I’m reading (listening to) Jimmy Carter’s “A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety” and I’m about half way through it. He narrates it (including reading some of his poems), and hearing his elderly southern voice makes me think of my grandfathers and the stories of their lives I didn’t get the chance to ask about. Listening to someone who has almost a century worth of stories and memories including 4 years as President is really grounding.
It’s so easy to feel like everything that’s happening is the very worst or maybe the most uniquely bad thing to happen, especially with politics. It feels as if any sense of honor or integrity has dissolved into the ether, but there is truly nothing that new under the sun. Even though technology and social media have swept across our landscape and shifted so many things, people are still people.
It’s never been easy to stand for something. It’s never been simple to live in community with others who hold different opinions and convictions and who react harshly towards change and differences. There have always been obstacles towards a better future.
Apathy is so tempting, but ultimately useless. I don’t want to give up because it’s hard, because others disagree or name call or act ugly. I don’t want to not believe things can be better.
I don’t want to be so easily discouraged, so easily deterred, or so easily baited to rage. I want my faith to hold steady even when my heart sinks and my temper flares.
Listening to Carter discuss how he got into politics and his approach to it made me think of the girl I was when I was 12 – someone who wanted to be President because she wanted to make a difference and believed herself to be able to do so.
That title became completely unappealing to me over the next 3 decades, but I never stopped wanting to make a difference, or wanting to believe that I can. I never stopped thinking of better ways. I never stopped asking why, digging deeper, looking for the roots of things. I never stopped caring about the big picture, the full array of people, the systems at play. I know now how intricate it all is, how complicated it all is. How necessary it is that people care, that people try.
I’ve spent a lot of time shrugging, biting my tongue, and feeling completely overwhelmed with even coming to an opinion with the excess of information constantly available that is poorly vetted or opinion/assumption based. My desire for peace and connection and safety has tempered my tongue (which isn’t always bad). At times though, the idea of attempting to discuss anything feels like an act of war. I hear and read the words of others and feel so heavy not only the because of the combativeness, but also due to the lack of empathy and critical thinking.
I wouldn’t say I have wasted this time like this, because God wastes nothing, but I also wouldn’t say I want to spend any additional time this way.
I think about the woman I will be when I’m 90, and what I want to be able to say about myself, and my life.
I want to have kept the faith. Not just in a spiritual sense, but in a practical sense. I want to have kept believing not just in the Divine, but also in the human connection to the Holy and our ability to respond to the Spirit’s call and conviction. To have kept believing in the movement of a body of believers to make true the prayer “on earth as it is in Heaven”. To have kept believing that people can bear the fruit of goodness, kindness, love, joy, peace, patience, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. To have kept believing that these things will burn brighter than the shiny substitutes of power, wealth, lust, gluttony, and earthly security. To have kept believing these things will satisfy more than the numbness of excessive consumption. To have kept believing that there is still a way to make a difference and that all our efforts matter.
Something I appreciate about the reflections Carter wrote about were how he knew what he stood for in regards to his faith and how it informed his politics and actions and he kept moving in that direction with others who believed the same. He was willing to listen and seek council, but he kept his core faith and let that shape his life. People disagreed, people criticized, people treated him and his family harshly at times, and things didn’t always pan out, but he kept steady towards it. I’d like to say the same at 90…and beyond (12 year old me also wanted to live to be 110).
