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Pathways that tie us together

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While traveling with new and long-time friends on a recent National Trust Tour in Panama and Costa Rica, I shared observations on how we engage with the past and old places. Both lectures were built around the premise that the reason older places matter is not so much about the past or only about the past. These places matter to people today and in the future.

Ruins in the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Old Panama

We create a narrative out of our lives to make them meaningful and coherent, and I wove this into the context of our trip through the Canal, into the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Old Panama, and as we explored San José and other parts of Costa Rica. Memory, identity, and continuity are all part of the narratives — the pathways — of our lives. They are also fundamental reasons why old places matter.

Passing by the only section of the French attempt to build a canal still remaining in Panama

Memory

History often comes from perspectives shaped by our memories. Perspective is a point of view . . . not the whole view. “Memory is a poet, not a historian” suggests Marie Howe.

Memories fade with time and they change as others share the story of the same event. Points get lost — or found — in translation. What begins as metaphor ends up being repeated as fact.

Yet memory is an essential part of consciousness and so many memories are tied to places. Memories are shaped and reshaped in thousands of ways we seldom recognize or acknowledge. All of which suggests that there will be differences in how we see the places we visit.

Square and statue in UNESCO World Heritage Site of Old Panama

We have generally chosen to save that which reflects well on us — beautiful buildings and sites that uplift. One of the challenges we face in the U.S. and in Latin America is to find ways to preserve and interpret sites that tell the stories of those who have traditionally been marginalized and not part of the long-told narrative, places where the story and the intangible and hidden history are just as important, if not more so, than the architecture.

Places of all types are important in how we understand our past as they key both individual and collective memories. We may have individual memories related to baptisms, bar and bat mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals in a specific religious site, but those we visited on the tour also spark collective memories, both for residents and for those of us who visit.

Cathedral in Old Panama
The distinctive golden altar at St. Joseph Church was one of the few items saved from Panama Viejo during the 1671 pirate siege. It was buried in mud during the siege and then secretly transported to its present location in the UNESCO World Heritage City of Old Panama

Why are memories of the Embera community, visited by some of us on the pre-tour, important? Those memories and places tell us something about ourselves as humans. They may spur thoughts about the longevity of the human race or the importance of different relationships to the earth. The resilience this community has exhibited over millennia can inspire us today.

On a canoe through the Darién

There is no road, not even a primitive one, across the Darién where the Embera live. “The “Gap” interrupts the Pan-American Highway where some 66 miles has never been built. We had to access it by canoe. But it was a trip well worth making.

Our arrival in the Embera community
Traditional materials and techniques are seen in the Embera roofs and ceilings
Stone carving from Costa Rica’s indigenous communities, now displayed in the National Museum in San Jose

Old places give us a chance to feel a connection to the broad community of human experience.

Identity

We often talk in language that recognizes the crucial connection between identity and old places. In the ancient world, Seneca phrased it as, “No man loves his city because it is great, but because it is his.”

National Theatre in San Jose, Costa Rica

Buildings, and neighborhoods, and nations are insinuated into us by life. Think of the way we may be linked, directly or through symbolic forms that tie people and land together, such as links through history or family lineage. And then there are “universal links through religion, myth and spirituality, links through festive cultural events, and finally narrative links through storytelling or place naming.”

Old places also embody our civic, state, national, and universal identity. In the U.S. we speak of American exceptionalism. But citizens of other countries also hear that their homeland possesses desirable qualities that others lack. French nationalists “tout the elegance and sophistication of their ‘civilization,'” while Serbians “have traditionally considered themselves the shield of Christianity.”

We heard of Costa Rica “exceptionalism” from our tour guides. “Costa Rica is different” they would say.

UNESCO listed oxcarts in Costa Rica (credit: Ministry of Culture)
Painted oxcart in the National Museum in San Jose

As with most countries, it is complicated.

The Costa Rica Reader: History, Culture, Politics (2004) edited by Steven Palmer and Iván Molina expands the perspectives around this intriguing Latin American nation by bringing new voices to the conversation. “Exceptionalism” is a term often used to describe Costa Rica, which is seen as “different from other Latin America countries.” It has never been consumed by civil strife or race-based oppression, the story goes, and it is the only country to have enjoyed uninterrupted political democracy for three-quarters of a century. Yet as Palmer and Molina write, some observers suggest that exceptionalism is at the center of a dubious mythology. This work is composed of short pieces that give a much fuller understanding of Costa Rica, showing it “as a place of alternatives and possibilities that undermine stereotypes about the region’s history and call into question the idea that current dilemmas facing Latin America are inevitable or insoluble.”

National identity is important, but we can resist the temptation to “see the country as an exception” while insisting “on the distinctiveness of its past and present.”

Continuity

In a world that is constantly changing, old places provide people with a sense of being part of a continuum — a necessity to psychological and emotional health, connecting us over time and space.

A key part of the continuity of canals that many don’t readily see is the vast network that sprang up in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. While the heyday of the canals lasted only a few decades, they transformed the American economy by connecting the areas west of the Appalachian Mountains to eastern population centers and Atlantic ports. Concentrated largely north of the Mason-Dixon line, they shaped American regionalism by linking the northeast and northwest together into a region that increasingly came to see itself as the “North.”

Applying his remarkable gift for “writing lucid, lively exposition,” David McCullough “weaves the many strands” of the momentous building of the Panama Canal “into a comprehensive and captivating tale.”

I last read The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914 (1977) by David McCullough several decades ago. But I picked it out of my bookcase and reviewed David’s work prior to this trip, as it is the indispensable work that “tells the story of the men and women who fought against all odds to fulfill the 400-year-old dream of constructing an aquatic passageway between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is a story of astonishing engineering feats, tremendous medical accomplishments, political power plays, heroic successes, and tragic failures.”

Sailing under the new Atlantic Bridge to enter the Panama Canal at daybreak

We saw this marvel up-close as we sailed under the 2019 Puente Atlántico — the Atlantic Bridge — entered the canal and moved through the locks over the better part of a Sunday, rising first to reach the level of the massive man-made lake in the center of the isthmus that makes this canal work on many fronts before being lowered back down again to sea level on the Pacific side.

Entering the canal’s first lock early on a Sunday morning
Gates closed as we wait for the water level to rise in order to enter the next lock
Documenting our passage through this pathway, in the typical selfie photo of the early 21st century
The canal is busy . . . a 24/7 operation 365 days a year (or 366 in this leap year)
View from the rear of the ship as we leave the lock

McCullough spends time in his book talking about the color line that cut through almost every facet of daily life in the Panama Canal Zone during construction.  It was clearly drawn and as closely observed as anywhere in the Deep South during that period.

Historic U.S. headquarters of the Panama Canal Commission
West Indian laborers working at the Miraflores locks (Library of Congress)

Black West Indians and white North Americans “not only stood in different lines when the pay train arrived, but at the post office and the commissary. There were black wards in the hospitals and black schools. White workers had living quarters while the Black West Indians had 50 X 30-foot rooms that slept 72 men . . . or they had none at all.

Living quarters for white workers and their families during the canal’s construction (Library of Congress)
Sleeping quarters for the West Indian workers who were fortunate enough to have them (Library of Congress)

David — a long-standing National Trust Trustee Emeritus before he passed away — wrote that it was debatable if the West Indians working in Panama were better or worse off than a Kentucky coal miner or an immigrant mill hand in Homestead, Pennsylvania. They did get free medical care and ate very well. It’s just that the working classes at the turn of the 20th century were expendable, conditions which led to major changes throughout that century.

As we marveled at the engineering wonder of the Panama Canal it was important to remember that this particular pathway between the seas is just part of a much larger pathway of continuity, connecting our past, present, and future, with all of its glory and with all of its challenging history.

Historic offices and headquarters for the U.S. Panama Canal Commission
Panama Canal as seen from the Atlantic Bridge

And more!

Several days were devoted to wildlife viewing along the coasts and in Costa Rica’s parks, including the wonder-filled Manuel Antonio National Park.

All-in-all a fascinating ten days and yes, just another wonderful National Trust Tour.

National Trust Tour travelers in Panama and Costa Rica February 2024 (Credit: Ponant)

Join us for a future trip!

More to come . . .

DJB

The Weekly Reader links to the works of other writers I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

All photos by DJB unless otherwise noted.

Pathway Free-Photos

A lifetime of letting go

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As happens every year on March 4th, today marks the beginning of my annual trip around the sun. While each year has its own opportunities for wonder and amazement, this is an especially important one personally. Should I be so lucky, I’ll turn 70 on March 4, 2025. Oh my. . .

Lincoln Memorial from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

March 4th has an interesting history. Until 1936, this was the day for presidential inaugurations in the U.S. Lawmakers chose that date because it was the one on which, in 1789, the Constitution went into effect. It was on this date in 1865 that Abraham Lincoln gave what many consider his greatest speech. In a short 703 words with the famous last paragraph — “with malice toward none with charity for all” — he provided the nation with a timeless and brilliant example “of his moral and rhetorical genius.”

March 4th is also known as “Do Something Day,” the only date that is also a command. My dear mother, it seems, was acting in the spirit of the day when she delivered me into this world.

I’ve used recent birthdays to take the time to stop and pay attention. Some important lessons are slowly revealed as one gets older, such as the realization that we spend a lifetime letting go. Sometimes grudgingly, at other times willingly, we may let go of a job, a career, a relationship, a house, a friendship, a community, or a child who leaves for college or other pursuits. It could be seen as preparation for this next stage of life.

Oliver Burkeman tells us of the paradox of limitations, suggesting that the more one tries to manage time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more one let’s go, confronting the facts of finitude — working with them, rather than against them — the more “productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.”

We’ll only truly live the life we’re given when we accept the fact that we won’t live forever, when we let go of the world’s preconceptions of what makes a successful life and understand that there is simply no cure for being human.

In times past I rushed through to-do lists that I’ll never complete, trying to hold onto things where I should let go, increasing the anxiety that is an all-too-common feature of 21st century living. This year I’ve been noticing the value of slowing down in order to see the wonder around us, to focus on my place and calling in life, and — simply — to enjoy the ride. It is a process, but I have also come to understand that any sustainable change comes from within. To help me with that change, I’ve turned to sources I haven’t always appreciated.

The Word in the Wilderness (2014) by Malcolm Guite features a poem for each day of Lent. The season in which we traditionally reorient ourselves, slow down, and recover from distractions is also a good time to change the very way we read. Guite, in this thoughtful forty-day journey, suggests poetry is a good tool to achieve that change. “Poetry asks us to be savoured, it requires us to slow down, it carries echoes, hints at music, summons energies that we will miss if we are simply scanning. In this way poetry brings us back to older ways of reading and understanding both the Word and the World.”

Reading poetry has long been a hit-or-miss proposition for me. But I realize that in the hands of writers such as the great Irishman Seamus Heaney, poetry — much like prayer — can be “banquet, music, journey, and conversation.”

Guite also suggests another way of looking at the idea of letting go. In his reflection to the beautiful poem The Bright Field by the Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, he speaks of the gospel paradox,

. . . about losing to find, giving away to gain, giving everything away only to find it given back in a new and more beautiful form . . . it is not about giving up for its own sake; it is about making room for something wonderful.

Reading poetry — like retirement in general — requires some humility on my part. With poetry, I have to concentrate, still grasping only a piece of what the poet intended. In retirement we are no longer on the pedestal where our job placed us. As a retired person “I am just that — an older member of our society. Sometimes I am respected as an older person. Other times, I am taken for granted or even dismissed. Being retired is a slice of humble pie.“

Perhaps, on this birthday, I’m letting go of some long-held hubris as well, to find something more wonderful.

Wherever your marching takes you, enjoy the day.

More to come . . .

DJB

The transformational power of stories

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If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that our memories are fragile. The poet Marie Howe has written that “memory is a poet, not a historian.” Yet we often rely on the memory of witnesses in histories, in courts of law, and in our personal lives. Memories fade with time and they change as others share the story of the same event. Points get lost, or found, in translation.

What happens when one of the most transformative events in human history, the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth at the hands of the Roman Empire sometime around the third decade of the Common Era, has to rely on witnesses for transmission across centuries?

Witness at the Cross: A Beginner’s Guide to Holy Friday (2021) by Amy-Jill Levine examines the stories, texts, social contexts, religious background, and perspectives of those who watched Jesus die: Mary his mother; the Beloved Disciple from the Gospel of John; Mary Magdalene and the other women from Galilee; the two men, usually identified as thieves, crucified with Jesus; the centurion and the soldiers; Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Dr. Levine, known as AJ to friends, brings her deep understanding of scripture, insightful commentary, broadness of perspective, and engaging wit to help us consider this climatic moment in the Christian story. The Rabbi Stanley M. Kessler Distinguished Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, AJ is also University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies Emerita, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies Emerita, and Professor of New Testament Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University, an internationally known author and speaker, and the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. She acknowledges the fragility of the memory of witnesses and suggests that readers “do well to listen to their stories and see how their stories transform us. At that point we pick up the stories ourselves.”

In this latest edition of my author interviews on More to Come, AJ graciously agreed to chat with me about her work.

DJB: AJ what led you, as a young scholar, to study the New Testament?

AJL: Stories about the divine have always interested me. This is probably why I liked Hebrew school (at Tifereth Israel Synagogue in New Bedford Massachusetts). My parents told me that Jews and Christians read the same books, such as Genesis and Isaiah; said the same prayers, especially the Psalms; worshiped the same G-d, who created the heavens and the earth, and that a Jewish man named Jesus and a Jewish woman named Mary, were very important to Christians.

When I was seven, a girl on the school bus accused me of killing her Lord. The Vatican II document Nostra Aetate (Latin: “In our Time”), promulgated in 1965, formally ended at least in Roman Catholicism the claim that all Jews are responsible for the death of Jesus. But this incident came before Nostre Aetate. 

Not understanding why Christians, given the same G-d and the same prayers, let alone Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, were saying such horrible things, I determined to go to catechism, Catholic education classes, to stop this hateful teaching (I thought it was a translation error, since in Hebrew School we learned Hebrew; nobody told me the New Testament was written in Greek). My very wise mother said something to the effect of, “As long as you remember who you are, go and learn something. It’s good to know about other people’s religions.”

When I read the New Testament, two things occurred to me. First, we choose how we read. Reading this book can incite antisemitism, but it need not. I wanted to learn what the switch was to help people read with compassion, not bigotry. Second, I realized that the New Testament records Jewish history. The first person in literature called “rabbi” is Jesus; the only Pharisee from whom we have writings is Paul.

I decided to study the New Testament. I also promised my mother that if I couldn’t get into a Ph.D. program, get a job, or earn tenure, I’d go to law school. I’m now 67 — law school is no longer an option.

Amy-Jill Levine

The four gospel writers bring different perspectives and perhaps agendas to the story of the crucifixion. How would you briefly describe what each brings to the story and why it is important to consider them together?

Jesus’s story, like creation (contrast Genesis 1 with Genesis 2-3) or the history of ancient Israel (contrast 1-2 Samuel and 1-2 Kings with 1-2 Chronicles), is too grand for a single version. Matthew’s Jesus is a new Moses, who escapes murder as an infant and who interprets Torah, originally given on Mt. Sinai, in the Sermon on the Mount. At Jesus’s death, the earth shakes, rocks are split, and tombs open: the women at his tomb are the first to see him, and they receive the first commission to proclaim the resurrection.

Mark’s mysterious Jesus can walk on water, as only G-d can do, but cannot perform miracles in Nazareth because the people do not believe in him. Mark’s focus is on Jesus’s suffering and death; the Gospel’s earliest versions depict the women fleeing from the empty tomb and leave the proclamation of the resurrection to the readers.

Luke’s Jesus is a storyteller (the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, etc. appear only in the 3d Gospel) who forgives the people crucifying him, comforts the men dying with him, and calmly states, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” While in Mark and Matthew Jesus dies surrounded by his enemies, Luke depicts the “daughters of Jerusalem” weeping for him and the people standing by him.

In Mark and Matthew, the Jesus cries Psalm 22.1, “My G-d, my G-d, why have you forsaken me?” Conversely, John’s Jesus always remains “one” with the Father. According to John, the dying Jesus establishes a new family between his mother and his Beloved Disciple, a family modeled by followers who are “born anew” or “born from above.” According to John, a soldier thrust his spear into Jesus’s side; from the wound pour blood and water, a parturition image suggesting that Jesus is birthing his new family.

How did your work teaching Vanderbilt Divinity School courses at Riverbend Maximum Security Institute influence your consideration of the two men who were crucified with Jesus?

My insider students consistently ask about the men crucified with Jesus: who stood by their crosses to comfort them, to drive away the birds and wild animals, to mourn? Who recovered their corpses and buried them? My insider students help me to complicate the common identifications of “good thief” and “bad thief,” to recognize the desperation of the man who demands of Jesus, “Aren’t you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” together with the irony that Jesus, by dying, is for the Gospel “saving” — giving life to — humanity. They see the additional irony in the other man’s plea that Jesus welcome him into his kingdom, since this man is the only person in the Gospel who understands that Jesus has a “kingdom.”

Which reactions to “Witness at the Cross” from Christian readers are most common? Which have surprised or intrigued you the most?

Comments in emails, zoom programs, and presentations include gratitude for talking about the women at the cross (Mark 15 tells us that women followed Jesus from Galilee; now I have to incorporate their presence in the previous 14 chapters), for noting various ways of understanding Psalm 22 and the tearing of the Temple curtain, for flagging connections between the crucifixion and earlier Gospel chapters, so that second readings are richer, and for the freedom to appreciate differences rather than jumping through hoops to create harmonization.

Since October 7th and the news from Israel/Gaza, several people have commented on the Introduction’s discussion of Simon of Cyrene, and of Libya’s now-vanished Jewish community.

What books are you reading at the moment?

Marc Brettler and I are now editing the third edition of the Jewish Annotated New Testament. I am reading newly commissioned essays as well as editing revised versions of annotations and earlier essays. After a full day of work, I can’t read anything more. I am knitting a baby blanket for a former graduate student’s newborn son.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

AJ Levine speaks to a packed house at the St. Alban’s Parish 2024 Memorial Lecture Series keynote speaker in Washington, DC on March 13th.

More to come . . .

DJB

Crucifixion by a Strasburgian painter, possibly Hermann Schadeberg; photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen (2009), Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons)

Faith to hand our children a better, stronger nation

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Americans are confused.

We think of ourselves as a nation that makes stuff. In the past thirty years 63,000 factories have shuttered.

We think of ourselves as a free nation. We, Americans of all colors, are the most incarcerated people on the planet.

We are home to the most innovative healthcare system on the planet. High healthcare costs have been our nation’s leading cause of bankruptcy for decades.

We are home to many of the world’s greatest universities. Millions upon millions of our students and graduates are in massive debt.

The life expectancy for Black men remains low, “suppressed by sky-high homicide rates,” while the life expectancy for White men has been “declining for years” driven by suicide rates that are even “higher than the homicide rates for Black men and boys.”

It can be hard to remain optimistic about the future when we consider the harsh reality of life in 21st century America. Yet there are strong voices, speaking from a lifetime of activism, who tell us that having faith that we can hand over a better nation to our children is the “only path to national survival, let alone true greatness.”

They believe “we can rise up together to demand freedom on behalf of all our children.

But first we have to start listening to each other.”

Never Forget Our People Were Always Free: A Parable of American Healing (2023) by Ben Jealous is a work of pragmatic and enduring optimism in a sea of national malaise. President of People for the American Way, former president of the NAACP, civil rights leader, scholar, and former journalist, Jealous writes from a lifetime of reaching out to others and listening to what they have to say. In this engaging memoir, Jealous uses a series of more than 20 stories from his life — modern-day parables — to make the point that we must truthfully and fully address the tensions that have been building up throughout this century if we are to survive.

Jealous, the son of a White father and a Black mother, understands that we are all connected in ways both natural and spiritual. Early in the book he tells the story of meeting a man and woman from Los Gatos — the husband grew up in Minnesota and the wife in Virginia — at a retreat weekend in California for people who played important roles in their community. It turns out both Jealous and the woman of the other couple are from Petersburg. When he hears that “Bland” is her maiden name, he takes a big gulp of his drink and then says to the man, “I don’t know how to say this. I think your wife’s family used to own my mama’s family.” And the woman relates that she always knew she had Black family because “Mammy raised me until I was twelve” and “I could tell she was related.” Who is my family? is a familiar theme throughout the book. It turns out we’re all — in many ways — cousins.

Jealous uncovers and considers other revelations that would surprise many readers. Historians have documented that race, as we know it, was not a factor in the first century of the American experiment. Later, the civil rights movement helped Blacks get what they fought for but in the process they often lost what they had. The “legacy of race and racism has led our nation to equate poverty, addiction, and handgun deaths with Black people” and to ignore “even larger numbers of suffering White people and rendered uniting every one of those impacted communities all but impossible.”

Each of those narratives upends conventional wisdom in much of America.

Jealous finds friends and allies in unlikely places: Mississippi, Arkansas, and — that whitest of all states — Maine. “Race relations in America began with shared struggle, not mutually assured destruction.” We need to get back to working together for a better future.

Throughout this hopeful book, Jealous describes ways in which conversations, shared work, and thoughtful listening can lead to people striving towards freedom together. He gives specific examples that readers can relate to in their own lives. He has specific policy prescriptions, such as changing California law so that prisons no longer receive 50 percent more funds that state universities.

Jealous writes that he has long been indebted to General Colin Powell, who once told him, “Ben, it’s easy to recognize what you disagree with people on. What’s more urgent and important in any democracy is to spend your energy figuring out what’s the one thing that you can agree on with a political foe. Figure that out and you can get a lot done.”

As he does throughout, Jealous in the end calls on the wisdom of his grandmother, who died at 105 as he was finishing this book. He once confronted this woman — who had spent a lifetime in the struggle for civil rights, human rights — to ask how she could be so lighthearted and positive. Didn’t she know how much was wrong in the world?

“Baby it’s true. Pessimists are right more often, but optimists win more often. In this life, you have to decide what’s more important to you. As for me” — she smiled — “I’ll take winning.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo by Jackson Hendry on Unsplash

Healing democracy’s heart

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While I’m on a writing retreat from MORE TO COME this month, I’m posting one essay each week that you may have missed the first time it went online. This post — the last in these reprints — comes from my review of three different books on America’s future that I wrote in 2015.

Healing the Heart of Democracy

I read Parker J. Palmer’s Healing the Heart of Democracy after reading a review of this 2011 book and decided to add it to my list of works on politics and our future as a country.

This is a very personal book, and I won’t attempt to delve into Palmer’s personal journey.  It is important to note that he writes this from a “season of heartbreak” – both personal and political.  From the prelude:

The politics of our time is the “politics of the brokenhearted” — an expression that will not be found in the analytical vocabulary of political science or in the strategic rhetoric of political organizing.  Instead, it is an expression from the language of human wholeness. . . .  If we cannot talk about politics in the language of the heart – if we cannot be publicly heartbroken, for example, that the wealthiest nation on earth is unable to summon the political will to end childhood hunger at home – how can we create a politics worthy of the human spirit, one that has a chance to serve the common good?

The prelude is as good a place as any to capture the essence of Palmer’s book.

It is well known and widely bemoaned that we have neglected our physical infrastructure – the roads, water supplies, and power grids on which our daily lives depend.  Even more dangerous is our neglect of democracy’s infrastructure, and yet it is barely noticed and rarely discussed.  The heart’s dynamics and the ways in which they are shaped lack the drama and the “visuals” to make the evening news, and restoring them is slow and daunting work.  Now is the time to notice, and now is the time for the restoration to begin.

For those of us who want to see democracy survive and thrive – and we are legion – the heart is where everything begins:  that grounded place in each of us where we can overcome fear, rediscover that we are members of one another, and embrace the conflicts that threaten democracy as openings to new life for us and for our nation.

Parker has a new edition of this book out, updated for the 2020s.

I am not as hopeful at the moment as Palmer, but historian that I am I know we have faced difficult challenges as a people in our past. Our nation was not forged from a natural unity but found a unity in spite of differences.  We fought one declared Civil War to begin to address the enslavement of African Americans (which — as Bryan Stevenson has eloquently put it — then simply evolved into other forms of slavery).  We fought an undeclared Civil War to take over western lands from our native peoples. We went through a Gilded Age of great income inequality and the suffering that resulted, and we appear determined to repeat the sins of that era today.  We have incarcerated immigrants and others who don’t fit our preconceived notion of an American.  We have allowed corporations to take over our government and wrest power away from the people.

But so many of our parents, and their parents, and their parents before them have also fought for our idea of America.  I have to believe that the spirit to fight for that idea remains and I believe that if we see our Constitution as the framework for having those arguments — instead of a piece of literal scripture with the answer for every issue — we can continue to thrive.

And finally, we need to focus in this work on e pluribus unum as opposed to the official U.S. motto that corporate America gave us when they invented Christian America in the era of the 1930s to the 1950s to push back against New Deal reforms:  In God We Trust.  But that’s another post.

More to come . . .

DJB

I Am A Man

A sampling of music for Black History Month

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While I’m on a writing retreat from MORE TO COME this month, I’m posting one essay each week that you may have missed the first time it went online. This week I’m linking to three past essays featuring musicians I’ve highlighted in recent years during Black History Month.

Amythyst Kiah

(Credit: AmythystKiah.com)

In 2020 I wrote about Amythyst Kiah who had burst onto the roots music scene with her powerful vocals and insightful songwriting. The native Tennessean is a self-described “Southern Gothic” singer of “alt-country blues” who had been receiving rave reviews and was nominated for a 2020 Grammy in the Best American Roots Song category for her spell-binding “Black Myself,” performed here with Our Native Daughters.

You can check out Kiah’s current offerings at her website.

Allison Russell

(Credit: AllisonRussellMusic.com)

Earlier this month Allison Russell took home her first Grammy Award after eight nominations — for Best American Roots Performance for “Eve Was Black.” 

Last year I featured Russell — a brave singer, songwriter, poet, and activist who had come through grief, abuse, and despair — in a Black History Month post. “Some of us come, later in life, to find our knees; while others slip young into trauma like a quarry stone gone under, held down by the weight of their own world.” As an abused child she grew into the “brave woman and fierce artist she would become — surviving being one of only two options, and not the most likely.”

You can check out Russell’s current offerings at her website.

The Black National Anthem

James Weldon Johson working at his desk

Last year I wrote a post on Lift Every Voice and Sing, which is known as The Black National Anthem. With words by James Weldon Johnson and music by his brother John, Lift Every Voice and Sing was written at the turn of the 20th century, a time when Jim Crow laws were beginning to take hold across the South and Blacks were looking for an identity. In a way that was both gloriously uplifting and starkly realistic, it spoke to the history of the dark journey of African Americans.

“It allows us to acknowledge all of the brutalities and inhumanities and dispossession that came with enslavement, that came with Jim Crow, that comes still today with disenfranchisement, police brutality, dispossession of education and resources,” Shana Redmond — author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora — says. “It continues to announce that we see this brighter future, that we believe that something will change.”

I’d vote tomorrow to have The Star Spangled Banner replaced as our anthem by This Land Is Your Land along with Lift Every Voice and Sing. Until that glorious day arrives, listen or sing along and remember that Black Lives Matter.

More to come . . .

DJB

Sanitation Workers in March 1968 outside Clayborn Temple (photo credit: Ernest C. Withers/Withers Family Trust)

There is always time for kindness

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While I’m on a writing retreat from MORE TO COME this month, I’m posting one essay each week that you may have missed the first time it went online. This post from Valentine’s Day 2022 came from a longer version of the story about the kindnesses I received upon announcing my retirement. I also link to three additional posts on kindness and gratitude at the end. Valentine’s Day seems to be an especially appropriate time to remember the lessons found in these posts.

I expected to hear from a number of people after announcing that I was retiring. Two decades with the same organization gave me innumerable opportunities to connect and work with people across the country and around the world.  I wasn’t quite ready, however, for the nature of the notes, emails, phone calls, hallway conversations, and comments that came my way.  I felt a bit like a man who wakes up in the casket at his own funeral and decides to lie there for a while just to hear people say nice things about him.

The overwhelming kindness of the remarks truly caught me off guard. That led me to think about the nature and effects of kindness. I also found quotes about kindness — sappy, inspirational, nonsensical, insightful, and more — for every occasion. My favorite, from the poet Mary Oliver, reads:

I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.

Kindness — like good-natured mischief and spontaneous singing — can touch our souls in unexpected ways.

I also thought not just about the nature of the notes but also about the different types of responses I received.  These include:

  • The “pithy and poignant” note. A new friend who prepared copy for our appeal letters sent an 11-word note that spoke volumes. Messages of kindness can be very short and to the point while carrying extraordinary power.
  • The “playing against type” note. One famously cranky preservationist sent me a very gracious and thoughtful note. In my response I told this long-time friend that it was clear that his email account had been hacked and that the hacker was saying nice things about me. I suggested that if he didn’t regain control of his account quickly, I was afraid his curmudgeonly reputation would soon be in tatters.
  • The “voice from the past” note. People that I’ve known professionally over the past four decades reached out to me, some of whom I had not heard from in years. I was reminded that you can never lose touch, and a voice from the past can add context and richness to a time that can be bittersweet at best.
  • The “small acts of kindness” note. There is a whole inspirational industry built up around “small acts of kindness.” Small acts have ripple effects that we can’t even imagine. You never know who is watching your actions and where the ripples will reach.

Kindness often gets a bad rap for being soft. My experience is that it is possible to be kind and yet make the very difficult decisions required as we move through work and life.  Unfortunately, many people value so-called leaders who are never kind, granting a type of permission to bully those with whom they disagree.  John Steinbeck noted these contradictions when he said,

It has always seemed strange to me… the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second.

As we deal with turbulent times, I am reminded that history has leaders who can show us a better way forward.  Through the Great Depression and World War II, few dealt with more challenges than Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Yet he recognized what mattered when he said, “Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.”

I am very grateful for the many kindnesses shown to me over the years. Having been the recipient of extraordinary kindnesses as I retired, I know the positive effect kind words and gestures can have on an individual. Be kind to one another. It matters.

More to come . . .

DJB

NOTE: I have always found that kindness and gratitude are linked. Those who practice one tend to also practice the other. If you are interested in exploring further, here are other More to Come posts examining kindness and gratitude that you may find of interest.

Image of children walking by Annie Spratt from Pixabay. Photo of fall scene at Devotion, North Carolina by DJB. Photo of flowers by Roberta Sorge on Unsplash.

Tommy Emmanuel

Life is not a rehearsal

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While I’m on a writing retreat from MORE TO COME this month, I’m posting one essay each week that you may have missed the first time it went online. This post from September 2018 features the amazing guitarist Tommy Emmanuel, but it about more than just music. I was reinspired when I read it again recently, and I hope you enjoy.

Tommy Emmanuel is one of the world’s best guitarists, yet he’s not widely known in a field that often places glitz above skill.  As Emmanuel explains in the opening to a very entertaining TEDx talk, when he told a fellow traveler in business class that he made a living playing the guitar, he had to respond to the question “What band are you in?” with the fact that he played solo guitar. His seatmate looked at him as if Emmanuel had stumbled into the wrong section of the aircraft.

But as he thought about it, Emmanuel explained that he does, in fact, play in a band.  A one man band. In his TEDx talk he showcases the amazing skills that have made him so in demand by demonstrating how he plays the bass line, the drummer’s riff, the fills from a rhythm section, and the melody line all at once. If you’re like me, your jaw will drop with the complexity of the music and you’ll laugh at the line “look at how much money I’m saving up here!”

This is clearly someone who has found how to blend his passion with his job.  As Emmanuel describes it, he has a calling.

Angela Duckworth, the MacArthur Fellow recipient and author of Grit notes that,

Fortunate indeed are those who have a top-level goal so consequential to the world that it imbues everything they do, no matter how small or tedious, with significance.  Consider the parable of the bricklayers:

Three bricklayers are asked: ‘What are you doing?’ The first says, ‘I am laying bricks.’ The second says, ‘I am building a church.’ And the third says, ‘I am building the house of God.’

The first bricklayer has a job.  The second has a career.  The third has a calling.”

Emmanuel is fortunate in that he recognizes that his work impacts people in special ways. He knows that what’s important is not the critics’ take on his work, but the connections he makes with those who come to hear him play. Connection with others is not just a musician’s stock-in-trade but is a skill many of us — not fortunate enough to have killer guitar chops — find important in taking a job to a calling.  To do work we are passionate about.  Emmanuel also notes that none other than the great Chet Atkins called him “the most fearless guitar player he’d ever heard.”  Emmanuel continues, “I think that being fearless is a huge part in breaking molds and in raising self-belief.”

Connecting with others. Fearlessness in what we do.  Building self-belief.  Remembering that you are the master of your own obituary.  Or, as Tommy Emmanuel says it at the end of his talk:  “Life is not a rehearsal, so you’d better get on with it.”

Have a good week.

More to come . . .

DJB

P.S. – For you Jason Isbell fans, you can hear Tommy play and Jason sing in the video above on a signature song by my first guitar hero, Doc Watson, from Tommy’s most recent album Accomplice One.  Enjoy.

Image: Tommy Emmanuel (credit: TommyEmmanuel.com)

Achieving a musician’s dream

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This morning’s post was going to be the last new one for February . . . but here’s an unexpected Saturday Soundtrack post on Monday evening! I didn’t realize that the folks at BU College of Fine Arts were going to release their video about Andrew and fellow graduate student Valentina Pulido Pardo preparing to perform at Carnegie Hall. Andrew said he had a great time sharing about what music means to him and what the experience was like.

Andrew, accompanied by Richard Rivale on piano, at Carnegie Hall last month where they performed composer Jake Heggie’s art songs “Friendly Persuasions: Homage to Poulenc” 

I know my kind readers will grant me this one indulgence for the unexpected posting. Enjoy!

As always, you can keep up with Andrew’s upcoming concerts at his website: AndrewBeardenBrown.com.

Now I’ll go on my winter retreat!

More to come . . .

DJB

Photos courtesy of Boston University College of Fine Arts and Andrew Bearden Brown.

What hallows a space

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NOTE: I’m taking a winter retreat from the newsletter to focus on other writing and travel. The next new post will arrive around the first of March. Until then, I hope you find time to rest, reflect, and even bash into some joy.

A recent trip to New York’s Tenement Museum has me thinking about the vastly different ways we experience home, work, rest, and productivity. Take the home office.

Although home is an elusive concept, many of us grew up thinking of home and the office as fundamentally different places. But the apartments of the Tenement Museum — bulging with families of immigrants who often worked, ate, slept, made love, lived and died in the same three small rooms — reminded me that the ideal (some would say fantasy) was, for many, unattainable. Living above the shop or actually in the workroom was common in many countries, including our own.

The kitchen/bedroom/workroom of a tenement apartment

The home/work division became more widespread for the middle and upper classes during the period when the late industrial revolution morphed into the information age. I’ve been fortunate to work in some amazing spaces in my career: in Staunton’s Wharf Historic District; Charleston’s William Aiken House; Washington’s historic McCormick Apartments/Andrew Mellon Building at 18th and Massachusetts; and the iconic Watergate Office Building, overlooking the Potomac River. All very different, but all important — yes, even hallowed in my mind — because of the work done there to save some of the country’s most important places that continue to link past, present and future generations together.

That all changed in 2020.

In these post-pandemic years of remote work, many have moved from makeshift solutions to create more permanent home offices. While retirement has all but ended the necessity of telework for me, I’ve nonetheless been thinking about the space I inhabit and the ways I honor and use it day in and day out. I’ve also thought about how the home office can easily intrude on the important time when we rest.

In writing on the joys of slowness, Cal Newport references a 1951 monograph by Abraham Joshua Heschel titled simply, The Sabbath. Early in the book, Heschel notes that the Abrahamic faiths found something Godly in a ritual of rest amid the flow of time.

The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work.

Work is important and good, Newport writes. But it’s not everything. “Doing less should sometimes be about enjoying the beauty of right now.”

And for those who work from home, we have to be intentional as to how we find that rest.

Recent efforts to declutter as well as conversations focused on future housing options brought these thoughts top-of-mind. January’s snowy weather also kept me indoors to contemplate how I shape my space and the ways in which the space shapes me.

My writing studio is a work in progress. Claire gave me permission to continue shaping this top-floor retreat from her childhood bedroom into a more personal space that can nurture good writing habits and prompt inspiration.

In space both utilitarian and aspirational, the desk is situated between two gable windows, letting in lots of light. On one side are books (bags of books) and a table for project work.

On the other side sits a comfortable chair and ottoman for reading (and because I need the rest, the ever more frequent 20-minute afternoon nap), a small guitar when I’m ready for a break, and remembrances from travels.

The windows bring their own delights: views of snow-covered trees as on a recent January day and the sounds of birds and squirrels in the other three seasons that make up our annual cycle of life.

View from the window of my writing studio during a January snowstorm

And since my writing studio doubles as the guest room or Claire’s bedroom, on the rare occasions she’s home, this spacious loft also holds some of her artful photography as well as the bedroom suite that my father received from his beloved uncle, David Jefferson Wagner (I was named for Uncle Dave and my grandfather).

Claire’s photography and CES artwork
Uncle Dave’s bed, covered with a cathedral window quilt lovingly crafted by Grandmother Brown

Elizabeth Dodson Gray suggests that “what hallows a space is what happens there.” Former New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp was thinking along similar lines when he wrote that “the essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city’s memory.” In natural spaces, of course, what happens does not necessarily need to occur with humans present.

Jan Richardson notes:

From the contours of our inner selves to the places in which we live, play, and work to our home planet and beyond, we dwell in and move through spaces that take on meaning according to how we engage them. Sacred space is born of relationship, of care, of what we give and receive.

I am working to create and hallow a space to help me focus on craft, care, and thoughtfulness. The studio can lead, if I’m fortunate, to vibrant writing full of amazement, wonderment, joy, and love. And because it is at “home” I’ve also ensured there’s time and a place for rest. In this new era of shared homes and offices, we can still strive to create and utilize our spaces in ways that enrich us and give them meaning.

More to come . . .

DJB

*On the same day I took the picture of the snowy tree outside my window, Claire sent these pictures from her retreat center . . . in Costa Rica.

Photos from Claire’s week in Costa Rica

Top photo by Roberto Nickson on Unsplash. All others by DJB and Claire Holsey Brown.