44

December 6, 2021

In January 1977, Jimmy Carter became president. Two months later “Rocky” won the Best Picture academy award. Elvis Presley died in August. The Yankees won the World Series. Sandy and I met on December 4th at a church Christmas party in Nashville. It’s been 44 years.

It was a cold, drizzly day. I went to a movie with a friend that afternoon, just to get out of my apartment. The story is that I went to the party, hosted by a young-adult group at a nearby parish, because my sister wanted to introduce me to someone else. That didn’t work out. The rest is history.

Some memories fade and slip away, others never die, as in the Marty Robbins tune. We’re left with one choice: move ahead and find joy in the world left to us. We set aside the nightmares, the covid onslaught, the school shootings, the Trump cult’s assault on the Constitution. What’s left is to recognize our place in God’s creation, that is, the intense and graceful complexity of the natural world in which all of us, even the cultists, participate. The joy comes in setting aside our knowledge of evil and understanding our connections, the connections of humanity, with every component of life, which is nature, its scintillating beauty and danger.

I thought of all this when I recalled the work of an odd lot of great men, some famous, others now obscure:  Alexander Humboldt, the German biologist and philosopher, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Perkins, Ernst Haeckel, and John Muir, laid out in Andrea Wulf’s The Invention of Nature.

Humboldt led the way. His research in the first decade of the nineteenth century after five years of travel across Venezuela, the Andes, Mexico, and the U.S., led him to recognize the subtle connectedness of all of nature. In his 1808 essay “Views of Nature,” he described nature as a “web of life,” describing the interdependence of all living things, plants, animals, mankind. Darwin, in Origin of Species, went farther and shattered myths and superstitions about creation as he documented nature’s relentless pace of change.

Their work stunned the contemporary scientific world, and in Darwin’s case outraged religious authorities. Haeckel, Thoreau, Perkins, Muir carried Humboldt’s and Darwin’s teaching forward.  Haeckel, a disciple of Humboldt and Darwin, in 1866 invented the word “ecology.” Together they and others inspired the birth of the modern environmental movement. Perkins, in Man and Nature, and Thoreau’s Walden and The Maine Woods crusaded for protection of wilderness. Thanks to Muir’s nearly singlehanded campaigning, Congress created Yosemite National Park in 1890. They push forward, slowly, against ferocious opposition, awareness of the miracle of the world around us.

Humboldt, the obsessive, driven intellectual, made no allowance in his universe for mystery, for a reality beyond his calculations. Darwin struggled through life with faith, eventually rejecting Christianity and calling himself an agnostic. Thoreau believed in God but was indifferent to organized religion. These groundbreaking crusaders for understanding of the miracles of the natural world left no room for miracles.   

All this occurred to me as our life here along the southern Blue Ridge sped forward to that 44-year milestone. We resolved to think of it as one more starting point into the future. Then too, to see ourselves within the natural world around us, a world of forests, mountains, rushing streams and thundering waterfalls, small towns, and winding country roads. We see the elements of life in this place as Humboldt and his followers saw nature, linked not by accident but by mystery, the mystery of God’s work. So we took Saturday the 4th as a reminder that we’re moving forward, always, seeking joy in the world we see.

Changing scenery, even in small ways and even for a short while, shocks the system. Three years ago we camped at little Red Hills State Park in southern Illinois and at Twin Bridges State Park in northern Oklahoma, where the muddy Neosho River meets the equally brown Spring River. We spent one night in dusty Shamrock, Texas, another in desert just outside Eloy, Arizona. We got a hurried glimpse at newness and strangeness that somehow must fit the world we know.

We find good news. Jimmy Carter, still among us after all these years, elevated the nation’s moral stature, now under attack by enemies of science. We dodged bullets en route to the 44-year mark, like any other couple who gets there and moves beyond it. We looked back at a wild ride: along with four energetic kids, three moves to new states, hundreds of doctor’s appointments, job changes and layoffs, the passing of parents, the loss of siblings before their time.

We didn’t do anything special to mark the date last year. Restaurants were out because of covid. Two days earlier I had an MRI. That followed a CT in mid-November that confirmed the carcinoma found in a CT in October, just before we pulled up stakes in Virginia. Two weeks after the MRI I was in the OR at Greenville Memorial.

So Saturday, to celebrate, we stayed in downtown Greenville. That afternoon we walked around, bought some gifts, watched the Christmas parade, and looked at the lights and decorations. We had a nice dinner, enjoyed the evening and early morning, went to Mass, then headed home.