November

Giving thanks for beauty in an ugly world ...

(Quick preliminary note: in case you missed it, I wrote a piece on the new Bonhoeffer film and the co-option of his story by political ideologues, for Slate. I was so honored to be able to interview some of the Bonhoeffer descendants for this piece. You can read it here:

https://slate.com/life/2024/11/bonhoeffer-movie-2024-review-angel-studios-hitler-nazis.html)

Now onto today’s meditation:

Nobody really loves the word “ugly.”

Even just typing it out brings up a sort of cringing, rejecting internal reaction. Ugliness is something that everything wants to shy away from, to crop just out of view, like the dirty dishes piled up in the sink next to a cluttered countertop in an influencer’s pristine kitchen.

Like the way you feel when you inadvertently turn on the front-facing camera, and the lens is staring right up your nostrils.

Even when something, someone, is being inarguably “ugly,” whether with their meanness or rudeness or utter dehumanization and cruelty - too often we’re apt to blur away the edges of the ugliness.

“Oh, they didn’t really mean it!”

“It’s not that bad.”

It can’t be that bad.

Can it?

Unfortunately, though, I have been called as a theologian of the cross: committing myself to the sometimes-lonely path of attempting to follow Jesus’ instruction even into the ignominious and lonely places of the world, reserved for those who dare to call out unfortunate truths: the ones that implicate ourselves as well as those we hate.

As Martin Luther first articulated the theology of the cross, in the Heidelberg Disputation all the way back in 1518, he said this in the 21st thesis:

1. A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the things what it is.

Call a thing what it is.

We are living in the ugly days, the ugly aftermath of an inarguably ugly American Presidential Election. I will draw back to my former sports reporter days to claim an expertise in understanding the difference between winning well and winning “ugly.” (Note that there is always a place for both in sports, of course).

But Trump won ugly. He won with insults and hatred and anger and despair. He won by depressing Democratic turnout and convincing people in America that things were so justifiably bad that it was worth betting the house, so the speak, on a former reality TV star who may or may not be experiencing some early forms of age-related dementia.

Call a thing what it is.

This was not a pretty victory, as evidenced by the fact that most of the people who voted for Trump don’t seem particularly happy even in the wake of his victory. I didn’t see anyone dancing in the streets after he won, though someone did send me a video of supporters singing How Great Thou Art, which I guess is nice - though it sure conflicted with the predominant messaging that led Trump’s negative campaign ads.

The ugliness of the world is all around us. Due to climate change, November in Minnesota is no longer a month of crisp fall and light snowfalls. Instead, it’s all dark and brown and gray, with frequent rainfall making up for the September-October months of drought. I told my kids it never used to rain in Minnesota in November, but I don’t think they believed me. This world, this new rapidly warming and changing planet, with disappearing polar ice caps, is the only one they’ve ever known.

In a particularly bleak post-election story from right here in the Twin Cities, a group of vandals uprooted 60 newly planted trees from the St. Paul Mississippi riverfront last week. The trees had been planted by a group of area high school students in October, during the fall break educator conferences. The city estimated the damages to be at least $40,000.

It was a dark and depressing reversal of Luther’s (maybe apocryphal) wisdom about an impending apocalypse, that even if the world was ending tomorrow, the theologian and reformer was said to have promised he would still “plant a tree today.”

Instead, Americans today are uprooting newly planted trees.

I wrote last month about fall and changing leaves in our neighborhood, and now that most of the leaves have fallen and the skies are black by 5 p.m., I find I’m still just absolutely desperate for trees: for leaves, for growth, for life.

Here’s the beautiful thing amidst all the ugliness. I keep seeing leaves, often perfectly formed ones from maple trees, framed against the gray asphalt and cracked sidewalk paths of my neighborhood. Every time I’m out walking, or even just coming up to my house, as I pick up litter and plastic and to-go containers, I see one of these leaves.

Every single time: it stops me.

It’s a miracle, right? That these perfectly formed leaves have survived: storms, sun, squirrels, rabbits, humans, cars, birds. They’ve drifted to the ground and maybe they’ve been trampled on over and over again: and still they shine with more brilliant colors than any Instagram filter could ever create.

Artificial intelligence claims to be able to write as beautifully as the greatest literary talents, and create music that sounds like a symphony. But I doubt it. Nature is unequaled in her majesty, from leaves to skies to you to me.

There’s beauty all around us still. Naming the ugly doesn’t take it away. But sometimes you have to look down to see it.

Happy Thanksgiving.

ICYMI: here’s my latest column from the Minnesota Star Tribune, on Trump’s reelection and who we really are …

P.S. …

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