a divine plan never achieved. The world that presented itself to us became a transparent surface, through which one could see the whole history of life. 

Reminds me of Paul’s metaphor of how “we see through a glass darkly.”

With Oliver Sacks, 

I rejoice in the knowledge of my biological uniqueness and my biological antiquity and my biological kinship with all other forms of life. This knowledge roots me, allows me to feel at home in the natural world, to feel that I have my own sense of biological meaning, whatever my role in the cultural, human world. 

Sacks credits this insight to “Darwin’s epiphany on the meaning of flowers” and Sacks’s own childhood experience of the natural world.

I once worked with a pastor who gave as much attention to the arrangement of flowers, cuttings, and plants on the chancel as he did to the words of sermons, the sacraments, prayers, and liturgies. When he died, I entitled his eulogy, “The Importance of Flowers.” To this day, I remember less of his theology than of his aesthetics—or truer, his aesthetic was his theology.

The impertinence of youth caused me once to chide my father for spending so much time on his garden “rather than on something that lasts.” “What lasts?” was his wise response, making no apology.

Possibly the better way to proclaim the Gospel is to “say it with flowers.”

Last Wednesday we passed the 300,000 mark in the number of visits since this blog began. Last week’s post did extraordinarily well, with 2700 visits so far. These figures do not include subscribers.

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Copyright © 2018 by Chris R. Glaser. Permission granted for non-profit use with attribution of author and blogsite. Other rights reserved.