August 26, 2022
Dear Interested Readers,
What is the Story of Your Motivation?
As you might have noticed if you are a regular reader of these epistles, I am a fan of David Brooks. That might puzzle you since I wear a liberal to progressive badge, and until recently Brooks has been a Republican who got his big break from William F. Buckley and was an enthusiastic supporter of Ronald Reagan and John McCain. In an interesting article about Brooks published last January in The Nation, Jeet Heer quotes Brooks and writes:
“A lot of my friends are trying to reclaim the GOP and make it a conservative party once again,” Brooks notes. “I cheer them on. America needs two responsible parties. But I am skeptical that the GOP is going to be home to the kind of conservatism I admire anytime soon.” Having abandoned the Republicans, Brooks has decided “to plant myself instead on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party.”
Indeed Brooks has put a lot of distance between himself and the current Trump version of the Republican Party, but he still calls himself a conservative as he fondly remembers Buckley, Reagan, and McClain. Labels can be misleading and none of us fit neatly into a predetermined category despite the biases that others may apply to us. What I find really interesting about Brooks is that he is a student of human nature, and he always seems to be asking how we might work together to improve the common lot of all people. He is the antithesis of a racist. Jeer reports that Brooks has said:
“To be conservative on racial matters is a moral crime. American conservatives never wrapped their mind around this. My beloved mentor, William F. Buckley Jr., made an ass of himself in his 1965 Cambridge debate against James Baldwin. By the time I worked at National Review, 20 years later, explicit racism was not evident in the office, but racial issues were generally overlooked and the GOP’s flirtation with racist dog whistles was casually tolerated.”
Brooks cares about the world we are leaving to our children. He cherishes the American form of democracy. What makes him a conservative is that he believes in the importance of tradition and structure. He supports private enterprise over government programs, and with the exception of a strong military, he is skeptical of the government’s ability to fix all problems. Jeer continues this picture of Brooks as a conservative by writing:
While Brooks has given up on the Republican Party, he remains faithful to conservatism, an intellectual tradition that he persists in seeing in literally romantic terms. “I fell in love with conservatism in my 20s,” Brooks enthuses. “As a politics and crime reporter in Chicago, I often found myself around public-housing projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes, which had been built with the best of intentions but had become nightmares. The urban planners who designed those projects thought they could improve lives by replacing ramshackle old neighborhoods with a series of neatly ordered high-rises.
Jeer accuses Brooks of overlooking many of the negative behaviors of his conservative heroes, especially their frequent use of the aforementioned “dog whistles” and other forms of racism in the service of systems that give further advantage to those, mostly white, who have the greatest equity stake in the status quo. Considering his “love” for traditionally conservative attitudes it surprises me that I have been such an admirer of his work and always want to hear his point of view. I think the honey that draws me to him is that he expresses such kindness and fascination with the attempts and desire of most people “to get it right” in the struggle against our own biases as we try to grow in life.
Brooks is the author of several of my favorite books. I loved The Social Animal published in 2011. It reads like an unusual novel where we watch the two main characters go through a lifetime of changes in the present moment. The Road to Character published in 2015 is built on his review of the lives of some of his heroes. I especially liked the section on Frances Perkins, the first woman to serve in a president’s Cabinet and “the driving force behind The New Deal.” The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life was published in 2019. It is autobiographical and is his most recent book. Second Mountain is my favorite book by Brooks because it describes his own experience with loss and recovery. If you click on the links which are reviews of his books, you will discover that in each instance the reviewers mix their positive comments with descriptions of his occasional inconsistencies and failures which I tend to overlook given my own inadequacies.
Just as Brooks now occupies a position that is a little left of most Republicans and a little right of the majority of Democrats, he lives on the border between Judaism and Christianity in his spiritual life and explores that “betweenness” in The Second Mountain which I mention as a way of beginning a conversation based on his column last Thursday memorializing Fredrick Buechner [pronounced BEEK-ner], a Presbyterian minister and the author of thirty-nine books that largely can be classified after his first two books as Christain fiction, sermons, and essays. Buechner died recently at the age of 96. Brooks begins his piece by describing Buechner’s father’s suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning which occurred when the young Buechner was ten years old. It was an event that his mother hardly acknowledged. Brooks reports that in Buechner’s autobiographical writing he described his mother’s seemingly cold affect by saying:
“The sadness of other people’s lives, even the people she loved, never seemed to touch her where she lived. I don’t know why. It wasn’t that she had a hard heart, I think — in many ways she was warm, sympathetic, generous — but that she had a heart that for one reason or another she kept permanently closed to other people’s suffering, as well as to the darkest corners of her own.”
Brooks’ response to Buechner’s description of his mother was to draw a contrast between the two of them. He writes:
Buechner went the other way. He realized that the problem with steeling yourself against pain is that you simultaneously close yourself off from being transformed by the power of life itself.
I had never heard of Buechner before reading Brooks’ tribute and the link to Buechner’s obituary printed a few days earlier in the Times, but at a social function last weekend, I discovered that many of the people in my local circle of friends had been Buechner readers and fans for years. One of the most thoughtful of those friends dropped by my house while I was away and left her copy of Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner on my front porch. My benefactor is a saint who gives much of herself to others and has always been intensely involved in what she can learn by “listening” to her own life and caring deeply about what is happening in the lives of those in the world around her who have less than they need.
Buechner was a literature major at Princeton, and in 1950, at age 23, he published a novel, A Long Day’s Dying, that was well received. He moved to New York to write more, but his second novel a couple of years later was not as successful. It was at that time that he heard a sermon at the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church that transformed him. In the mid-fifties, he attended Union Seminary and studied with Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr before being ordained as a Presbyterian minister. He never was a pastor, but he continued to write novels, poetry, literary reviews, essays, and three autobiographies. In the early years after Union Seminary, he did teach at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. Over the years he was a writer who people wanted to meet, and he became a very popular speaker and preacher without ever leading a specific church. It seems evident that Brooks has been influenced by Buechner’s life. He writes:
His books are understated, not narcissistic. By and large, they don’t make arguments. Buechner’s books tell stories, let you experience another person’s experience, let you get involved with the deep parts of one person’s life to see where it rhymes with and differs from your own.
That is how I read Brooks. He continues;
He modeled how a person can experience life more fully, which is a process of scraping off some of the ways adulthood teaches us to see. As Philip Yancey wrote, Buechner “tries to reawaken the child in people: the one who naïvely trusts, who will at least go and look for the magic place, who is not ashamed of not knowing the answers because he is not expected to know the answers.”
Near the end of the piece, Brooks describes the impact that Buechner has had on him and extrapolates his thoughts to our collective miseries at this moment.
One of Buechner’s often cited observations is that you find your vocation at the spot where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need. Perhaps like many others, I struggle to experience my inner life in the quiet, patient, deep and old-fashioned way that Buechner experienced his. So much of the world covers over all that — constant media consumption, shallow communication, speed and productivity. Sometimes I think the national obsession with politics has become a way to evade ourselves.
Those words from Brooks and the implications of the Buechner quote “you find your vocation at the spot where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need” got me thinking first about my personal experiences in the practice of medicine and my time in leadership, but it did not take long for me to begin to stretch my thoughts to extend to you and this moment we share. I was drawn to medicine as a way to experience the satisfaction that I enjoyed in being helpful to others.
What is the origin of the “deep gladness” that brought you to healthcare? During the darkest hours of the pandemic, it was quite obvious that there were thousands of dedicated professionals who rose to meet “the world’s deep need.” They made personal and family sacrifices. They endured the exhaustion of the long hours and the uncertainty of working in a dangerous environment. There are many heroic stories describing how self-interest and personal safety and comfort were set aside by thousands of dedicated caregivers to meet our collective “deep need.” With that thought, my mind went in a few directions.
First of all, I thought about the variety of individuals who fall under the label of “caregiver.” Then I thought of those who directly support those on the front line. My thoughts expanded then to include those whose scientific expertise developed the vaccines and medicines that eventually helped. Then I realized that I should not forget the men and women who clean the hospital rooms, prepare the food for patients, and do all the tasks that are necessary to maintain the environment and the “supply chain” of healthcare. Each of them has their own personal story. Some were drawn to healthcare because they found joy in direct contact with patients as they try to heal wounds, combat disease, relieve pain, and lessen anxieties. Some had vocations that required business and organizational skills to support the work of those in the labs and at the bedsides. It is impossible to understand healthcare without understanding a huge collection of personal examples of “deep gladness meeting the world’s deep need.”
Buechner was an observer of life and a storyteller who tried to connect what seemed mundane to larger forces. My examples from the recent world of healthcare demonstrate that we have the capability to rise to direct challenges. What is unclear is whether that energy and those talents can be continuously managed toward improvements that create lasting change during more normal times. Most of us can remember the national cohesion that existed in the early months after 9/11. My parent’s generation talked about the willingness to work together after Pearl Harbor was bombed. We definitely can respond to emergencies that dramatically threaten our collective safety. It is not certain that we have the organizational skills and discipline to react collectively during “normal times” when there is no obvious emergency. To react collectively and continuously to the “world’s deep need,” we must be able to join our individual vocations, vocation means “callings,” into a collective effort to improve the social determinants of health and give everyone access to effective healthcare. It would be nice if we could set aside or deep partisan divides in favor of joint efforts to improve our common destiny. Collectively we must mount a sustained response to the summation of the individual needs that combine to constitute the world’s deep needs.
I agree with Buechner’s thesis that stories give us wisdom and motivation. The book of daily meditations that was loaned to me by my friend is taken from a survey of Buechner’s writing. Most entries lean heavily on stories. He makes his thoughts transferable to the reader by attaching them to vignettes from life which I think explains the title, Listening To Your Life. It is interesting that the selections for each day were made by George Connor who in 1992 was the Guerry professor emeritus of English at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. In the introduction that Buechner wrote he notes that many of the selections felt like the writing of some other person. He referenced Emerson who had once said he had “gradually slipped into a serene senility in which his mind finally became a calm blank.” I have had that same feeling on rare occasions when I read something that I wrote several years ago. He acknowledges reading similar books of meditation himself, usually at bedtime. In that confession he says:
The good ones, for me, are the ones that almost uncannily hit on something that I have been thinking about often without realizing that I have. They are the ones that sound like a friend talking, like somebody who has been more or less where I have been and felt something more or less like what I have been feeling–about life, about myself, about the people I love and the people I am unable to love, about God. They are not so much the ones that tell me something new that will keep me awake, puzzling over it, as the ones that will help me see something as familiar as my own face in a new way, with a new sense of its depth and its preciousness and mystery.
As you might expect, I jumped right in and can confess that the entries for August 24 and 25 were stories that resonated with some concerns and thoughts that I have had. Some of those thoughts and concerns lie behind this letter. Going back to the end of David Brooks’ column, I can see that he has had similar thoughts because he did write:
I struggle to experience my inner life in the quiet, patient, deep and old-fashioned way that Buechner experienced his. So much of the world covers over all that — constant media consumption, shallow communication, speed and productivity. Sometimes I think the national obsession with politics has become a way to evade ourselves.
I think Brooks is almost right. We should be less consumed by the day-to-day dramas of the world because from day to day there are few changes, but I do believe that we need to monitor the world on a day-to-day basis without being consumed in a way that leads to what I like to call “unforced errors.” We need to be organizing our personal varieties of motivation toward progress that chips away at inequities and defends the progress we have already made. Each step forward, like the one President Biden took this week with the program of forgiving some student debt and mitigating the road to repayment for others, is an example of some progress toward the greater objectives of equity and opportunity that will improve the lives of many. Brooks may object to Biden’s move in a future column or he may agree, but I am sure that if there are differences in our opinions there will be more than enough commonality across the broad spectrum of “the world’s deep need” to keep me interested in what he has to say. I also plan to read more of Buechner now that I have been introduced to him. I think that he may help me listen to and better tell the stories from my own life.
Some Days Will Be Cloudy
I definitely prefer days with no clouds or those days with plenty of blue sky between beautiful white puffy clouds that occasionally block the sun for a moment or two. I do expect that there will be cloudy days both metaphorically and in reality. Things have been so dry around much of the northern hemisphere that clouds should be a sign of hope. Clouds that don’t produce rain are painful teases in difficult times.
My neighbor with the drone camera continues to be very productive, and this week he put a video up on the Internet that celebrates clouds. As is often the case for his productions, the background is the beauty of our lake, but the stars of the show are the clouds over the lake. The header for today reveals that there is a certain beauty in a “low ceiling” of clouds. Dark clouds don’t have to mean trouble. They can be a sign of hope if the earth is thirsty. Big billowy clouds on a sunny day are as beautiful as a meadow full of flowers. Everything must be put into perspective.
Be Well,
Gene
