Of Bees and Revolutions

Most of the writing I do and the kind I most enjoy is about things that arise out of everyday experience. It has been a few weeks since my last blog entry, so I’ll ground this one in what’s going on with me.

I have had to take a rest from the onslaught of news and commentary, although not a complete break from them. With ten full months and more of the second Trump presidency, I find the barrage of news bone-wearying, mind-numbing, and soul-assaulting. I’ve never wanted this blog to be simply another venue for axe-grinding about politics, but rather a place where people who care about their faith and the way it plays out in the political sphere can share honestly our struggles, questions, and insights.

During this news hiatus, I’ve been checking off my Advent and Christmas lists, concentrating on parts of my life that give me energy and strength, like singing, reading, entertaining friends, exercising, and baking. Most days I walk between two and three miles. When I walk, at least 50% of the time I’m praying. I meditate better when I’m in motion.

Preaching and presiding at the Thanksgiving Day liturgy at the Church of St. Paul in the Desert wedged me back into a familiar groove that feels familiar but surprisingly novel, too, since I do so little of that anymore. Meanwhile, when I have tuned in to the news, I've found myself astonished at how many signs of hope abound, although I wonder if those flickers of hope are mainly about things curated by others who share space in my own bubble.

Joe and I have now watched four of the six segments of Ken Burns and others’ remarkable documentary, The American Revolution. Although I had no fewer than three courses in American history between fifth and tenth grades, and the equivalent of a minor in American Studies in college, there are revelations in the documentary that are completely fresh to me. I am especially grateful that this marvelous work comes at a time when Americans deeply need to be better informed about the immense cost of the War for Independence as well as what was at stake when it was fought. The American Revolution is particularly important in emphasizing the roles of foreigners, poor people, minorities, women, enslaved and free African Americans, and Native Americans. My college course in American history was especially good in delving into opposing interpretations of the Revolution, including the economic dynamics that propelled it. If you have never read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, do yourself a favor and read it. Zinn was not interested in rehashing the usual narratives but rather in bringing to light the untold stories of minorities and the people who were not the propertied, monied, educated classes. It isn’t clear to me how much influence, if any, Zinn’s book had on the making of the documentary, but plainly the documentary addresses some of the historical currents that Zinn treats and many of my generation never heard in school.

I finished three days ago a very interesting novel selected by the St. Paul’s book club. Grey Bees, by Andrey Kurkov, translated from the Russian by Boris Dralyuk, is set in contemporary Ukraine. Although written before the Russian invasion of 2022, Ukraine’s current greatest living novelist portrays the desperation and confusion that have multiplied in the last several years. The protagonist is a beekeeper who cares for his bees with an earnestness and tenderness that contrasts markedly with the way people are treating each other in places like the Donbas and Crimea.

Although we are not living under the present circumstances of Ukraine, some of the same sorts of hatred, prejudice, and violence inflicted by humans on each other are now everyday occurrences here in the United States. Not that they haven’t always been around, only less openly promoted and sanctioned, even perpetrated, by our government.

The novel is in many ways tender, made so especially through the development of the main character, Sergey, a very ordinary man in his late forties, separated from his wife and daughter, without much education and even less social clout and polish. He has a moral compass that impels him to perform some actions that are nothing less than heroic. The presence of such a person in the middle of indescribable cruelty and destruction, thoughtful and caring without pretense or artifice, only doing what he thinks ought to be done, is a reminder that redemption doesn’t waft down from some superior place above earth but rather springs from roots in kind human hearts.

That is where I am in these Advent days mixed with waiting, hoping, and somewhat frenetically preparing for celebrations that seem at best a little out-of-step with the tension of the times. I continue to believe that my job, our job, is to keep imagining the world as we want it to be, knowing that what we long for in our hearts is what will most likely materialize. It’s a hard job. But then so was the labor for the mom who brought forth her first-born son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger.