Oh, come on!
Fog Clearing With Sunrise
After a bout with the foggy brain of Covid, I’m back writing this morning. I know this about myself: I need to write. For a time it seemed like I couldn’t get my bearings, my focus, or the words to say anything. But then, as I start out this morning, I realize the problem is bigger than Covid. We all desperately need new clarity, new instruction, new energy to make our way down the foggy paths we travel. Our society needs a new source from which to get our bearings on common sense.
Everything seems clouded, foggy. Everything seems up for grabs. So muddled. So contested. Everyone seems to think differently, among friends, among family, certainly across the spectrum of our society. You listen to someone taking a position and you think: “How could they possibly think like that. What have they been reading, watching? Don’t they know?” And then you’re struck with a dagger of humility. Who’s to say your position is the only informed one?
But still, and here’s my point this morning, there is so much befuddled thinking going on these days. We step back in exasperation and despair. There’s a lot of just outright nutty stuff being said, stuff not normal, not rational. Men don’t get pregnant or have periods or breastfeed. Can we really not define a woman? Are babies really not babies, just clumps of cells?
We feel acutely an absence of common sense.
Bari Weiss said the other day:
These incidents are not discreet little firestorms. They are deeply interconnected. They are the result of a zealous and profoundly illiberal ideology that has infiltrated our largest companies, our media, our universities, our medical schools, our law schools, our hospitals, our local governments, our elementary schools. Our friendships. Our families. Our language.
One recalls the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, just as he was banished from Moscow into forced exile: We can only overthrow the regime of darkness, as he called it, when we “at least refuse to say what we do not think.” We must “never knowingly support lies!”
I’ve reached the point where I believe our civilization is fragile, creaky. We need a revolution of common sense. I see it coming here and there, a backlash, but we’re not yet close to changing our deepest societal course. We know all the reasons that have led us to this place, all the deep cultural patterns, all the philosophical shifts. We can trace the patterns of how we got from sense to nonsense—but that’s not enough anymore, just to know how we got here.
I’m looking for the sources of common sense. I need a foundation on which to build a house that will not fall down. I need to say confidently: “Oh come on,” say it kindly, not arrogantly, but say it. I need a source that makes sense, a source that can guide us toward meaningful lives and flourishing communities. We’ve broken it all down. We’re exhausted, spouting out truths we know not to be true.
What am I called to do? That question haunts me. I ran into an amazing passage the other morning that is helping me.
The Lord GOD has given me
the tongue of one who has been instructed
to console the weary
with a timely word;
he made my hearing sharp every morning,
that I might listen like one under instruction. Isaiah 50:4
There’s a lot going on here for me. The starting point is to listen as one “under instruction.” This is crucial. I need to find the ways, the disciplines, where “my hearing” is made “sharp every morning.” I take it that means prayer and meditation and sacred reading. It means inviting the living God into my little space. That’s the place to begin to reclaim common sense for our day.
But then the passage adds this: We need for our tongues to be sharpened as “one who has been instructed.” That’s what I want. Whatever the shape of our tongues they need sharpening every morning. If we can hear this instruction, perhaps then we will able “to console the weary / with a timely word.” That’s the goal.
Do I always believe my tongue is sharp in this consoling way? Do I always believe that my writing, or any writing, can make a difference? I don’t. But I have come to believe this is my goal, my calling, from here on out. Place my tongue under the instruction of the God to whom I draw closer every day. Just then, just maybe, I will acquire a tongue “to console the weary / with a timely word.”