Should I Be Doing Something about This?
The inner life and action
Like many people, I’ve spent the last week wondering if there is something I should be doing, given the speed with which the new occupant of the White House has been dropping signatures on the Resolute Desk like housefly carcasses. I have a restless urge to sweep.
That’s not the only sign of rapid change.
cautioned that “VUCA times — ‘Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous’” could present triggers to depression. A post titled “What you can do / Ten ways to resist Trump II” by the bestselling political writer has received over 7,700 Likes and 1,700 Restacks since it was published just five days ago.I consult my inner life for guidance. What is my inner life but the accumulation of stories, beliefs, hopes, and experiences refracted through my temperament? When I consider stepping up my political activism, the first stories that come to mind cancel each other out:
The Good Samaritan - The good neighbor helps strangers in need.
Bleak House - Mrs. Jellyby’s philanthropic work causes her to neglect the care of her children. (I have children.)
Then there are the cases of Martha and Mary in the Gospel of Luke. When Jesus visits their home, Mary sits at the visitor’s feet and listens to him, while Martha grows angry that her idle sister is not helping with women’s work. Jesus famously admonishes busy Martha that Mary has “chosen the better part.” Could it be possible that my urge to sweep something will not actually solve what I want to solve? How does one know when to listen quietly, and when to take action?
I put the question to others on Substack Notes: When chaos seems to gain the upper hand in the world, how do you decide which actions to take, and when?
() is giving her attention to people in her community and their small, local acts of humanity (“What do we do now?”). () is allowing her primal feelings to surface and prioritizing “the deeper, majestic nature within life, within myself” (“Reclaiming the divine feminine amidst the chaos”).1Stories I trust for their wisdom swirl in the mind, advising me this way or that.
What feels right to me at this moment is to maintain my ordinary activities as a mother, homeowner, professor, and writer, aware of my surroundings. That is already a handful. A well-formed inner life can stay alert for new information while engaged in ordinary, local activity. Wise action proceeds from conscious silences. I tune the frequency of my quiet time to stories. I draw characters close to me for company and resolve.
The rules
In Jason Reynolds’s multi-award-winning young adult (YA) novella of 2017, Long Way Down, a boy named Will reacts swiftly to trouble when it finds him. His way lacks reflection. This is not the way to act in a crisis.
Not far into the novella, Will gets into the elevator of his apartment building with a gun, intent on killing the person he believes murdered his brother. He is only following “the rules” of his family and neighborhood: Don’t cry. Don’t snitch. Take revenge. The answer to trouble is more trouble.
It’s not just “revenge” that receives critical pressure in the story, but also the moral absolutism of “rules” themselves. By the time Will learns that the rules have cost him his father, among other casualties, the reader is watching him for any signs of independent thought. What’s at issue is Will’s freedom as a human being. Is he caught in the web of stultifying “rules” written by someone in the obscure past, or will he think for himself?
A moral being must have freedom to put rules to the test and choose action.
In our time, firm scripts on the political left and right direct actions (of protest or submission) like Will’s rules. Long Way Down reminds us that our free choice comes before loyalty to our ideology or tribe. Whatever we find to do in these times must be at least part improvisation.
The neighbor
Undoubtedly you know at least a portion of the parable of the Good Samaritan. A man is robbed and beaten on the steep road from Jerusalem to Jericho, and two other men pass — a priest and an official of the temple — before the third one stops to help. The Samaritan bandages the stranger’s wounds, loads him onto his donkey, and pays for his care at an inn. The moral is clear to every schoolchild: Be kind. Intervene. Do not turn a blind eye to suffering.
But the gospel-writer, Luke, surrounds the Samaritan parable with an important framing device. What appears to be the story of a righteous act quietly becomes a story of righteous attitude. This makes a difference if we are studying the Good Samaritan story as an exemplary tale. We get to decide which moral to follow.
The frame begins in chapter ten, verse twenty-five, when “an expert in the Law” (New International Version) tests Jesus with a question, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus asks him what he has read about that, and the legal expert recites the first two commandments: Love God and neighbor. “And who is my neighbor?” the man presses further. After a pause, Jesus begins the parable.
Whereas the legal expert wants a definition of his neighbor, Jesus instead shows him a manner of behavior that would make a person neighborly to others. He makes the story about “I,” not “the other.” As theologian Ceslas Spicq points out, neighborliness is not established by geography or ethnicity but by action and attitude. The Samaritan “both felt and behaved as a neighbor to the wounded man; charity, then, makes of a stranger a neighbor. By love we become brothers of all men ….”2
To see if the lawyer understands his shift in the meaning of “neighbor,” Jesus follows the parable with a question that any school-child could answer: “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” In the last verse,
The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”
Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”
In Luke’s frame story, Jesus proposes a radical reinterpretation of the second commandment from the beginning of the story, when the lawyer wishes to establish “who counts” in legal terms, to the end, which envisions a merciful, neighborly attitude toward all people.
Whether the man of law accepts the command or simply goes away, fuming, we do not know from Luke. We do know, however, from William Shakespeare, that this story’s lesson traveled down the centuries. The Christian Portia explains to the Duke in The Merchant of Venice that “earthly power doth then show likest God’s / When mercy seasons justice” (Act IV, scene i). To a man whose business is justice, Jesus teaches his questioner in Luke, let mercy permeate all you do.
The present
“Mom, ice is coming to Caldwell!” my daughter shouted. She stormed down the hall with furious footfalls.
“Good morning,” I answered, stalling for time while I tried to reconcile her tone of outrage with the observation she had just made about the weather thirty miles from us. Was she hoping school would be cancelled?
My mental gears whirred — and clicked. She was not talking about the weather. She meant ICE. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. La Migra. Coming to the agricultural end of our valley. I pretended I had understood her all along.
“Trump is gonna deport people!” she continued.
“Some people evidently want him to do that.”
My lack of surprise or outrage was making her angrier. She wanted me to say, “Those bastards!”
But I was asking myself more practical questions. What should I do about the humanitarian crisis that threatened? Should I cancel our schedules for the day and drive down the valley looking for families to shelter in our home? I felt immediately that would be too much. Even the Good Samaritan did not veer from the path of his regular business by more than footsteps.
Later that day, my teen updated me on the news again, still angry. “They’re going to hospitals and schools to find people!” she exclaimed, horrified. “Hospitals!”
“Here in Idaho?”
“No, Chicago. Other places. They went to a school but they wouldn’t let them in.”3
“They? Who wouldn’t let them in?”
“The teachers. The school.”
“Yay, teachers and administrators!” I cheered. “That’s the spirit!”
Now, what was I making for dinner — burritos or pasta? I seasoned the meat with compassion and mercy. For the moment, mercy came down to us as a timely and nutritious meal for a family.4
The Schindlers
Since my daughter mentioned the Trump deportations over breakfast, all day I’d been preoccupied with Oskar Schindler and the Speilberg movie Schindler’s List.
Emilie Schindler wrote that her husband Oskar “was not a hero, and neither was I. We only did what we had to.” They bought the factory near the Jewish ghetto in Poland without any plan to save Jews. As Hitler’s abuses became more obvious, they changed their plans to meet the exigency of the moment. Instead of profiting from cheap Jewish labor making goods for the Reich, they used the factory to harbor 1,200 Jews as “essential” workers, trading personal possessions on the black market to procure food for everyone. At first, they did not veer from the path of regular business by more than footsteps.
In high school, when a teacher lobbed an ethical problem out into the classroom for discussion, it seemed that there were two kinds of people, the altruists and the self-interested. The altruists would go to any length to do good works. The self-interested would go to any length to protect their status quo.
I don’t have to be an altruist. I can go about my regular activities. But that’s not a fixed rule. It’s just a choice for now. Your choice might be different. Mine might be different if you ask me again.
Thank goodness we are free to choose where to channel our energies. For the moment, that is the paramount thing.
Thank you to
for the invitation to contribute to this week’s Inner Life! My newsletter, Quiet Reading with Tara Penry, features original reflections on our common humanity inspired by books and other marvels.Other wise responses to my question came from
(laughter), (consult the body, mind, and emotions together), (energy work and Human Design), (remember transience and look for grace). and are attending to these topics, too.Ceslas Spicq, Agape in the New Testament, Volume 1: Agape in the Synoptic Gospels (Wipf and Stock, 1963), p. 111. We can safely update the language “brothers of all men” to “brothers and sisters of all people” without damage to the author’s point.
Later in the day, Chicago school officials and the U.S. Secret Service told journalists the school visit was not from ICE but from the Secret Service, investigating a threat to someone under Secret Service protection (ABC News article). Although ICE did not seek entry to a Chicago school last Friday, the Trump Administration has rescinded rules that formerly prevented immigration arrests near schools and churches.
A point from
’s recent Inner Life interview with Mary Tabor is relevant here. About life incidents that lead us to new states of awareness, Kimberly said, “[U]ntil there's a readiness in our body, mind and spirit, I sometimes think we close the doors before we even know that they've been inched open.” That very point might be made about the timing of new actions, altruistic or otherwise, that arise from our undivided selves.
I've been talking about all of this with my 12 yr old. She is quite aggrieved about the binary gender rule. But she was saying in the car, after driving home from a night out, that nothing she could do would make a difference. Ever since then I've been encouraging her to find ways to use her voice. We might start with a letter to the editor, but remaining engaged with things that matter to her, including her LGBTQ club, is still a way to use her voice.
Your point about not veering too many steps out of the usual path is so important. I'd talk to my students often about climate change. Activists would have us believe that it is the great moral issue of our time, of a scale that justifies enormous personal sacrifice. We'd watch the documentary about Tim DeChristopher, a young person who tried to defend a wild place by fraudulently bidding on several parcels of land that were up for public lease. He went to prison for his actions -- a sacrifice that I could not justify as a father.
I'm also mindful of how similar the playbook for legalizing gay marriage was to your blueprint here. It was not the zero sum struggle that we see playing out now in American politics (with alarming echoes of the Middle East). It was a nudge toward common ground, a reminder that everyone had a brother, niece, aunt or uncle, or cousin who was denied a basic civil right. There was almost no sacrifice required in that case, just a simple shift in thinking: oh, right, people I love are affected by this. It's one of the only recent benchmarks of social progress that I feel is worth emulating.
I've been talking about exactly this--almost your whole essay here--with everyone I can get to tell me what they're thinking. What you wrote here defines who you are and the very fact that you, Tara, are doing something.
Yesterday was Holocaust Memorial Day--and it seemed as if nobody noticed. I was thinking about this quote about our need to "do something". The quote is inscribed on the Holocaust Memorial in D.C.:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller