How to Be a Human

Renewing our sense of the sacred amid MAGA's campaign of desecration...

Photo of Gunflint Lake by Sharon L. Palmer.

For the past forty years, I’ve been self-employed as a writer and traveling teacher. Unfortunately, my employer is a curmudgeon who’s loath to grant sabbaticals. But at age 86, I have enough reasons for taking one that the old codger has grudgingly agreed to give me a month off—so I’m sneaking out before he changes his mind. I’ll return to Substack on Friday, Sept. 26.

I hope to spend part of my sabbatical in a place where I can rest at the edge of the woods and eavesdrop on the ancient conversation between those old friends, the lake and the land. I’m eager to follow Wendell Berry’s advice to “Sit down. Be quiet.”, as offered in a poem that might as well be titled, “How to Be a Human.” And I look forward to returning to this online community which I’ve come to value a great deal, despite its dependence on “wires and screens!”

Before I go, a few words about why I regard taking “sabbath time” as the foundation of nonviolent political resistance as well as an act of self-care. Years ago, I found a passage in Thomas Merton’s journal, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, that speaks to me as clearly today as it did back then, maybe more so:

There is a pervasive form of modern violence to which the idealist…most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralizes his [or her] work… It destroys the fruitfulness of his [or her]…work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. —Thomas Merton

Merton wrote those words in the mid-1960s, when the nonviolent peace and justice activists who looked to him for guidance were working nonstop to end the Vietnam War and establish civil- and voting-rights as the law of the land. He worried that the movement had become so obsessed with political action that it risked killing off its contemplative roots and the spirits of its practitioners. “True self,” as Merton called it, has the capacity to guide us through all kinds of madness—but when we fall into frenzy, it goes into hiding.

Today, millions of us who abhor MAGA and all it stands for suffer from the soul-sucking frenzy Merton warned us about. In doing so, we fall prey to the strategy of manipulation that one of MAGA’s overlords announced in 2018. MAGA will win, he said, with on-brand crudeness, if “we flood the zone with s _ _ t.” Why? To keep the rest of us so distracted, confused, and worn out that we fail to push back on MAGA’s crimes against all that is holy.

Here’s a principle I’ve learned the hard way: when someone tries to twist me into whatever they need me to be or do to serve their purposes, the answer is NO! That’s my response of MAGA’s effort to grind us down into servility. It’s also my response to MAGA’s efforts to divide and conquer us, and to con us into accepting what they’re doing as the new normal. No, no, no! Everything MAGA needs me to be and do if they are to win this fight for the nation’s soul goes against the grain of my soul.

But staying in touch with the soul’s imperatives amid MAGA’s madness is not easy, surrounded as we are by conspiracy junkies, social media that serve as Petri dishes for viral falsehoods and toxins, and mass media that collaborate with MAGA’s agenda. This is where the poets (and other artists) come to our rescue. As William Carlos Williams wrote, “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men [and women] die / miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”

Photo from Dreamstime—photographer unknown.

What’s found in Wendell Berry’s “How to Be a Poet” is, of course, a call to step away from noise and frenzy—from anything that distorts the soul’s truth—and step into the simplicity and silence that make it possible to hear the still, small voice of true self. To which I say, “Amen.” But for me, the poem’s most arresting lines are these: “There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places.”

The “sacred” as I understand it is not tied to a particular creed. The sacred is found in whatever is worthy of reverence and respect. I think, for example, of the wilderness areas where I’ve been privileged to spend time. In boreal forests, on the desert, in the mountains and on the coasts, there are places where you can still see the earth in near-pristine glory. To all who have a heart, the earth itself is sacred.

So it’s hard to describe the gut-punch I experienced on a 2017 visit to the wilderness known as the Boundary Waters, when I saw that a MAGA barbarian had stripped the bark from a large tree to emblazon the words, “T _ _ _ P WON!” on its trunk. That’s the essence of desecration: to defile a living truth with an obscenity in a way that maims it and may well kill it.

Desecration is one of MAGA’s deadliest weapons on its march to domination. Think of all they are desecrating in the U.S. these days: •The dignity, sanctity and basic rights of entire groups of people. •Trust between family members, friends and neighbors. •Fair and free elections, accessible to all who are eligible. •Our humanitarian obligations to those who suffer, at home and abroad. •The hard-won insights of generations of scientists and scholars. •Human health and the health of the natural world. •Facts, reason and truth itself. And all of this is driven by an obscene white supremacist ideology that maims and kills all that is sacred—aided and abetted by self-described “people of faith” whose idolatry and hypocrisy knows no bounds.

The sacred is always with us, everywhere, all the time—but only for those who have “eyes to see and ears to hear.” In this era of nonstop MAGA assaults on all that is holy, it’s temping to close our eyes and cover our ears to avoid feeling the pain of all that is dying. Sabbath time allows us to sit quietly in the presence of that which is wondrous, opening our eyes, ears and hearts as fully as we can, so we can bring that vulnerability back to our life and work in a wounded world.

We cannot escape the pain of desecration by hiding out from it—sooner or later, it will rise up and take us down. We need to take the world’s pain in and transform it by saying NO to the desecrators and YES to the wonders within us and around us. We must protect all that is worthy of reverence and respect against the assaults of MAGA’s walking dead. Being alive is a sacred trust that can be honored only by passing the gift of life along, refusing to let death have the final word. That, it seems to me, is how to be a human.

[NOTES: You can listen to Wendell Berry read his poem HERE. My 10 books are HERE and HERE. The Center for Courage & Renewal is HERE. I post on Substack every Friday, as time and energy allow. Free as well as paid subscriptions will always have access to everything I post. See you again on Sept. 26!]