The Age of Miracles (13 page)

I remember when Barbra Streisand used to sing “The Best Things in Life Are Free.” And so are the most powerful things. Compassion. Reading to children. Mercy. Tender touch. Sweet thoughts. Forgiveness. Prayers. Meditation. Love. Respect. Peace.

These things cost a lot: B-52s. Long-range missiles. Military helicopters. Tanks. AK-47s. Artillery guns. Field cannons. F-16s. Rotary-wing aircraft. Littoral combat ships. Joint strike fighters. Artificial limbs. War.

The chilling truth is that if we do not end war, war is likely to end us. In the words of Albert Einstein, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”

In a world where the means and amount of means of mass destruction are so extraordinary (the destructive capacity of the entirety of WWII is like a grain of sand compared to our destructive capacity today), war is no longer a sustainable or even, in the long term,
survivable
option for the human race. In the words of Congressman Dennis Kucinich, “We must challenge the belief that war is inevitable.” It is the moral task of our generation—not our children’s generation or their children’s generation (there is no time for that)—to take a stand for a world that has moved beyond the insane, self-destructive militarism that dominates international relations today. I can’t believe that even now, American leaders are talking about war like it’s a little boy’s set of Legos.

In truth, war only creates victims. The people who are killed are victims and the people who are sent to do the killing are victims as well. Post-traumatic stress means not only the trauma of remembering having seen people killed; it just as often means the trauma of remembering
having killed.
War is monstrous and should be seen as such. To go into war as anything other than a truly last resort, much less for cooked-up reasons—or to greet it with rallying cries like it’s a sports event—are the signs of a nation having lost its heart, for sure, and possibly its mind.

This attitude is not pacifism per se. We’re living in an era that poses a new set of questions. Other generations could argue about the moral validity of this war or that war; we don’t have the luxury of that debate. Our moral challenge is to move beyond war, period.

Some seem to think that we can continue to manufacture more nuclear bombs, put weapons into outer space, create ever-more-pernicious methods of chemical warfare, and make further sales of arms to other countries to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars—not to mention embark on further military misadventures—without ultimately starting to lose our own cities and our own people in massive numbers. Such people are either in such denial, or so blind, or possessed of such cold hearts, that they should never again be endowed with either our governance or our trust.

Anyone who doesn’t understand the wave of new thinking and enlightened perspective that’s sweeping the planet today is someone whose time in power should end. There’s a new conversation in the air, and all of us should contribute our voices to it as best we can. It is time to redesign the world—not along traditional economic geopolitical lines, but along deeply humanitarian ones—in which the amelioration of unnecessary human suffering becomes the new organizing principle of human civilization.

It’s easy to laugh at baby boomers when we say such things. After all, isn’t that what we said in the ’60s? And what did that lead to? Well, it led to the end of one war, and that’s not nothing. And it arguably would have led to much more, had Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., not died in part for believing it. The mistake of the ’60s generation wasn’t that we didn’t have the right goal; it was that we didn’t yet realize that we ourselves must be the means by which the goal is achieved. In the words of Gandhi, “The end is inherent in the means.” We must
be
the change we want to see happen in the world,
because otherwise the change will not happen.
We didn’t know that then but we know it now. We’re more sophisticated about politics, and we’re more sophisticated about love. We’re becoming what author Andrew Harvey calls “sacred activists.” We got here late, but we got here.

We arrive with gray hair and irony: The generation that declared war on hypocrisy has become among the most hypocritical of all; the generation that sought to replace guns with flowers has more often replaced flowers with guns; and looking at the clock, we have about ten minutes left to awake from our stupor and retrieve our moxie.

Our greatest failure now isn’t one of politics so much as of imagination. We need to
imagine
a world at peace, and then work backward from there. The world can only be at peace when more of its people are fed, housed, and educated; when more of its people are given the medical care they need; when more of its women are free; when more of its opportunities are available to more of its population; and when more of its resources are shared equitably. These things wouldn’t just “be nice”—they’re essential keys to a survivable future. Imagine, for a moment, the $600 billion or more a year that the United States now spends on our military and defense (and that does not include the war in Iraq). Going back 30 years, what if we’d spent the majority of that money on such humanitarian concerns as mentioned above? What if more people in the world had seen American-flag decals on schools, roads, and hospitals in their communities than on military installations? Would it have been so easy, then, to stir up so much hate against us? Is it possible that there wouldn’t even have been a
9/11?

Such questions are ridiculed by the political status quo, but at this point no conscious person is stopped by the derision of the status quo. Those who look at the world today through a lens more relevant to the way things were 60 years ago are not the ones to lead us forward. We’ll move forward only with a new vision of where we want to go. And there is no way we can get there if we forget our deep humanity. We need to do more than just defeat an enemy; we need to create more friends. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., we must make the world a “beloved community.”

Politics and economics have to mirror our spirituality or else they mock it. Humanity will change; the only issue is whether we do so because we grow in wisdom or because the pain of not changing becomes so intense that we will have no choice. A nuclear bomb would ruin everyone’s day and everyone’s business. There is nothing astute—financially, or in any other way—about doing whatever we want to do without worrying about its effect on others. Such thinking shoud be repudiated now. It’s time to transcend modernity’s limited perspective and lay claim to a more enlightened worldview.

It’s said that when Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Henry David Thoreau in jail after he was sentenced for his protests against the Mexican-American War, he asked his friend what he was doing in there—and Thoreau responded, “What are you doing
out there?
” That’s how it feels to be someone shouting “Foul!” at the top of your lungs today; anyone who isn’t doing so must be nuts.

Age gives you a sense that what you know is what you know, and whoever doesn’t agree with you no longer has the power to make you change your mind or shut you up. The only justification you need for having an opinion is that it’s your opinion. You might be right and you might be wrong, but under no condition will you be silent about what you believe any longer. As Jesus said in the Gospel of Thomas: “That which you have will save you if you bring it forth from yourselves. That which you do not have within you will kill you if you do not bring it forth.”

One of the ways we can give birth to a new world is by speaking it into existence. And
love
is not a weak word. One word, one prayer, one book, one speech, one conversation, one poem, one script, one song at a time
… we will speak of love, and our word will prevail.

“M
INE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY
of the coming of the Lord: / He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; / He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: / His truth is marching on.”

I remember watching Judy Garland sing those lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” on television after the assassination of President Kennedy. I was too young to appreciate the full import of what was happening, but I could tell from my parents’ tears and Judy Garland’s performance that this situation was bad, and that it was history. A mental snapshot of Garland singing that song has stayed in my head for over 40 years. Its message is still one of my favorite affirmations that no matter what happens, no matter how much cruelty or injustice fills the world, God’s truth will somehow prevail.

I have a friend who has been in prison since she was 17 years old. She is now 34. Her crime was that she drove the car in a marijuana sale during which someone was killed. Later that night, after more than nine hours of intense interrogation by the Detroit police, a confession to having masterminded the drug sale was manipulated out of her. (“Just sign here, and you can go home to your mother.”) No reading of Miranda rights; no presence of counsel. And now this beautiful woman, who at the age of 17 would not in a million years have known how to deal with police pressure, sits in a prison cell unable to procure the commutation of her sentence that any reasonable person’s interpretation of justice would demand. She dreams, and many dream for her, that the day will come when she’s released from the hell of her confinement and is free to live out the rest of her days with some version of a normal life.

I once asked her what she wanted to do when she got out of prison. I told her that as soon as she’d visited with her family, I’d take her anywhere she wanted to go. I was thinking a spa. A beach. Wherever.

Her response? Get ready for this.

Her eyes brightened. “CVS pharmacy,” she said. “I would love to go to CVS. I would love to be able to pick out my own shade of lipstick. I hear they have a lot of them there. We only get one shade in here.”

Her eyes were bright with hope; my eyes were bright with tears.

And on any day when I feel that my life isn’t exactly what I’d wish for in this way or that, I think of Toni. If you still have the chance to get up each day, do basically what you want to do, and make every attempt to make right what went wrong before, then you’re still in the game. Some people made mistakes in their past for which they cannot just atone and start over.

In order to “[trample] out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored” (cancel out hate) and “[loose] the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword” (
karma
and
justice
are gentler words, but I’m not going to edit Julia Ward Howe), God needs our help as much as we need His. Later in the song, Howe wrote: “As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.” If only.

God needs us to surrender ourselves to be used for His purposes. And in order to be of use to Him, we need to be channels through which He can operate. That is why we do what we do—not only for ourselves, but for Toni and the millions like her who we know in our hearts could so easily have been us.

A
ND THEN, OF COURSE, AT THE END OF ALL THIS
—after all the years of yearning and strife, achievement and disappointment—we will lay down the body. All of us hope for that tunnel of light, the otherworldly peace we’ve read about, and the joy of feeling that in the final analysis, this lifetime wasn’t bad at all.

Death has been called our “next adventure,” and the older we get, the more that seems to ring true. In the words of Carl Jung,
“Shrinking away from death is something unhealthy and abnormal which robs the second half of life of its purpose.” That doesn’t mean death is something to be excited about, necessarily. But it’s something to be accepted in faith—faith that nothing exists outside the love of God, the perfection of God, or the plan of God. If He has us leave here, then it’s by definition into greater light.

For myself, the greatest sorrow of death is the thought of leaving those I love the most. But then I think of those I love who have already died, whom I’ll get to see again. And I think of those I might leave behind when I die, but who themselves will cross over and join me on the other side one day. The smallest child, even if blessed with the longest life, will someday die. So whether our train is faster or slower, we’re all on our way to the same destination. And in God’s universe, the only destination is Love.

Knowing that we will die doesn’t make life less important; in fact, it makes it more important. The realization of our mortality creates a sense of urgency to use life wisely, to appreciate it fully, to love more deeply while we’re still here and we still can. There is a magical thinking to youth: Most young people have the secret thought that they’re the one who’s going to cheat death. (“Death wouldn’t dare take me!”) And with that false sense that life will last forever comes a casual disregard for how serious it is. When I was young, the only things I took seriously were seriously unimportant things. It was only with age that I came to see how important, how very truly important, is the simple existence of life itself.

When you’re young it never occurs to you that when you call a friend it’s not one of an endless number of times you’ll have the chance to do so. Once you fully appreciate that every experience in the material world is finite, you realize how amazing it is just to be able to make a phone call. As my friend Sarah often says, “Time’s a-wastin’.” Isn’t that the truth.

We presume on things we have no idea are so fleeting. When we’re young, we don’t know—except intellectually, and even then we don’t really believe it—that we won’t always have endless energy or glow. When age forces us to see how much is now gone, we are shocked and hurt to realize all the things that are over and will not come again.

But then something happens when the shock wears off … something subtle yet immense. What happens is counter to the thinking of the world. We’d always seen older people at dinner or at the theater, and we looked down on their diminished lives with pity. What we failed to realize—how could we then?— was that many of these men and women were existing in a parallel universe where they looked at
us
as the pitiable ones, having not yet realized what life was about or even really for. They were having, perhaps, more fun than we knew. They were seeing, perhaps, what we had not yet seen. What has happened now is that we’ve entered their room. And it isn’t what we had expected. It’s whatever we
want
it to be.