When a cherished place from my past – where I’d once felt loved and in tune with the world is violated, I feel diminished. In the ‘Talbot Spy’ recently, columnist Jamie Kirkpatrick’s moving essay Then and Now, reflects on his boyhood in Pittsburgh, where the recent Tree of Life Synagogue shootings took place.

“I knew nothing but peace and safety in that neighborhood, but that was then. This is now,” Jamie writes.

In this bittersweet comment, I imagine Jamie is attempting, as I would, to make some kind of sense of two disparate images; one, of a lovely place of family and childhood, the other, that same place but now violated by hate and anger. The violation of a special place diminishes the solace the memory of it offers.

I’ve been reading an essay by the famous anthropologist Loren Eisley. In an allegory about a sense of place and the role our memory can play in it, Loren Eisley describes a changing landscape in Philadelphia in the thirties.

The old elevated railway station in Philadelphia was a large waiting area containing vending machines. As soon as pigeons heard the trains approaching, they would alight in large droves to feed on peanuts that commuters left scattered on the station floor.

The El was slated for demolition to build a subway. When the tunnels were dug the El was totally dismantled and where the pigeons had always gone for their sustenance was gone.

Eisley began seeing some pigeons returning to their old haunts. What brought them back was the noise, not of approaching trains anymore, but of the wreckers, a sound inciting their hopes that they could return there to be fed as they had always been before.

Even when the structure was fully gone, Eisley writes, “It was plain . . . that they (pigeons) maintained a memory of an insubstantial structure now composed of air and time.” Although that special place for them had been violated, the pigeons never quite surrendered the memory of the place that had nurtured them.

The recollections of my past can produce incongruent images. The images contrast between the way it was and the way it is, now. There can be pain, grief, and a sense of personal violation in such recollections. I often feel it as I recall the open spaces of my childhood now suffocated by tract housing and overdevelopment. The dissonance resulting mitigates the melancholy sweetness of nostalgia. In the courts of memory, there are many sacred places. When those sacred places are profaned, I’ve lost something.

The word sacred is not a user-friendly in today’s world. Consumerists have coopted most of the language of traditional piety to make sales pitches, but not even the most tasteless marketer offers his wares as ‘holy.’ A Subaru may be pitched as ‘love’ but never as ‘holy.’ Outside of places of worship, you rarely hear the word. It’s a hollow world where nothing is sacred,

“Draw not near here: put off your shoes from your feet, for the place on which you stand is holy ground.” And so, God speaks to Moses reminding him of both the place and the special encounter he is to have. Moses is asked to acknowledge this holy place and its awe-filled moment by making a traditional gesture of veneration. He removes his sandals to respect the household into which one enters. It reminds me of how I once watched a funeral a procession pass through an old southern town. People stood roadside and watched, as men removed their hats honoring the solemnity of the moment and the suffering of the mourners. They had an idea of the holy.

The recent shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue is another instance of how far we have come from grasping any significance of the holy and the place it holds in our lives.

There were generations of people in The Tree of Life synagogue community who had gone through life’s rites of passages – rites that were thousands of years old. It was sacred space, a holy place where it’s members were invited to “remember” G-d, Moses, Jacob, Isaac and David in their worship. Girls grew into women and boys into men with the validation of, and within the safety of, a loving community.

The word ‘profane’, like the word, ‘holy,’ has dropped out of the modern vocabulary. I note that “to profane,” means to treat what’s sacred with irreverence and disrespect. It means literally to desecrate, to violate and to defile, and I have no doubt that our present trend is profaning our two most sacred trusts: each other, and the environment.

A sacred space can be literal or figurative. There are sacred spaces, and holy ways of being. Those spaces may be comprised of nothing more than benevolent sensibilities, kind and generous ways of being with self, with others, and with the environment. I didn’t mention ‘with God’ only because if you are kind to yourself, gentle with others, and respectful of the environment, having touched all these bases, you’re sure to be right with God.

The royal route for entering sacred spaces is to become aware, conscious of what is. One of the popular means of that search begins with smelling the flowers. Flowers are almost universally present.

When I commuted to Washington years ago, I’d take New York Avenue. In the windows of the stately old row houses that had fallen into disrepair and were inhabited by poor and disenfranchised people. I’d be surprised to see so many window flower boxes, obviously tended and glorifying as much as they could this, the desperate landscape. The flowers invoked the holy in the lives of those whose lives were being profaned.

We see flowers everywhere. They adorn almost every social occasion, whether a dinner party or a wake; they offer grace and beauty to our rites of passage, from celebration to mourning, and they keep us mindful of the one inscrutable mystery of life that ensures our future: the magical business of the birds and the bees.

I cannot think of one flower that is not beautiful. Ever watch a child pick a dandelion and ceremoniously present to you as a present? This is a sacred moment. The combined beauty of the simple dandelion and the child’s expression of anticipation is exquisite beyond words.

Where there is hate there is evil and suffering. Where there is holiness, there is beauty and healing. Where there is truth there is beauty, holiness and healing.

The present social atmosphere has grown toxic with brutal words and vengeful deeds. It’s not easy to remain focused on what ennobles us and affirms life. St. Paul had an idea about that. He put it this way and I believe it still holds:

“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

What we think about will direct how we act.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist.  A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.

Media reports suggest an economic upturn, even increased employment, while at the same time, reports also indicate that the nation’s social fabric is unraveling. What’s going on?

Are there two issues running concurrently in our country? It seems counter-intuitive to me to believe that a rising economy with improved employment would not stem the grievances being aired about our adversarial way of life? Still, there’s no doubt that we Americans are feeling less safe. Chronic lying and relentless character assassinations by our leaders are creating tension and encouraging distrust of our neighbors, both native born and immigrants. It’s very common to hear people say they feel helpless.

It’s not a new thought that man does not live by bread alone.

In a recent column, conservative pundit George Will described what he sees as the modern dilemma with which we live today.

He notes how the nation’s most-discussed political problem is entangled with the least understood public health problem. “The political problem is a furious partisanship. The public health problem is loneliness . . . Americans are richer, more informed and ‘connected’ than ever while unhappier, more isolated and less fulfilled.”
There’s something to this. Insurance giant Cigna conducted a survey to explore Americans’ mental states to see if they correlated with our physical health concerns. The survey revealed complaints of loneliness by 48 percent of Americans. Baby boomers scored 42 points. Members of generation Z born between the mid-nineties and early two thousand said they felt lonely and isolated and that their relationships were not meaningful.

There’s an old story about a team of technical advisors dispatched from the states to a Polynesian island in the Pacific. They went to help with agriculture. The natives’ lives were oriented around watering their crops that grew in fields on top of a hill. Their water came from a river below flowing in the valley. Irrigating required enormous effort and took almost the entire tribe’s time. Buckets of water were carried up the mountain daily.

The team saw immediately how labor intensive their lives were. They knew ways in which they could reduce the burden of labor and time the natives spent in tending their crops – simply by mechanizing the delivery of water to the crops. Pumps were brought in and pipes laid so the water could be efficiently delivered, leaving the natives with the kind of leisure time they’d not known before.

After the irrigation system was up and running, the natives grew bewildered.

Soon, unprecedented behavior appeared among the members of the native community. Children began to defy their elders. The men began drinking. Spousal abuse became endemic. Fights were frequent and a murder occurred, the first in tribal memory. An attitude of malcontent and malaise began pervading the lives of natives who once lived satisfying lives by sharing in the manual task of watering their crops.

Watering the crops by hand was far more than just work or even survival. Men and women talked to and connected with each other daily while they went up and down the hill. The children worked along with elders, everyone was integrated into a way of life that had meaning well beyond the particular task of feeding themselves. From one point of view, with mechanized irrigation the natives never had it so good. What nobody had foreseen, however, was how this arduous but well-functioning way of life that brought peace and harmony to the community had been decimated with what we, by western standards, would call progress.

The team had their hearts in the right place but they lacked understanding of the values natives held and how critical this difficult work was to their way of life. Labor was playing the determining role in creating social cohesion and community, more than the attempts to bring progress did.

Trump has, by word, deed and innuendo, legitimized hatred, and has bred a brutal climate that polarizes our citizens. It’s become a way of life. My question is if economic and employment improve, will our social climate grow kinder and gentler, or is there something else fueling the hostile climate? I believe that the president by his leadership has drawn from the social order, all the toxins that had been latent or partially contained. Instead of using the power of the presidency to mitigate these harmful toxins for the common good, he has exacerbated the toxicity to serve his own purposes. Congressional republicans don’t seem at all troubled.

A way of life, rooted in basic human values can sustain a community though the most difficult times. Consider the remarkable story of the Amish community.

In October of ’06 a small Amish community in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania was stricken with a horror of unimaginable proportion. Ten Amish children were killed in their school in a mass shooting. Only five survived. There have been more shootings in the twelve years since the one in the tiny Pennsylvania village, some with much higher death tolls. But the Amish school shooting moved our country in a way other shootings had not. The attacker preyed on the most innocent and defenseless members of a bucolic and pacifist religious community. Within hours, the Amish announced they had forgiven him. This reaction of the Amish community stunned those familiar only with the Amish rejection of modern technology. Many were unaware of the community’s deep faith and how it guides their daily lives. In the face of unspeakable tragedy and violence a community that cultivated essential goodness, although bloodied, survived with grace and dignity.

Their way of life helped to heal the community, even the family of the perpetrator.

The Amish forgave the man who killed five of their children. They embraced the man’s widow to comfort her. The community responded not with rancor, anger or hatred. They responded with love and forgiveness. Not only does character count but it may be the singularly greatest asset in sustaining community life.

“We have to forgive,” said Aaron Beiler, 66, whose farm is just a few miles away from Nickel Mines where the shooting took place.

I often wonder if I would have had the moral fiber and the depth of character to meet such tragedy with that kind of grace and magnanimity. The truth is that many Amish did feel just such outrage because they are, like all of us, human. Brutal and retaliatory instincts exist in all of us. We are both lamb and lion; whichever one is regularly fed and encouraged, takes us over. Managing our instincts is a matter of our values. The more humane values guiding a way of life can transform the raging inner landscape of pain, anger, and vengefulness first into one of sadness and mourning, and finally into forgiveness.

I propose that the real challenge for Americans today may be less about money and jobs, than the way of life we’re beginning to settle for.

Without a vision, the people perish.

Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist.  A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.