History is replete with moments of intervention. As children at play, we were always the "white guys," of course, who were engaged in the noble enterprise of spreading American Progress across the untamed wilderness. We often found ourselves bogged down, surrounded by savages, that relentless threat to our Western European Order and Goodness. At the last minute they arrived—yes, the US cavalry, spiffy in blue and yellow; once again they saved the day.
Even today that “cavalry” moment remains as a metaphor in our lives: The email inviting us back to work, the promotion and a warm handshake from the boss, the divine intervention that puts the "Lord’s Cougars" over those pesky Redskins once again.
This human dynamic of survivor and rescue-angel helps me piece together what I believe is the divine pattern in all our lives. In films it’s “fate,” or “serendipity. For Old Son” [my dear friend, Alan Keele, suggests a better blog title-- “Old Son Shines.”] Thank you, friend, because this meditation is a sunny piece, hopefully evoking a miracle moment in our lives that helped make us who/what we have become. Have you noticed these angels are most often an anonymous bystanders? Of course, relatives, friends or family members step into the middle of our personal tsunami and pull us out, gasping for breath, to safety and warm sand on the beach of deliverance.
Few of us, for example, would find the summer of 1766 of importance, unless as a family history researcher you finally find great grandfather Jose Gomez’ birthday was that very day: June 22nd, in a little village outside Monterrey. For you, 1766 has become personal.
For us few, “we happy few” that day in June was the moment Henry and Hester Thrale found an emotionally prostrate Samuel Johnson in the throes of a nervous breakdown, desperately gripping a very confused Minister Delap’s leg. The Thrales, who had known this giant, awkward, terribly scarred genius for more than two years and just happened to stop by for a short visit, scooped him up without comment and rushed him to their rolling estate, Streatham Place. In the words of W. Jackson Bate, they “did more than ‘contribute’ to the restoration of his health. They made it possible." No, Mr. Bate, they did even more: They saved for hundreds of thousands of reader-disciples over the next 250 years the finest mind in the Western World. Scholars will want to arm wrestle me over this statement, but all the literati agree Johnson was the most brilliant conversationalist in all of Europe. The guy selling papers in his Times Square stand may not know all the words, but he knows the sentiment of, say, Johnson’s remark about a second marriage after a tempestuous first marriage that only Sophia and Lev Tolstoy’s uncivil war could match: “A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.”
Usually these lifesavers, angels of intervention, remain virtually unconscious of their heroism, or, certainly, of the long term, eternal impact of such rescue on the “saved” and those who are and become part of that survival.
What about the guys who put together the technology that saved the Chilean miners? How will survival echo through their progeny in a 100 years? Is there a journalist, poet, doctor or the finest plumber Santiago will ever know awaiting arrival on Mother Earth? What of the team that developed the technology to rescue “Baby Jessica” and the brave soul who climbed through that plastic tube [allow me this pause to hyperventilate; I don’t even trust elevators] to pluck her to safety? And what of the man who, while battling terminal cancer, developed the P-51--the airplane that won the war. Yes, we are skipping over the 36,000 airmen who died in the war and the thousands who returned, scarred, scared and never the same.
What about the now nameless African American who reached over the seat and restrained [my violent Other Self wanted him to knock the man out with one blow] the terrorist with the dynamite underwear? He said or sort of whispered his almost apologetic heroics. His style reminds us of the guy walking home from work who sees a burning apartment, steps under the window and catches a flying baby dropped to miraculous safety by a valiant mother willing/hoping at least the child would live. A dozen times I watched that YouTube “catch” so perfectly executed. “Oh, I don’t know," he echoes the airline passenger Knight in Armor who constrained the guy with the Fruit of the Loom bomb. “I saw someone in trouble and just kind of figured I needed to make a soft, cradle-like catch.” Don’t tell me about The Catch [Willie Mays made]. And our too-soon-to-be-forgotten angels? They disappear into the crowd, for, as they say, they were just "taking care of business.”
We must in those “midnight moments” of which Neal Maxwell spoke, meditate on the downstream effect of someone’s survival who is now in your life. Let your mind unwind like a spool of thread, asking yourself as you inventory those people in your life how different and blessed you are because of them. What if, as Emily Dickinson says, they had been “subtracted” from your life by some “rude arithmetic?"
There are two ways to do this: Keep it personal and heart-felt; or, count the cost, with what John Stuart Mill called Utilitarianism. All ethical/physical acts of courage boil down to arithmetic: The greatest happiness for the greatest number. Here’s one for you...
You see a house burning; knowing the floor plan, you realize the nursery is on the first floor, where a baby sleeps; the rented apartment is on the second floor, where the local Catholic priest resides, ministering to a small flock of people in spiritual need. You can only save one. Which one? Why?
Now in my winter years, I play this meditation game several hours a day. Some might call it a form of prayer, pondering or just a wave of healthy daydreaming. How many people changed my spiritual direction? Saved me from intellectual starvation? Who entrusted me with thousands of students over 40 years? And where are they now? Three are on the BYU-I faculty, but I wonder about the hoards of now nameless humans, the less brilliant, perhaps, the restless and sometimes the lost. You never know as a teacher. The brightest, the one who always looked bored, ended up researching for the Supreme Court. How do we know? On a bitter-cold night in the Wyoming Wind River country in a little farmhouse, does a woman reach for Anna Karenina and say, “Yes, I’m in the mood to follow this woman once again.. all the way home.”
My list grows. I want to slip into the late 40s where I could surmise thickness in terms of the Sears Catalog. But alas. . . I would have to settle with an analogy using RAM or BYTES, etc.
Before turning to the bell lap of this meandering meditation, I am blessed to speak as an intervener. During the Christmas holidays in 1947, my brother Gene and I walked over to the annual set-up of a giant Colorado Spruce, brought down from the imperial Sierra Nevadas 40 miles away from Bishop, where we were growing up in a Huck Finn world.
We huddled around a small fire, feeding it with odds and ends of lumber from the project. Looking down, I saw his pants aflame. I grabbed him, rolled him over a couple of times and patted out the fire. He suffered terrible burns on his leg but he was never close to death. Someone else would have saved him, perhaps faster. Over the years, however, I have thought about Mother Nature’s “rude subtraction.” What of the echo effect of his life? On family? On students? On fellow church members and neighbors? On me? What of that brother who wrote both study guide and all the quizzes on Homer’s Odyssey when little Lonesome Dove’s wings were broken again?
What then is the impact value-loss when people in our lives now had not ever been there? I know we’re not quite on the verge of Christmas and Bedford Falls, but give it a thought this week. How much richer is your life because of someone else? We could begin with the absurdity of measuring parental impact. Yes, sometimes for more bad than good. I just read that Steve Jobs never could square with a dad who apparently did not claim him, leading, I guess, to adoption. Wow! Is there a message to those who grow up in what we these days so off-handedly call a dysfunctional family?
Trace the centrifugal pattern of impact on rescue-angel and survivor, a sacred synergy, and the countless thousands who reap the legacy of courage, that moment, for example, when a self-effacing pilot drops an airliner onto the Potomac, like an autumn leaf floating slowly down to a slow-flowing brook.
Our inner ring moves to siblings, then extended family, then beyond, to dear friends. To the guy who brought the huckleberry pie when the days were dark, or the neighbor couple who showed up that April day we decided to settle Carolyn in an assisted care facility? Or poet-scholars who wrote to me and called me and walked the precious miles around the campus, deep into TS Eliot—and the Red Sox. What of that couple in another state who often pulled into the driveway in time to offer a little Balm of Gilead; or the couple who choose to grace Carolyn’s funeral in the middle of a move to another state. Let’s don’t forget the tons of Relief Society-inspired food. What of the emails, of books, of those small, intimate study groups which ranged from a duet to a half a dozen. What Matthew Arnold called the “sweetness and Light” filled our hearts and minds, quietly uniting us in a kind of collective gratitude for the men and women, though often plagued by Babylon who blessed generations with their words. However, looking back now, years later, the groups seem to have been more about the readers than the readings.
Here the list begins to unravel into the eternities. And what of the hundreds of prayers, or of those nameless drivers who still say, “I passed your house and thought of you;" “we talked about that time you. . . ” Then the struggling with this project, which is an exercise of your patience, and the kind comment from a life-long colleague: “Larry’s in the halls again.”
Perhaps that’s what we all hope or at least expect/suspect about eternity. Forever to engage in the endless project of creating poems and reading them. Remember, there must be an audience, a congregation for a poem or a speech to happen. What other eternal projects? Edifices, sculpture, art and music [yes, there will be music constantly], and athleticism and craftsmanship of all kinds. And First and Last: The story of “Christ and Him crucified," as Paul assures us; a world where, as Emerson says, “All [is] in All.”
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