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The anniversary of January 6, 2021, is upon us. What an occasion to think anew.
Two weeks later, 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman reminded us what a new year could bring. “We can lift our gaze to what is before us,” she told the nation and the world. "America is more than a pride we inherit. It’s the past we step into, and how we repair it."
This new year has begun. Days get imperceptibly longer. Something new emerges, imperceptibly at first—it always does. As people living on the cusp—hopefully, someday this year, stepping out of our Covid time and space warp; hopefully, someday, softening our culture wars; hopefully, somehow, addressing our unique personal challenges—we can see anew in 2022. We can both see what’s up and lift our gaze.
We have choices. We can add to the difficulties of this new emergence or amplify the good that is on its way. To midwife the good, we have to want to help and come from a wise and caring place within us. And we start with small-scale change within—the kinds that we address with the person in the mirror. To start getting us to the good side of the cusp, we go personal and “close in,” as another poet, David Whyte, reminds us.
A few powerful thoughts on the human guidance to lift our gaze and start with inner clarity come from almost 200 years ago. I revisit these thoughts often. William Ellery Channing was a transcendentalist in the Emerson/Thoreau circle and he was the chaplain at the U.S. House of Representatives. His words are timeless and accordingly seem made for this time of transformational possibilities. His formula for right living and happiness includes:
To live content with small means; to see elegance rather than luxury and refinement rather than fashion. To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently and act frankly. To listen to the stars and birds, to babes and sages with open heart.
Whatever new that needs to be born in our ways of being on the planet—commercial/relational, religious/spiritual, governmental/ecological—will be more readily birthed if we pay attention to these ideas.
Some won’t heed Channing’s thoughts, spoken in different forms by many now and ever. They think challenges are on the outside and don’t know they originate in the less visible places within. Some think the old rules apply, and we don’t need the new; some deploy only their ideology.
Humility Over Ideology
But we on the cusp need more humility than ideology. Who fully knows what wants to and needs to emerge? Who is humble enough to inquire rather than pontificate? Who needs to “study harder, think more quietly, act more frankly”? What of Channing’s guidance most applies to us? What courage do we need to muster to look deeper than our normal inner scans?
A renewed state of living and being with each other on this small wondrous planet will never emerge unless we talk, in Channing’s words, more gently, and listen more to each other. He guides us to revamp our communication and attitudes, to be like babes and sages and the stars, metaphors for nature, wisdom, and an innocent newness.
School boards, do your best to listen. Don’t be afraid of the other side—what are they trying to protect that is not so unlike what you want to protect? Family members, where can you reach out, talk gently, listen deeply, and reconnect.
I wrote this sentence in 2011, at another time when I cited Channing: "Our Congressmen and women today are locked in ideological warfare that resembles WWI trench warfare: endless attacks and no movement."
We're 11 years on now. Legislators, get us out of this dead-end lock jam. Please listen to a former chaplain of the Congress–what do the people, not your party, need?
But we won’t wait for legislators—we don't need to. We start at our own idiosyncratic close-in/within places: our attitudes, thinking patterns, our hearts. Channing speaks to us in our work and personal and civic lives.
A good place to start? With Channing one more time: Let’s be worthy more than respectable.
