Rise, Let Us Be On Our Way

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower Of Babel, 1563

Philosopher-historian Charles Taylor, in his masterful book A Secular Age, remarks that we sometimes catch a glimpse of “what life should be like.” We sense there is a “place of fullness” out there, but we also know, we are not there yet. Life seems so hard. Things break apart. We are so divided. We can’t agree on anything, what is true, our common good, a center from which we might begin to build something new. We can’t even come together, in simple, common-sense conversation, to talk about how we might rebuild our families, organizations, communities, our nation. If we really do sense what life should be like, why can’t we have this conversation?

The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt recently evoked the ancient story of Babel to help grasp what’s going on:  

The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.

[Babel is a story] about the fragmentation of everything. It’s about the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. It’s a metaphor for what is happening . . . within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families.

We recall the mid-twentieth-century, ever-provocative Hannah Arendt with similar thoughts:

We have ceased to live in a common world where the words we have in common possess an unquestionable meaningfulness. . . . Short of being condemned to live verbally in an altogether meaningless world, we grant each other the right to retreat into our own worlds of meaning, and demand only that each of us remain consistent within [our] own private terminology.

The consequences of this fragmentation are huge. Our government grows more dysfunctional by the day. Our institutions, on which we have relied for so long, are crumbling. Our personal lives are a mess, too much anxiety and stress, too much uncertainty about the big moral issues, too much division and hatred, too much violence, too much focus on politics now turned vicious and profoundly unhelpful. When I feel all of this seeping into friendships, or into family life, or into the shattering of communities and organizations we have loved and served—well, this is when I lie awake into the wee hours of the morning.

What I really want to say, though, is that when we get to this place, when we have bottomed out, something happens, something always seems to happen. Something turns, pivots. Some kind of insight blazes across our line of thought. A light breaks through the fog, if only for a moment. There is a fruitful burst of thought that seems to connect the dots. In my faith tradition, down through the ages, people have called this a visitation of God’s grace. When this happens, we can actually hear a song of joy singing. This is the place from which we might start over.

Something like this happened to me the other morning. I heard Jesus saying, oh-so-simply, so tenderly, “peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. . . . Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid. . . .” And then Jesus adds something that had me jumping out of my chair: “Rise, let us be on our way.”

Isn’t this a center we can claim, right here in the promise of Jesus, where we might turn a huge corner? Can’t we start there to imagine how life is supposed to be?

I keep singing these days that lovely, familiar, oh-so simple hymn:

Turn your eyes upon Jesus,
Look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim,
In the light of His glory and grace.

Look, I know I will be told this is way too simple, actually a little ridiculous, preposterous. You’re indulging in that separatist streak you’ve fought so hard to avoid, someone might say. Well, I’m ready to take the risk and the ridicule. Maybe it’s as simple as this: Turn your eyes upon Jesus. If this is where peace and rest and joy begin; if this is how fear and troubled hearts can be lifted—well, count me all in. I’m ready to get on my way. Surely our world is ready too.

Are you ready? How about joining me. Rise, let us be on our way.