The good, the bad, and the ugly. But mostly the bad and the ugly.

I feel a little sorry for Clint Eastwood today. 

I imagine that he was trying to do something clever, to find a memorable and creative way to make his point.  I’m sure he did not plan on providing a metaphor for everything that’s wrong with our public discourse in this country.

Which he surely did.

Not just a metaphor for our political discourse, though that’s where it is at its worst.  No, he gave us a picure of our entire public discourse, our common conversation about all things important – social, moral, religious. 

Because we spend a lot of time talking to empty chairs.

Not talking to each other.  Not speaking to reality, to things that matter.  Just talking to empty chairs.  Inventing enemies, making up problems, putting words into each other’s mouth that aren’t really there.  Did you hear?  President Obama said ‘you didn’t build that.’  He’s against small business!  He’s anti-American!  He’s dangerous! 

Except that’s not what he said.  That’s just what the empty chair said. 

But who cares?  We’re not interested in what anyone actually said, or meant.  We’d rather just talk to the empty chair.  We mustn’t allow ourselves to be confused with reality, distracted by facts, accountable to any objective source or science or some real person’s experience or feelings.  So we ignore the data, or twist the data, or make up our own data, of just make our assertions without it completely. 

What do empty chairs care about that?

And you know exactly who is to blame for all of this. 

You are.  OK, we all are. 

We are because we have abdicated the responsibilities that come with our place in the community.  We take someone’s word for something because it’s too hard to check on it.  We just pass on a friend’s email blast because we don’t want to get left out, without worrying about what it actually says.  We don’t seek out impartial sources because we are comfortable with the voices we’ve always listened to, because they tell us what we want to hear and it’s too hard to hear what we do not like.  We trust what we hear because it’s from our “team,” as if that was the only important criteria of truth.

We might as well be the empty chair ourselves. 

But we’re not.

No, the empty chair is an entirely different problem in the American discourse.  The empty chair is the voice of our neighbor who has no voice in the conversation, who has no power, who has no one to speak for him.  The empty chair is the person who can’t afford a photo ID, who can’t get time off of work to go and vote, the hungry person who didn’t vote for the person who wants to talk away his food stamps, the sick person who doesn’t understand that his Medicaid is about to be defunded, the woman who is filled with too much pain to tell you what rape really is, the immigrant who is too afraid of being seen in public to tell us what the American dream really is. 

There are lots of empty chairs in our community, people who everyone wants to talk about but no one wants to listen to. 

And who will speak for them? 

It's a long way to where you are going

62-year old Dyana Nyad wants to swim from Cuba to the Florida Keys.  That’s 103 miles of open water swimming amid jellyfish, sharks, ocean currents and storms.

I sometimes have to talk myself into walking to the end of the driveway to get the mail. 

It’s a remarkable dream, an amazing expectation, a dramatic reach beyond the limits of human ability.  And I mean beyond.  Like really far beyond. 

Candace Hogan, part of her support team, said as much.  “There will always be a point where a human body can't go any farther.” 

I wonder if anybody really gets that.

Mountain climbers attack the summit of Mt. Everest, knowing that every minute in the so-called “Death Zone” (above 8,000 meters) is killing them.  Literally.  Extreme athletes take on all manner of risks for a new, greater thrill.  NFL players subject their bodies to constant torture, something like the effects of half a dozen car wrecks every game they play, endure long-term physical and mental disability, for the sake of whatever glory comes from a game. 

No, it seems we do not understand.  There is only so far a human body can go.

This is more than an athletic question.  It is a social question, a spiritual question.  We are creatures who aspire, that is what separates us from the rest of the animals, it is what makes us good and prosperous and happy.  Human aspiration makes the world a better place.

Until we forget that even the greatest human aspiration has its limits.  Until we stubbornly and arrogantly run full steam into the wall, the end, the limit of who we are.  Until we take the apple off of the tree and take a great big bite.  Until we forget our place and try to be God. 

How much suffering, how much of the damage we do to ourselves, to our community, to our neighbor, to our planet, is the outcome of aspiration gone wrong?  How many people have we knocked down in our reaching?  How many have we run over in our sprint to the finish?  How many have been buried under the heap of our self-aggrandizement? 

I applaud Ms. Nyad for her courage and determination.  I hope she makes her goal, I pray for her safety. 

But I also hope and pray that we should all learn the peace that comes from accepting our humanness, from understanding the boundaries that come with this life.  I hope and pray that we would be free from the prisons of too much celebrity, too much wealth, too much power, too much vanity, too much certainty, too much self-righteousness. 

I dream that we might all aspire most to cast off our pride and live, separately and together, just well enough.  I pray that we might aspire for the keeping of someone else’s dream, some pedestrian dream of having enough to eat, of having a place to live, of seeing a doctor when they are sick, of having a friend, a shoulder to cry on, a place to belong. 

Because then, I know, discovering that we cannot aspire to heaven, we will bask in the amazing delight of grace, of the gift we did not earn, of the eternity to which we did not aspire, of the goal hard won for us, of the God of Jesus Christ. 

Which is surely the biggest reach of them all. 

These also competed ...

At least these tears are real.

After a steady diet of unreality TV, of contrived drama and scripted emotion, it is startling to witness honest, heartfelt reaction.  Tears of unashamed sorrow for dreams reached for yet unrealized.  Tears of pure incredulity that what was hoped for actually happened.  Moments well-rehearsed that happened in reality.  The plain truth of falling short, undenied.

Moments worthy of tears. 

Which I guess, in too short of order, raises for me the question that always comes at such times of great importance, of singular attention and value:  why isn’t the rest of life this significant?  Or, perhaps more clearly asked, why don’t the people crying over the battles and matches of their daily life garner tears and new stories, too?

Because for every Olympic athlete who’s years of sweat and determination come crashing around them in a fortnight in August, there are thousands, maybe millions of our own neighbors who daily face the realization that all of their best efforts will not feed their children, that seeing a doctor or buying the medicine they need will always be just past their reach, that there will always be others who, thanks at least in part to superior resources, training and equipment, will always occupy the winner’s place while they watch from the sidelines.

And why isn’t that worth a few tears, too?

Real sorrow, true tragedy in our world happens more than once every four years – it happens constantly, everywhere.  And the win-at-any-cost mentality that now dominates our culture blinds us to the many, many, many who get left behind while we bask in the accolades of our own victories.  Yes, it is true that only few deserve the gift of victory, only few can aspire to the top, only few have the gifts and desire and will to get the gold. 

But does that mean that the rest are unworthy of our concern?

It seems to me that it ought to be easily possible to celebrate winners without rebuffing the rest of the field, that just because it is a great thing to win does not require it to be a shame to lose.  I could have sworn that was what the junior high gym teacher was trying to teach us about sportsmanship way back when.  Perhaps it is just our own guilt that makes us so repelled by the least around us, perhaps it is just that we are so blinded by the gold, perhaps it is an extension of our shame, our secret knowledge that we are not, no matter how much we wish we were, worthy of the medal stand ourselves. 

Maybe we need to warp our arms around some losers and cry with them a little.  Perhaps by shedding our pride we will recover a little of our humanity. 

Which could change more in the world than any Olympic contest could ever hope to do.

On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it … 1 Corinthians 12:22-26