Too often on Good Friday, we lapse into abstractions, grasping for a way to make sense of this horrifying scene. We talk perhaps about redemption. We say that Christ bears the burdens of the world’s sin, our sin. We lean on this event for a strange strategy of salvation. Sometimes we simply turn our heads, walk away.

In his magnificent book The Love of Learning and The Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, Jean Leclercq calls St. Gregory the Great “a great pope, a great man of action.” Sometimes overlooked, though, he was also “a great contemplative, a great doctor of prayer.” I want to suggest this balance between these two sides of our lives is timeless, absolutely necessary. Tip one direction or the other and we get off balance.

I woke up Saturday morning pondering whether we had become “a nation of no.” First we designated our polarized political parties as “parties of no”—they’ve each had their stint in that driver’s seat. After a flurry of intense activity over the future of health care, we came down to nothing, nada. Nancy Pelosi pronounced this as a victory for America. It was not a victory for America. It stuck us once again in the mud of paralysis. I am pondering this morning what we have become. We can’t seem to get anything done. It’s not that we are making the wrong decisions; we can’t seem to make decisions at all.

I am thinking these days I simply can’t control the world. “Duh,” you might say, “you’re just getting that figured out?” Well, yes, maybe, but I am convinced we all live with the illusion that we are in control. Or we think we need to be. We’ve got to make those we love into something more suitable to our ideal. We’ve got to shape the troubled world, surely, into something better than it is. We’ve got to reconfigure the thinking those who disagree with us. Of course we never measure up ourselves—we’ve got to get more fit and healthier, kinder, more knowledgeable, better at what we do, more everything. It’s all a heavy burden. We carry this burden with us every minute of the day. At least I do.

Big publishing news going on today. A long-awaited and much-anticipated book—Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy For Christians In A Post-Christian Nation—burst on the scene today. My preordered copy arrived from Amazon just now. This book calls on Christians, struggling to live as Christians in our Post-Christian world, to follow the model of the sixth-century founder of monasticism, St. Benedict of Nursia.

François Mauriac begins one of the chapters in his intriguing 1962 book What I Believe with a haunting scene of a Russian boy, now grown older, visiting the church of his childhood. “At times I try to imagine,” Mauriac begins…

I was thinking the other day how each human being is unique. So is each animal, of course, each leaf, each drop of water. There is a lot of sameness among people too, but when we focus on sameness, we tend to get lost in abstraction, something like the sea of humanity. I’ve been choosing these days to place my bets on uniqueness. Each of us is exquisitely our own person.

In my ongoing efforts to step aside from the madness in which we seem engulfed, I came across an incredible article by the novelist Mark Helprin in the most recent issue of First Things

I don’t think my mind is big enough, broad or bright enough, to be an effective apologist for the Christian faith. I turn often to the great apologists of the centuries, to Augustine, for example, to the best of C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, most recently to N. T. Wright, Tim Keller, and so many others.

There is lots of talk these days about the Benedict Option. What in the world is this all about? While the centuries-in-the-making secularization project has come to completion with breathtaking speed, the question for Christians is what now? Surely not withdrawal. Maybe another form of engagement.

Apparently we live in a world of alternative truths. We float around in our individualized bubbles, barely bumping into one another. We read and watch things that reinforce our own strongly-held beliefs. We spend time gathering various facts to reinforce our corner on the truth. While it’s almost impossible to admit, each of us lives in a bubble.

Is it ever possible to be satisfied, to be fully self-accepting, to be content? Don’t we carry around some notion of perfection rumbling in our heads—to which we never quite measure up? Always another thing to do before we can rest, another rung to climb before we are accepted. Why are we such restless people? Isn’t there some deep longing to find a resting place? Or is it just me?

As I begin this new year, I am trying to reshape my posture toward our tumultuous, chaotic, divided world. How can I possibly be more positive, more forgiving, more joyful, more content? With renewed energy, I have turned for help to my years-long practice of reading from the Psalms every morning. A good cup of coffee and the Psalms—this is part of my morning ritual. Does this ancient spiritual discipline, practiced by Jesus and Paul and our ancestors of faith, have something to offer our crazy world today?

At this time of year, I have always been an inveterate goal setter. I love the feeling of leaving the year behind, the whole bundle of joys and hardships, successes and failures, good memories and things you’d like to forget. It feels good to turn the page to the next chapter. It feels clean. What can I do better? How can I love more, see more, learn more, contribute more? How can I understand the world better, so that, perhaps, I can make some small dent in the problems we all face. I love opening a new chapter.

Our world is saturated with the human ego these days. We are swamped. It can feel hard to breathe at times. The constant display of ego makes us feel cheap, degraded, diminished. After the circus of purported public discourse—the presidential debates, for example—we wince. It’s more about the ego than it is about ideas or dreams or solutions. The ego has always been that monster under our beds waiting to pounce at any moment. Once loose it damages leaders. It corrodes our world. It messes things up, destroys things that are  good and decent. Our nation is paying a price for letting the ego out of its cage.

I am looking for good news these days. Of course we need look no further than the dinner table of our own homes, the small gestures of goodness among our children and grandchildren, from a spouse or friend, within our churches or places of work. David Brooks tells one such story last week that is truly good news.

The bad news is relentless these days. I find myself skipping through the papers, turning off the news, avoiding Twitter. What more do I need to know about the last insult hurled across the public landscape? What more do I need to know about another distortion of the truth, another betrayed loyalty, another crass remark. What more do I need to know about the latest sensational, scandalous mistake someone made either yesterday or decades ago?

Maybe it’s time for some good news. On the morning when 100 million of us are likely to watch the presidential debates tonight—in this most bizarre of political seasons, in this most fractured nation of ours—here’s the kind of good news we long to hear. Yesterday, one humble, gracious man, Vin Scully, who after 67 years as the announcer for the Los Angeles Dodgers, at the age of 89, occupied the broadcast booth for the last time. “I will miss you,” he said, characteristically shifting the focus from himself.

Vincent Van Gogh painted his remarkable Wheatfields With Crows in the summer of 1890. This was his last painting before his untimely death in July of that year. At the time of the painting, life seemed to spiral further downward for him. He felt abandoned by his beloved brother Theo. He felt profoundly alone, sick, disturbed, surviving bursts of fresh expectations, only to sink once again into despondency. He turned to his familiar brushes to provide a semblance of balance for which he yearned.

We live in an age of shame. We are instructed endlessly to feel ashamed of almost everything. We are constantly afraid of a slip in how we say things--someone is sure to pounce. Those of us who are doomed to be male are supposed to be ashamed, even though we acknowledge the historical mistreatment of women, maybe even our own. Those of us who are white are condemned to shame, even though, once again, we ask forgiveness for the stain of slavery and the ongoing consequences of privilege. We are taught to be ashamed of our country, for the wars we have created, the displacement of native populations, for the destruction of the landscape. We are scolded these days to be embarrassed by patriotism.This word of shame comes down hard on Christians. We are told to be ashamed of all kinds of things, the dark chapters of the Crusades or the Inquisition, the way we have treated those who are different, the purported hypocrisy of changing our views. We are even told to be embarrassed that we claim our faith to be true: “Who’s to say what is true?”