This Saturday, priest, theologian, and author James Alison will speak at St. Alban’s parish in Washington on Choosing Judgment or Joy: Helping people of faith move from anger to love. Alison’s appearance is supported by the St. Alban’s Endowed Memorial Lecture Fund, which provides for lectures or other presentations that allow the parish and the wider community to examine the pressing issues of our time through the lens of contemporary theology. *
I came to know the work of James Alison when my third stage men’s book group began reading his introduction into the Christian faith for adults — Jesus the Forgiving Victim — which follows on from the insight into desire associated with the great French historian and philosopher René Girard. It is a fascinating book, unlike almost any other I’ve come across on faith, which focuses on the non-moralistic nature of Christianity. Grace, not laws or morals, is the theme that he explores through twelve insightful essays.
It was that focus that led the parish to invite Alison to speak to the nature of our polarized times, and how to move beyond judgment of those who hold different opinions, who belong to different tribes, who look different from us, and who may be trying to do us harm. Alison is well situated to discuss this topic, as he is also known for his firm but patient insistence on truthfulness in matters gay as an ordinary part of basic Christianity in the Catholic church and beyond, and for his pastoral outreach in that sphere.
*Full disclosure: I am a member of the Memorial Lecture Fund committee at St. Alban’s.
NOTE: I am on a writing break and have been taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. However, this new post is built around the deadline of an upcoming event, and the book that led us to invite James Alison to speak.
Each month I have a goal to read five books on a variety of topics and from different genres. Here are the books I read in February 2022. If you click on the title, you’ll go to the longer post on More to Come. Enjoy!
How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (2021) is a groundbreaking book by poet and author Clint Smith that asserts that slavery is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it. Smith’s well-researched work takes the reader to landmarks and monuments across America, places where guides, local citizens, and activists tell stories to those who visit. Some of the stories are true. Some are willfully false. Others take less than complete information to try and point towards truth. Smith works to understand what these places mean today, what we’ve told ourselves about them, and how that impacts the way we live. He treats old places as having value as spaces of reflection and he treasures the stories and memories of elders who are not that far removed from those who were enslaved. Memory — it has been said — is a poet, not a historian. In a book I’ll return to again and again, Smith shows why we give thanks for the poets and the stories they bring to life.
Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) by philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman is best known as the book that Martin Luther King Jr. turned to for inspiration before he led the Montgomery bus boycott. In chapters on fear, deception, hate, and love, Thurman “demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised.” Nowhere is that more evident than in the chapter on hate. Thurman notes that in the end Jesus rejected hatred “not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial.” As Dr. King demonstrated, Jesus and the Disinherited can be a life-changing book.
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2003) by Chris Hedges, is an important book I returned to read again as Russia was threatening the invasion of Ukraine that ultimately came later in February. I noted then that in Hedges’ words, a war in Ukraine will be a “mythic” war, where those involved will seek to imbue events with meanings they do not have. Hedges writes on the “very nature of war itself, its causes and consequences, and the physical, emotional, and moral devastation it leaves in its wake.” While he asserts that humility, love, and compassion are the only chances for the human race, war — a deadly addiction — is hard to shake. I wish he wasn’t so right. This is an important read for our times.
Why Old Places Matter: How historic places affect our identity and well-being(2018) by Thompson M. Mayes, a long-time friend and former colleague, is a series of 14 essays. Some address the more practical reasons we preserve old buildings, such as sustainability, economics, and community. But the ideas that most intrigued Tom — and that get to the heart of why these places seem to matter so much to people — were captured in the essays on memory, continuity, and identity, positioning old places in people’s lives in a much more fundamental fashion than the ways in which we often talk about the past and design our preservation laws. Tom’s book is as vital and timeless as the old places we love.
The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant) (2004) by Avi is a delightful children’s book that takes the reader through the multiple adventures — and the occasionally snappy wordplay — of Avon, a small snail, and his friend Edward, the ant. Avon loves to read about adventures. But having never been on one, he decides that he needs to go in order to be happy. Avon and Edward explore parts of their world, such as the end of the branch where Avon lives, that they had never visited before. Along the way they meet many different creatures. And they decide that even tiny adventures can broaden one’s worldview.
Enjoy reading!
More to come…
DJB
The Weekly Reader series features links to recent books and articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy.
While on a blogging break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Let’s stop celebrating a past that never existed. Instead, let’s understand and honor the one that did. — which is used in a portion of the following piece — was originally posted on October 5, 2020.
Our recollections need a reckoning and a reimagining. A reckoning with the history that did happen and a reimagining through recovered stories with hope for our collective future.
America has spent centuries denying the fundamental role slavery played in shaping our country. Our capitalistic economy, the way we shaped our cities and countryside, our unwieldy way of electing a president, America’s uneven system of justice, thoughts on what constitutes the public good, our constitution … so many aspects of life in America were shaped, at their core, by that history. Slavery “is not irrelevant to our contemporary society; it created it.”
At some point it is no longer a question of whether we can learn this history, but whether we have the collective will to reckon with it.
Smith’s is a well-researched book told with a poet’s ear for the story. Which is as it should be. He takes the reader to landmarks and monuments all across America, places where guides, local citizens, and activists tell stories to those who visit. Some of the stories are true. Some are willfully false. Others work with less than complete information to try and point towards truth.
The reader visits Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and Whitney Plantation — two Southern historic sites taking different approaches but, nonetheless, working toward a fuller understanding of our past. Smith, a Black man, visits Blandford Cemetery during a Sons of Confederate Veterans event, where the participants’ polite but strained conversations mask their indifferent and sometimes hostile attempts toward a full understanding of the past. He is in Galveston for the Juneteenth celebration, a story that until recently wasn’t known to many white Americans. Angola is the site of a former slave plantation turned prison, where incarcerated Black men work long hours in the fields in a system akin to slavery. The readers join Smith for a tour of Manhattan to learn about New York City’s difficult and tortured slave history.
As a historian and preservationist, I was exhilarated and challenged by How the Word is Passed. Exhilarated that a writer of Smith’s talent and background would take on public history in such a thoughtful and respectful way, while recognizing the importance in saving the places where history happened. Challenged by the realization yet again of how far we have to go just to a true examination of the past.
Jamestown, Virginia
In reading this book, I was reminded of when I first stood at Jamestown as a history-enthralled 11-year-old. The picture of the 17th century ruin of the church tower, abutted to the 1907 Memorial Church, is seared in my mind. I also remember the water lapping at the nearby shore, serving as a reminder that the people at Jamestown had the most tenuous of toeholds on this continent in those early years.
While I didn’t know it at the time, the narratives of life in early 17th century Virginia — told by the guides, the plaques that lined the walls of the 1907 church, and the books I devoured — were incomplete and sometimes egregiously false. White Christian Europeans were the focus. If they were mentioned at all, Native Americans, along with the enslaved African Americans who began arriving against their will at Jamestown in 1619, were small, dependent actors; impediments, if you will, to the greater story of the colonists and settlers and the shaping of what it meant to be an “American.”
Those Europeans were not home. They were the outsiders. Yet we are still fighting over how to interpret their presence in what would become Virginia.
Today, thanks to the scholarship of historians, works like the 1619 Project, the explorations of archaeologists, and the education efforts of groups like Preservation Virginia, the interpretations at Jamestown are more richly textured, recognizing the various layers that make up this iconic place in American history. Something worth understanding happened there in the early 17th century. There are stories worth telling and people worth remembering in part for the significance they bring to our lives today. But because history is not what happened, it is a story about what happened, we need to be thoughtful and as truthful as possible in how we craft our narratives of remembrance.
In his remarkable first work of nonfiction, Clint Smith has shown us a way forward. He visits places with hard and misunderstood histories. He listens intently to the stories of the historians and guides and asks meaningful questions that draw out conversations. He works to understand what these places mean today, what we’ve told ourselves about them, and how that impacts the way we live. He treats old places as having value to our life today, as spaces of reflection. He also values the stories and memories of elders who are not that far removed from those who were enslaved.
Memories are important because of the gaps that exist in the story of slavery. Smith quotes David Thorson at Monticello who said, “I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory.”
Memory is a poet, not a historian. Clint Smith is also a poet. In this book I’ll return to again and again, he shows us why we give thanks for the poets and the stories they bring to life.
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining the need to tell the fuller story of our history:
Image: Discussion on the life of the enslaved at Belle Grove, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation that has worked to tell the fuller story of all those who lived, worked, and died there. Photo credit: Belle Grove.
I am on a writing break and have been taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. However, this new post — which consists of a few words and some pictures — is of a personal nature that I wanted to share in a timely fashion.
Providence, Rhode Island, is one of the country’s underappreciated gems. We arrived by train last evening in order to hear our son, Andrew Bearden Brown, sing the role of the Evangelist tomorrow afternoon in the St. John Passion with the Schola Cantorum of Boston and the Providence Baroque Orchestra. Very cool!
UPDATE: Andrew did a fantastic job and received a rousing ovation at the end of the concert!
As is my habit in the morning, I woke up early, stretched, and then took to the streets of downtown Providence. The city is very walkable — Candice and I walked from the train station to our hotel last evening — with great architecture all around. Thanks to the work of preservationists, city government, business leaders, and others, downtown has had a renaissance. On this trip I saw more early-morning dog walkers, which suggests that downtown living is growing in popularity, and some of the empty parking lots have been filled in with new infill construction. Updated with more pictures after we took a self-guided walking tour of downtown mid-day.
The historic arcade in the early morning hours before shoppers have stirredProvidence has a wealth of wonderful architectureThe historic Hotel Providence, our location for the weekend.
Grace Episcopal Church, the venue for the St. John Passion…and mere steps from our hotel
Grace Church (Episcopal) interiorGrace Church (Episcopal) rear organModern addition to Grace Church (Episcopal) looking out“The Women” mural in downtown ProvidenceSkylight in the Emery Majestic Theatre – now home to Trinity RepDetail on the Turks Head BuildingThe Providence Public Library – one of the gems of the cityBeneficent ChurchA good reminder…Westminster StreetAmbrose Burnside – who is better remembered for his facial hair (and giving the world the word “sideburns”) than his military exploits.
And did I mention that Providence is one of the great food cities in America? Forbes magazine once called it the country’s best food city per capita, and we agree. In our first 15 hours in town, we’ll have eaten two great meals (at North and at Ellie’s) and tonight we have reservations at one of our favorite Providence restaurants, Gracie’s.
While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Isolated minds. Dead hearts. — which is used in a portion of the following piece — was originally posted on November 23, 2020.
Author, philosopher, theologian, educator, and civil rights leader Howard Thurman begins the powerful chapter on hate in his seminal work Jesus and the Disinherited with a vivid image of hate relentlessly pursuing the hated, crushing down on those who have been cast off and repudiated.
Hate is another of the hounds of hell that dog the footsteps of the disinherited…
Famously known as “the text that Martin Luther King Jr. sought inspiration from in the days leading up to the Montgomery bus boycott,” Thurman’s work both shaped the civil rights movement and changed our nation’s history. It is a short, but profound read which will stay with me for a long time.
As Vincent Harding writes in the Foreword, Jesus and the Disinherited “was the centerpiece of the Black prophet-mystic’s lifelong attempt to bring the harrowing beauty of the African American experience into deep engagement with what he called ‘the religion of Jesus.'” In chapters on fear, deception, hate, and love, Thurman “demonstrates how the gospel may be read as a manual of resistance for the poor and disenfranchised.” Nowhere is that more evident than in the moving chapter on hate, where he focuses on the conspiracy of silence around the function and meaning of hatred, and how it has an especially severe impact on the disenfranchised.
Hatred often begins in situations where there is “contact without fellowship,” writes Thurman. There are no overtures of warmth and genuineness. It is easy, he asserts, “to have fellowship on your own terms,” something that any one of us who grew up in the segregated, Jim Crow South can easily see. It is unsympathetic understanding breeding ill will. Hatred becomes a source of validation for us and for our personalities.
While hatred has the ability to bring us much satisfaction, Thurman writes that Jesus knew that ultimately hatred destroys “the core of the life of the hater.” It guarantees an isolation from one’s fellow humans.
Hatred cannot be controlled once it is put in motion.
A mentor wrote about evil and hatred following the attacks of 9/11. “This past week has shown two of the ways that evil can affect human beings,” he said. “It isolates the mind and kills the heart.” Thurman saw that in the Jim Crow South. We’ve seen it not only in 9/11, but in events as recent as the horrific murder of George Floyd. We have long since reached the point in our civic lives where we can be easily overwhelmed by evil and hatred. It is all around us.
Thurman pivots from hate to love by writing that “Jesus rejected hatred.”
It was not because he lacked the vitality or the strength. It was not because he lacked the incentive. Jesus rejected hatred because he saw that hatred meant death to the mind, death to the spirit, death to communion with his Father. He affirmed life; and hatred was the great denial.
We need to nurture empathy so that we are better equipped to appreciate the challenges others face. It is difficult to remain stubborn when you bring in your heart and are empathetic to the needs of others. According to recent neuroscience,empathy is hardwired into all mammals. Our default — our authentic self — is to have the courage and strength to help others. But the forces that want to isolate our minds and kill our hearts is very strong. Those forces are working on us to suppress our authentic selves in the hope that we will only focus on our needs and our grievances. That force is pushing us to hate others.
Thurman writes that we have to move toward love in action rooted in concrete experience. “No amount of good feeling for people in general, no amount of simple desiring, is an adequate substitute.” Once we have defined our neighbor, “then the moral obligation is clear.” In the story of the Good Samaraitan, Jesus uses
… sure artistry and great power to depict what happens when a man responds directly to human need across the barriers of class, race, and condition. Every man is potentially every other man’s neighbor. Neighborliness is nonspatial; it is qualitative. A man must love his neighbor directly, clearly, permitting no barriers between.
Love your neighbor as yourself. It was no easier in Palestine 2000 years ago than it is today in a polarized America with the world reeling from an immoral war. Yet we must try.
For every man there is a necessity to establish as securely as possible the lines along which he proposes to live his life.
As Martin Luther King demonstrated, Jesus and the Disinherited can be a life-changing book.
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining hatred and love.
While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Where the journey begins — which is used in a portion of the following piece — was originally posted on June 29, 2020.
As I was preparing to give a talk to a preservation planning seminar at the University of Virginia late last month, I took the time to reread Why Old Places Matter: How historic places affect our identity and well-beingby my long-time friend and former colleague Thompson M. (Tom) Mayes. I returned to Tom’s book because it is a great place to consider and understand the variety of factors that come into play as we save old places.
A key reason for me is that old places help us feel that we belong.
In writing the 14 essays in Why Old Places Matter, Tom spent time on some of the more practical motivations and outcomes, such as sustainability, economics, and community. But the ideas that most intrigued him, and that seemed to get to the heart of why these places seem to matter so much to people, were captured in a cluster of the essays that were about memory, continuity, and identity. These ideas are fundamental.
Memory. Old places help tell our stories.
Continuity. Old places give us a chance to feel a connection to the broad community of human experience, a community that exists across time.
Identity. Old places help us understand that our lives are not insignificant — that what we do will have an impact on the future.
Memory, continuity, and identity are deeply important to people, positioning the importance of old places in people’s lives in a much more fundamental fashion than the ways in which we often talk about the past and in the way we design our preservation laws. It was that point of view that I wanted to share with the students. As I did so, I placed it in the context of my personal journey and the stories that matter to me. Such as my origin story, which takes place at Union Station in Nashville.
Union Station is a Nashville landmark. As one approaches on Broadway, it looms alone on the landscape, like Mount Monadnock or a butte in Monument Valley. It is a beautiful old pile of a building in what is known as the Romanesque Revival style. The lobby is designed to showcase the power and opulence of the railroads at the turn-of-the-twentieth century.
The building’s history as a key Louisville & Nashville Railroad station is worth remembering. Its architectural and decorative features add to what makes it important. Yet all of that wasn’t enough. By the early 1980s, the building was threatened with demolition. Abandoned and deteriorating, Union Station was just another eyesore from a bygone era.
Places with imposing presence, with designs built for the ages, places that once served noble purposes, are — from my perspective — worth the effort to find a new use in today’s world. But for some, what is seen as the push for progress is worth the loss of the buildings and landscapes that provide continuity with the past. No, Union Station wasn’t going to be saved because of its railroad history and grand architecture alone. It became a landmark in so many minds — providing the motivation behind the effort to save it from the wrecking ball — because of the building’s innumerable, varied, and deeply personal connections to people in Middle Tennessee.
Former New York Times architectural critic Herbert Muschamp states it succinctly when he wrote that “the essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city’s memory.”
Emotions, stories, and memories flow through Union Station like so many trains. Emotions, stories, and memories like mine.
Union Station was incredibly busy in the years before the advent of the automobile, taking men, women, and children to places near and far, creating memories on a daily basis. Many were traveling for pleasure. But others — like African Americans riding in segregated cars during the Great Migration of the 20th century — were looking for a better life or, at least, a different life from the stifling restrictions of the Jim Crow South.
My father had an early encounter with Union Station when he joined the Navy during World War II. The station was never as busy as it was in those years, shipping young men and women like Tom Brown to bases and ultimately battlefields all across the globe.
My parents were part of the post-World War II marriage boom that begat the well-documented baby boom. Both were from the small town of Franklin, a rural farming and commercial center south of Nashville that grew in the early 20th century thanks to the connections made possible by the Interurban Railway, where Granddaddy Brown served a stint as a conductor. My father had just graduated with his engineering degree from Vanderbilt and was enrolled in a training program that led to his life-long career with the Tennessee Valley Authority. Mom, then a couple of years beyond her high school graduation, married my father on June 30, 1950, in downtown Franklin’s First Baptist Church just blocks away from their family homes. Before moving first to Columbia and soon thereafter to Cookeville for my father’s first major position with TVA, Tom and Helen Brown had a honeymoon to take.
Luckily for them, my father’s sister lived in Chicago. That meant that my parents came to Union Station — like so many honeymooners, soldiers, professionals, laborers, and families before them — and boarded a train bound for the Windy City. There’s a signboard behind the hotel check-in desk today that is from this era. I look up and see the same schedule that my parents saw as excited newlyweds, ready to begin their life’s journey together. The same schedule with those evocative Southern train names: The Azalean, The Humming Bird, Pan-American, The Georgian, Dixie Flyer.
One day in 2015 while at lunch (at Murfreesboro’s City Cafe, naturally), my father started talking about that train ride again, and he told me that he and mom left at midnight on “The Georgian.” When my father was last in Union Station, he took a picture of the train schedule. Sure enough, plain as day, you can see that the Georgian leaves Nashville at 11:59 p.m. on its way to Chicago.
Historic Train Schedule from Nashville’s Union Station
I’ve heard stories my entire life about the theatre shows they saw in the city, the food they ate at the ethnic restaurants that was so foreign to their Southern palates, and their visit to Comiskey Park to see the White Sox. The facts from the trip have been filled in through the years, but the memories always originate with that train ride from Union Station. It is what makes it such a vivid part of my origin story.
Old places matter because their materials and appearances connect with human souls through emotions and memories. For some, those places may be mountains or streams. For others, buildings, neighborhoods, and streetscapes are involved.
The story of the saving of Union Station, like similar accounts of preservation successes in communities big and small, has thousands upon thousands of personal stories intertwined with the brick, stone, marble, and mortar. Stories and memories hold these places up, literally and figuratively, embedding the connections from the past into our lives today and in the future.
Everyone has an origin story, and many revolve around places. Because of the power of stories, Union Station remains today as a touchstone for innumerable individuals and families.
Emotions and stories flow through places, like the train leaving Union Station with two newlyweds bound for Chicago and a life unimagined ahead.
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining why old places matter.
I am on a writing break and have been taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. However, this new post — which comes entirely from the work of a historian I admire — arrived in my email inbox on March 4th, my birthday. I felt it was a gift I wanted to share with my readers.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson writes a daily newsletter entitled Letters from an American. It usually arrives in the early morning hours, calmly summarizing major events from the day’s news and placing them in the context of American history. In something of a surprise, she quickly became one of the most successful individual authors of a paid publication on the newsletter platform Substack. She is the opposite of the right-wing and mainstream media journalist, working at the level of conversation, not soundbite. Her followers and subscribers (including me) are devoted.
Every day, people write to me and say they feel helpless to change the direction of our future.
I always answer that we change the future by changing the way people think, and that we change the way people think by changing the way we talk about things. To that end, I have encouraged people to speak up about what they think is important, to take up oxygen that otherwise feeds the hatred and division that have had far too much influence in our country of late.
Have any of your efforts mattered?
Well, apparently some people think they have. Last week, President Biden’s team reached out to ask if I would like some time with him to have a conversation to share with you all.
On Friday, February 25, I sat down with the president in the China Room of the White House to talk about American democracy and the struggles we face.
Dr. Richardson noted that it was an “amazing time to be able to talk to the President.” Vladimir Putin had just attacked Ukraine, the president was preparing to give his first State of the Union address, and Biden “had just made the historic announcement of the nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson for a seat on the Supreme Court.”
In this thoughtful 30-minute conversation, held before a crackling fire in the White House, Richardson and Biden focus on how the president “thinks about America in this pivotal moment, to put the specifics of what he does in a larger context.” There are many wonderful segments, one of which involves the president telling how historian Jon Meacham came to help pick the portraits for use in the Oval Office.
Historians offering guidance to a president. What a wonderful thought.
In my books, (Richardson writes) I have argued that throughout our history, America has swung between the defense of equality outlined in the Declaration of Independence and the defense of private property outlined in the Constitution.
Our peculiar history of racism has meant that every time it seems we are approaching equality before the law, those determined to prevent that equality have turned people against it by insisting that government protection of equality will cost tax dollars, thus amounting to a redistribution of wealth from those with property to those without. That is, if Black and Brown Americans, and poor people, are permitted to vote, they will demand roads and schools and hospitals, and those can be paid for only by taxes on people with money. In this argument, an equal say in our government for all people amounts to socialism.
With this argument, those defending their property turn ordinary Americans against each other and take control of our political system. Once in power, they rig the system for their own benefit. Money flows upward until there is a dramatic split between ordinary people and those very few wealthy Americans who, by then, control the economy, the government, and society.
This point in the cycle came about in the 1850s, the 1890s, the 1920s, and now, again, in our present.
In the past, just when it seemed we were approaching the end of democracy and replacing it with oligarchy — and in each of these periods, elites literally talked about how they alone should lead the country — the American people turned to leaders who helped them reclaim democracy.
We know these leaders from our history. Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt all have entered the pantheon of our leaders because of their defense of democracy in the face of entrenched power. But all of those presidents became who they were because they rose to the challenge of the pivotal moments in which they lived. They worked to reflect the increasingly loud voices of the majority of the American people.
James Buchanan, William McKinley, Herbert Hoover, and Donald Trump did not.
And now President Biden stands at another pivotal moment in our history. What he does in this moment will reflect what the American people demand from hisleadership.
Thank you, Heather Cox Richardson and President Joe Biden, for such a wonderful conversation. As one commentator wrote, Richardson’s “letter is my nightly north star. So happy to see you recognized by President Biden for the invaluable and trusted role you are playing as you interpret our living history.”
And she did it while wearing sensible shoes to the White House!
More to come…
DJB
*I have copied much of Heather Cox Richardson’s letter into this blog, because she always encourages her readers to share the information. But I encourage you to go to her site, read it there, and subscribe.
While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Ideas. Relationships. Adventure. — which is used in a portion of the following piece — was originally posted on June 26, 2017.
I love to read. Avon — the small snail in Avi’s children’s fable The End of the Beginning: Being the Adventures of a Small Snail (and an Even Smaller Ant) — also reads every day. He is a kindred spirit. Books tell him “All about the things that creatures did when they went on adventures.” Having never been on an adventure, Avon decides that he needs adventures in order to be happy. When a passing newt hears his sigh, he encourages Avon to “go out and seek some adventures.”
Avon replies that he doesn’t know how.
“Remember lad,” said the newt, “if it’s going to be tomorrow, it might as well be today. And if it is today, it could have been yesterday. If it was yesterday, then you’re over and done with it, and can write your own book. Think about that.”
This delightful children’s book takes the reader through the multiple adventures — and occasionally snappy wordplay — of Avon and his friend Edward, the ant. They explore parts of their world, such as the end of the branch where Avon lives, that they had never visited before. They meet many different creatures. And they decide that even tiny adventures can broaden one’s worldview.
We are too often tied to our own branch, trapped in our own limited perspective.
If I were restricted to three words in any commencement speech, they would be: Ideas, Relationships, and Adventure. Ideas are the basis for change, for re-invention, for, yes, intellectual capital. Relationships have to do with outstanding people working in harmony and openness, where everyone feels empowered, where all members feel included and at the center of things, where they feel competent and significant. And Adventure has to do with risk, with a bias towards action, with curiosity and courage.
The challenge for organizations and their leaders is, as Bennis states it, to “create the social architecture where ideas, relationships, and adventure can flourish.” That isn’t easy, especially in light of challenges facing us today, but those who “choose to succeed must have the strength to persist in the face of setbacks, even failures.”
Think about how this idea fits in with the fable of the snail and the ant. Avon had the idea that he wanted to travel and see the world. Avon and Edward built a good relationship. They had success and failure, but they stuck to it. Together they had adventures untold (for a snail and an ant).
So don’t just sit there and read about others. Create your own adventures. Explore!
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining the joy and wonder of adventure.
While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. I am still every age that I have been — a longer version of this piece — was originally posted on March 5, 2018. With a birthday coming in just a few days, this story is a good personal reminder that we can always call upon the joy and wonder we experienced as children, because we’re still that age.
I’ve recently taken to reading several children’s books, a trend that began a few years ago when I reread the classic A Wrinkle in Timeby Madeleine L’Engle. I was drawn back to that particular book at a time when our family was dealing with hip replacements, birthdays, and other challenges of adding years to our lives. With those changes, I was comforted by L’Engle’s thoughts on how we should age:
“I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be… This does not mean that I ought to be trapped or enclosed in any of these ages…the delayed adolescent, the childish adult, but that they are in me to be drawn on; to forget is a form of suicide… Far too many people misunderstand what ‘putting away childish things’ means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don’t ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and ‘be’ fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup.”
Living through what you know and who you have been from the years of life is a way to understand current circumstances and embrace new possibilities. The quote popped into my head as I was thinking of L’Engle and the buzz about the A Wrinkle in Time movie that was being released about the same time. The folding of space and time is at the core of the story, as is the power of love over evil.
My children both read the book when they were young, and it remains among the most influential of their lives. My wife took a week-long writing class led by L’Engle almost 30 years ago and returned with a copy of “Wrinkle” signed by the author to me. I pulled it out one weekend when a colleague said she had been encouraged by my earlier note to “read when it is inconvenient” and — in the midst of a busy week of board meetings — I began to re-read the book before the movie’s launch.
A prized copy of “A Wrinkle in Time”
As we face the years ahead, I’ve taken to thinking anew about what it means to be three, thirteen, twenty-five, forty, and (ahem) more all at the same time. L’Engle’s push to retain a child’s awareness and joy seems like a great place for all of us to begin. There’s no time like the present.
More to come…
DJB
NOTE: Here are other posts on More to Come examining joy, wonder, and a childlike awareness of what is around us.
While on a writing break, I’m taking the time to share some of my favorites from the More to Come archives. Hopefully you’ll find a new insight or something that you may have missed.
Most communities have a place that even in technology-obsessed, anti-intellectual 21st-century America remains a surprisingly relevant bellwether institution: the public library.
Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey into the Heart of America by James and Deborah Fallows provides a good example of why public libraries are both relevant and important. Our Towns is the story of a five year journey across the country — most of it undertaken at low altitude in a little propeller airplane — where the Fallows saw small and mid-sized towns that, in spite of hardship, also exhibited “the emerging pattern of American reinvention.”
One of the first places they stopped in each town to gather local information and to gauge the character of the community was the public library. *
James and Deborah Fallows found librarians in America’s public libraries committed to their communities, to reading, to learning, to public service, to the people who use their services, and to innovation. Librarians who are committed to books and what they can tell us beyond the crisis du jour of cable news networks and your Facebook feed.
People who are probably very much like my mother, a life-long reader who served for decades as the children’s librarian in our hometown.
Yes, my mother was known throughout our community as “Queen Helen, the Storytime Queen”. She knew all the children who used the library and their parents as well, and she was adored and appreciated. Mom was eager to point child and parent alike to a book that fit the need in that family at that moment. Her commitment to reading and education was one reason our family established the Helen Brown Scholarship Fund at First Baptist Church in Murfreesboro after her too-early death from cancer. For more than two decades, it has helped young people attend college. My sister Carol followed in her footsteps and now serves as the branch librarian at the same public library where Mom spent so many years.
Public Library in Staunton, Virginia
A 2020 article in the Washington Post entitled “The pandemic took away our family’s second home: the public library” brought back those memories and more. Writer Maggie Smith notes that while she misses a wide variety of places where she used to visit, “One of the places my kids and I miss most is the public library.”
When our children were young, my wife and the twins would go to the Staunton Public Library — located downtown in a repurposed and restored historic school building — on a regular basis. There they attended story-time and special events, or just read books that piqued their interest. At the end of each visit they would pick out a dozen or more treasures to bring home in our book box. I would tag along when work allowed, and the cycle repeated itself every week for several years. Smith tells a similar story as she and her children would visit their public library in Bexley, Ohio, once or twice a week. And just like as in Staunton,
“The children’s section is on the basement level, where you can look through the windows and see people’s shoes as they walk in the small courtyard outside. We’d descend the stairs together — or take the elevator when one of the kids was still in a stroller — and round the corner into a wonderland of books, puzzles and toys.”
Our children acquired a life-long passion for reading and writing, and they fit into a family pattern. Mother and Daddy loved to read and write, and my sister Carol and I acquired that same gene. Smith suggests that we “become readers before we discover we’re writers, and we become readers by being exposed to literature early and often.” It is our public libraries that make this exposure possible, free of charge. “Public libraries,” she adds, “are where readers — and, therefore, writers — are born.”
New York Public Library
Dr. Vartan Gregorian, the savior of the New York Public Library, talked eloquently about the importance of these places when he made the case for saving that city’s library system.
“The New York Public Library is a New York and national treasure,’”he said. “The branch libraries have made lives and saved lives. The New York Public Library is not a luxury. It is an integral part of New York’s social fabric, its culture, its institutions, its media and its scholarly, artistic and ethnic communities. It deserves the city’s respect, appreciation and support. No, the library is not a cost center! It is an investment in the city’s past and future!”
In the first two decades of the 21st century, libraries have reinvented themselves to serve a public that has very different needs from those of the first two decades of the 20th century or even the 1960s and 1970s of my youth. But they have done so in style, and have remained incredibly relevant, to the point that two journalists, flying across America in a small plane to get a sense of how the country is handling all this change, wouldn’t think of starting their search without a stop at the local public library.
MORE TO COME... 