Decmber 2022
15 Minute Read | Volume 1. Issue 7.
15 Minute Read
Volume 1. Issue 7.
“Hey guy!”
Those were the words that a mustached older gentleman yelled at me while I was doing some final Thanksgiving shopping in a Fred Myers grocery (the grocery store in the Pacific Northwest—it was to my utter shock and horror as a kid when my California relatives informed me it did not exist in their state). We had traveled to Washington state to see my family for Thanksgiving and my wife, one-year old daughter, and I were still coming off the time-warp sensation one feels when they travel across our vast country. And now, to add to the dysphoria, this ominous and mysterious figure loomed before me.
Those who know me well know I despise shopping. When I go into a store, I have one mission: get in and out as fast as possible. Naturally, this day was no different, so I proposed a divide and conquer strategy to my wife. She would give me items to hunt down in the grocery which I’d quickly obtain like a faithful golden retriever. I had just fetched some black beans and returned to my family in the fruit section when the mysterious man announced himself. We stared at each other. Time slowed.
Do I know this guy? He wasn’t jogging the memory banks. Then I thought about my attire, I was wearing a Washington Huskies sweatshirt, and a week earlier I’d watched my beloved alma mater put up 400+ yards through the air on the Oregon Ducks. It was a glorious victory over our hated rival in Autzen Stadium in Eugene. Perhaps this man was a disgruntled Duck fan, enraged at the Washington beat down his team had received. I envisioned him taking a swing at me. Then I’d tackle him into the apple stand while moms throughout Fred Myer watched in horror as we slugged it out, fruit debris flying haphazardly through the air.
Instead, the man finally said, “How’d a guy like you end up with these two beautiful gals?”
I was still reeling from my imagination’s wild fruit-stand dust-up and responded with some nervous laughter and a “I don’t know, I’m truly blessed.”
He chuckled, then said, “Happy Thanksgiving,” and walked away. My wife and I laughed about the experience and continued shopping. But the man’s words stuck with me.
Mansions
1.
by Matt Hartley
2022 has been one of the more incredible years of my life. It’s been my first full year with one of my new best friends, my one-year-old daughter, Harper. I watched the miracle of life take form in her, saw a personality begin to emerge, and experienced the unconditional love parents have for their kids. I got to see my wife as a mom for the first time and observe the beautiful new shades of her character that developed as a result. I started a new job at a company I’m excited about that I believe has big prospects ahead. And I co-founded this publication with my good friend, Jean-Luc Currie.
This is our seventh issue and it’s been fun to look back and reflect on what we’ve done so far. And in that introspection, it’s brought me face to face with one of the driving forces behind this project: ambition.
It’s a funny thing, ambition. It can provide the fuel needed to work harder and enable you to push past your perceived limits. But it can also lead into dark, selfish areas of character. When I’m honest, in the rawest sense of the word, and look at the motivations that sometimes drive me, I have to acknowledge that they’re not always good. Sometimes it’s simply because I want to be perceived as someone who’s done something great. And through that greatness obtain wealth, control, and influence. But when I’m fueled by this sort of ambition, it often leads to dramatic mood swings when hours of effort collapse into failure.
During our visit to the Northwest, my wife and I spent a day enjoying Portland. We went to the rose garden in Washington Park that overlooks downtown and gazes towards the eastern Cascade Mountain range. We wandered the surrounding historic neighborhoods where literal castles and architectural marvels owned by the old-money and elite of the Rose City stand proud on the hillside. Even though I grew up in the region, I’d never explored these neighborhoods and my jaw dropped as I stared at their expansive, intricate designs. They sat perched on the hill overlooking the Willamette Valley like the gods’ throne room on Mount Olympus. And as we walked the streets, I fantasized and dreamed of owning one myself.
I’d host friends and family (generous with my wealth of course) for a holiday feast–the buffet table strategically positioned near a wide window displaying the city below. People would meander through the vast hallways thinking as they explored, wow, Matt really made something of himself. How quickly our imagination can lead us into sickening displays of ego.
So, as we wandered this majestic neighborhood, staring at homes I’d never be able to afford ($2 million was the low end, the internet informed us), suddenly the memory of our grocery store visit popped back into my head. And the peculiar old man who reminded me I’ve already got it made. How quickly I’d forgotten the great treasure of my family. Such is the human experience.
Earlier in our Portland adventure, we swung by Powell’s Books – an iconic site that claims to be the largest used bookstore in the world. If you’re a reader, it’s easy to get lost in the labyrinth of book-stacked shelves and multiple floors of the store. I picked up a memoir by a monk named Thomas Merton called “The Seven Story Mountain” in which Merton reflects on his lifelong spiritual journey to know God.
Early in his life, Merton was fueled by a deep ambition to be great and experience all that the world had to offer. He directed himself towards the highest realms of intellectual achievement studying first at Cambridge, then Columbia, to pursue an education he hoped would lead to a career as a prolific writer, poet, or professor. But the more he sought to achieve these aims, the more unsatisfied he became. Merton writes:
“I had at last become a true child of the modern world, completely tangled up in petty and useless concerns with myself, and almost incapable of even considering or understanding anything that was important to my own true interests. Here I was, scarcely four years after I had left Oakham and walked out into the world that I thought I was going to ransack and rob of all its pleasures and satisfactions. I had done what I intended, and now I found that it was I who was emptied and robbed and gutted. What a strange thing! In filling myself, I had emptied myself. In grasping things, I had lost everything. In devouring pleasures and joys, I had found distress and anguish and fear.”
Here I was in Portland, home to corporate juggernaut Nike where slogans like “Greatness is not born, it is made” and “What you do is up to you. Just do it”, would spur me on to try and one day obtain one of these glorious mansions on the hill. Yet Merton’s wisdom quietly spoke of the ends of such self-centered pursuits. I could spend years working to amass the wealth needed to purchase such a home only to find like the monk did that “in grasping things, I had lost everything.”
So fittingly in the Thanksgiving season, God sent a messenger to me (in the grocery section of Fred Myers of all places) to remind me to be grateful for what He has given to me. A beautiful family, good friends, a job, a home, and so many other things that would turn this essay into something far too long to read.
I had a pastor who once told me, “For the Christian, there’s no such thing as coincidence.” So on the plane ride home when a cowboy from Eastern Oregon sat down in the seat across the aisle, looked at my family, and said, “Son, do you have any idea how blessed you are?” I knew it wasn’t random.
“Yes, I do sir,” I responded. And I meant it.
The first act passed uneventfully, with one exception: when Jacob Marley burst forth from beneath the stage in Scrooge’s bedchamber. He scared every child in the audience and caught the adults by surprise. One woman actually screamed.
So as the play continued, revisiting the familiar story line, I sipped from my overpriced, red-wine-filled plastic cup expecting more of the same—distraction, diversion, even delight. I expected entertainment but nothing overly emotional. I expected to be charmed but never challenged. Amused but never moved. Then suddenly, as the second act began, Dickens’ story forced something out of me. I was moved by Scrooge’s journey from indifference to conviction to despair to love, a journey that struck a chord deeply within me.
At the beginning of the story Scrooge has no love for his fellow characters––indifference is too mild a word to describe his loathing. He says of the poor that it’s better if they die off “...and decrease the surplus population". Then, through the visitation of three spirits, he's forced to reckon with these same people––not as a concepts, but as people. It’s one thing to talk about people conceptually and another thing to meet them individually–– we can only treat people conceptually when we abstract away their individuality.
The simplest way we do this is through sheer volume. One person is an individual, one hundred people is a crowd, but one million people wrecks our ability to identify and value any singular human. If we put enough people together they become nameless and faceless. Group enough people together and they cease to be people and transform into “the poor” or “the homeless” or “Republicans” or “Liberals”, for example, which makes the transition to “Deplorables” or “Libtards” relatively effortless, almost unconscious. Then it’s easy––no, "easy" is the wrong word—Then it's effortless when we do come face-to-face with the individual to dehumanize him or her. Unable to break away from the abstract and recognize their humanity we lose the capacity for recognizing individuality.
The language of statistics aids us in these efforts. We talk about median household incomes, and people above or below a certain threshold. We talk about the “1%” and the “99%”. We talk about normal distributions and averages and confidence levels. And this allows us to distance ourselves from the people those stats represent. As Scrooge learns, “The poor” is general but “Tiny Tim” is specific. “The poor” is a concept, but people aren’t concepts. It seems silly to say, but they’re people. A sample size of one is meaningless in statistics but everything in relationships.
Dostoyevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov that the more we love mankind the less we love man in particular. G.K. Chesterton echoes this by saying that when we embrace mankind, we embrace no man in particular. Said another way, embracing our fellow man conceptually is easy. Embracing the person directly across from us is hard.
A Christmas Carol reminds me of this truth. Reminds me that relationships are inconvenient. That people are frustrating, eccentric, and yes, even poor. Part of the attraction of abstraction is the permission it gives me to pat myself on the back, to tell myself I'm doing OK, to love humanity generally. But how am I loving the individuals around me?
2.
Misanthropy as a
Matter of Abstraction
By Jean-Luc Currie
I tried desperately to keep from sniffling too loud, not wanting the people next to me to know I was crying.
Much less my mother seated beside me. But I wasn’t crying—I was sobbing. Tears poured down my face, tears I refrained from wiping away out of self-consciousness. Snot pooled in my nostrils, and it took all my adult restraint to keep it breaking the dam and pouring forth all over my face. Hence, the surreptitious sniffles whenever the audience applauded or the chorus swelled to an appropriate volume.
The audience was a mix of young and old, and by the second act the former were restless. One boy, about five years-old, began crinkling his water bottle loudly until his mother took it away. I looked around the intimate venue of Denver’s Wolf Theater. Plenty of other children squirmed nervously, their attention spans exhausted long ago. Then I noticed I wasn’t the only one crying. Most adults in the room were sniffling or quickly wiping eyes in the way adults do when they don’t want someone to know they’re crying, attempting to make it look like an itch or a casual wiping of the eyes.
My family was in town for Thanksgiving and I had suggested we see the stage adaptation of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. The Muppets Christmas Carol was a family favorite growing up, so there was sentimental value in returning to the story as a group. However, I had my reservations. Would the live version measure up? It’s hard to outclass the duo of Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit and Michael Cain as Ebenezer Scrooge.
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