Our spiritual problems

Generalizations are always troublesome, but I'll make one anyway, purely anecdotal. For years, I taught an advanced writing course, for some a requirement, for most an option, often enrolling the school's best natural writers. Occasionally, one of the students would be South Korean--not often, because English was, for them, a second language.

One of the assignments was to do an essay having something to do with nature. I'd hand out examples, we'd read through what students had written in previous years, and sometimes even go on excursions out in the country to look and see for ourselves. 

South Korean students had trouble with that assignment. They were always gunners, always industrious, immensely hard-working; but I began to believe--and here too I'm speculating--that while they didn't lack in intelligence, or industry, they didn't have a relationship to nature that most American and Canadian kids did. They didn't have a sense of wide-0pen spaces. 

We had only to take a short walk off campus to be surrounded by open fields and gargantuan skies. To kids who've lived in high rises, amid huge populations, nature doesn't play a starring role, nor even make cameos. 

In a sweet piece of writing last week, NY Times columnist David Brooks looked at an almost hopelessly divided America and suggested that maybe, just maybe, we all need to renew our relationship with nature, the nature of Sitting Bull, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie. Maybe we all should spend more time around a campfire singing "This Land is Your Land."

Okay, it's just a inch or two from goofy--I get that. But I like Brooks, and I held on to the essay because Brooks knows something that I too believe, that our problems, many of them, are spiritual, not material. "Why don't we win in Afghanistan?" "What's with suicide bombers?" "Why would a mother leave her baby behind to kill random Americans?" The problems we face are spiritual problems, and Brooks suggests that those who can lose themselves in our immense natural world--something Americans have done for centuries--may well become better human beings. That's his point, his wish. Like I said, I kept the essay. You can too--read it here. 

Nature's far more fearsome character sits like a brooding giant over south Texas right now, where it's created unparalleled destruction in flood waters that cover everything. Thousands upon thousands are homeless; the nation's fourth-largest city has become a bayou. Still, the rain falls. All the way into Louisiana, floods rage. In the face of nature's brute force and destructiveness, we can only cower. 

But spiritually at least, cowering isn't always a horror. Sometimes, getting down on our knees is a blessing. No one has ever considered us timid and self-effacing. By reputation, Americans are brash and self-possessed. We insist on private property, and the more, the better. 

Nature's lessons--listen to the ancients, our Native brothers and sisters--speak different truths, even in storms and tumult and horrifying destruction. Nature--and Nature's God--insists something altogether different: be still and know.

Yesterday, our 45th President had an opportunity to impart wisdom by way of alleviating suffering, by way of touching the battered lives of countless south Texans. Did he? 

Yes, say his admirers. No, say those who are not.

To a President who seems obsessed with size--big crowds, big hands, big towers, big deals--it seems clear to me after his visit that the rest of us need to be bigger than he is. 

What's happening at this moment in south Texas, what's happened since the advent of Hurricane Harvey, since it first touched ashore, is the spiritual lesson written all over this immense tragedy: there's joy and beauty in love and selflessness. 

If by way of south Texas the President can teach that lesson, he may yet become the leader some so passionately believe him to be.