A “generational” winter storm and the solidarity of our souls
If you happen to live in the geographical half of the country that was not victimized by a “devastating dose of winter weather” over the weekend, please permit me to reflect on the experience on behalf of the half of the country that was.
- Trees exploded in Minnesota.
- In the coldest areas, people were warned that they could incur frostbite in five minutes.
- President Trump approved twelve federal emergency declarations yesterday.
- Nearly 820,000 are without power this morning.
- More than twelve thousand flights were canceled yesterday.
- Railroad operations were disrupted.
- Twenty-three states and Washington, DC, declared a state of emergency.
- A meteorologist warned that much of the country would be “entombed” in ice.
- A writer in Austin wrote, “If I were to run, where would I run to? The cold is everywhere, all the way up to New York City.”
His complaint points to the point I’d like us to consider today.
Why YouTube is the most popular TV platform
A “generational storm” like this is one of the few things that unites us with other people. I got a phone call Friday afternoon from a friend in Pennsylvania who was expecting thirteen inches of snow over the weekend. Like us in Texas, she assumed her kids would not be going to school on Monday.
Apart from a storm system that spanned forty states stretching from Arizona to Maine, what else unites us these days?
Media has shifted hard to the left and right as paywalls replaced advertising revenues, causing outlets to cater to “passionate subscribers who want their worldview reinforced, not marginal readers.” The United Nations no longer unites the nations. The World Health Organization no longer encompasses the world.
Our political polarization has reached an all-time high. From abortion to same-sex marriage and LGBTQ ideology to euthanasia, a record-high 80 percent of us agree that we are “greatly divided when it comes to the most important values.”
In an insightful Wall Street Journal article, Ben Fritz notes that “for most of the twentieth century, pop culture was the glue that held the US together.” He reports that an estimated 200 million tickets were sold for Gone With the Wind when the US population was 130 million. In 1983, more than 100 million people watched the finale of M*A*S*H.
From the 1940s through the 1990s, three TV networks and seven movie studios decided everything we watched, while five or six record labels determined what we heard. Nearly everyone saw Jaws and Star Wars, Jurassic Park and the Harry Potter and Marvel series, or so it seemed.
Then came the internet, enabling everyone to make and stream video content, and handheld screens on which to watch it. YouTube is now the most popular television platform. As Fritz notes, this is “not because it has the hottest handful of shows, but because there’s something on it for everyone, no matter how mainstream or obscure.”
A photo of my father and his father
Disasters and crises can still unite us. If you’re old enough to remember 9/11, you also remember what it felt like to crowd into churches along with people who were there for the first time, to watch the president of the United States throw out the first pitch at a New York Yankees game, and to grieve with hundreds of millions of fellow Americans in the face of such horrific tragedy.
Think back to the COVID-19 pandemic and, again, the solidarity we all felt. When my wife and I ordered groceries online, drove our car to the store, and opened the back hatch so the masked store employee could put our food inside, we thanked them with a level of heartfelt gratitude I had not felt for a grocery store employee before.
My parents had similar stories about surviving Pearl Harbor and World War II, and my grandfather about serving in Europe during World War I. My brother recently sent me a photograph of our father in his war uniform, standing next to his father, both of them with prideful smiles I seldom remember seeing from either.
But the exceptions prove the rule. For people made in God’s image and thus for relationship, the atomizing fragmentation of our secularized society is devastating. The US Surgeon General reported that our “epidemic of loneliness and isolation” directly impacts cardiovascular disease, hypertension, diabetes, infectious diseases, depression and anxiety, suicidality, and self-harm.
If it takes a storm that endangers thirty-five states to unite us, what is our future as a “United” States of America?
The power of “a love genuinely lived”
Behind all that divides us, there is a commonality waiting to answer my question. St. Augustine spoke for us all when he prayed, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in thee” (Confessions 1.1.1).
Thirteen very disparate colonies in the New World became a united nation only after the First Great Awakening drew them closer to God and therefore to each other, then an existential war for independence forged their national cohesion. The reason subsequent national crises, such as world wars, terrorist attacks, and pandemics, have not sustained the unity they sparked is that they were not preceded by such a transforming spiritual movement.
Our first president was therefore right to identify “religion and morality” as “indispensable supports” to “political prosperity.” Gen. Washington’s assertion makes sense: If we are created and intended to love our Lord and our neighbor as our highest purpose and aspiration (Mark 12:30–31), we will find unity and cohesion in doing both.
I cannot imagine that the weather crisis gripping much of our country will produce a national solidarity that endures once the ice and snow have melted. But I can respond to the personal finitude and mortality this storm revealed by seeking greater intimacy with the Lord who still calms stormy seas. And I can renew my commitment to loving my neighbor by praying earnestly for spiritual awakening to transform my nation and then by sharing my Father’s love with those I meet today.
In Meditations on the Cross, Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed:
The world is overcome not through destruction, but through reconciliation. Not ideals, nor programs, nor conscience, nor duty, nor responsibility, nor virtue, but only God’s perfect love can encounter reality and overcome it. Nor is it some universal ideal of love, but rather the love of God in Jesus Christ, a love genuinely lived, that does this.
How “genuinely” will you live such love today?
Quote for the day:
“The real love of God does not consist in tear shedding, nor in that sweetness and tenderness for which we often long just because they console us, but in serving God by serving those around us in justice, fortitude of soul, and humility.” —Teresa of Avila (1515–82)
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