Hope and Despair

I recently listened to an episode of On Being with host Krista Tippett, which asked the questions: What is filling you with despair? And what is giving you hope?  These are very good questions for these times.  So, I would like to pose those questions to the readers of this blog, what is filling you with despair? And what is giving you hope?

Before you consider these questions, let me clarify what I mean by the terms hope and despair.  Generally, despair is defined as being without hope.  However, this is not all that helpful until we define hope.  I believe it is better, for our purposes, to define this as being resigned to the inevitable; to have no possibility (hope) that the current situation will not improve and will lead to the end that is in front of us and there is no possibility that something will intervene to prevent that from happening.

Turning to hope, it is often the case that hope is used synonymously with optimism.  I can be optimistic that some situation or event will turn out okay in the end regardless – regardless of what?  There is nothing that is required of you to bring about the outcome you are wanting.  Hope, on the other hand, is to my mind, the possibility that things will turn out for the best if forces are brought to bear on that issue and work to bring about the desired outcome.

That force is sometimes – perhaps even often – a divine one which will bring about the best of all possible worlds or at least the best of possible outcome in this case.  This is best expressed by the saying of Julian of Norwich, the 14th century English mystic, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."   However, in hope there is also the possibility thahopt the forces will be based here on earth comprised of people working to achieve the desired ends.  Sometimes these forces combine as in the Social Gospel movement to bring about the Kingdom of God which will encompass the ends that are hoped for.  This can be considered faith in action.

It is easy to despair these days with the wildfires raging across many parts of Western Canada, and warfare raging in Ukraine, and the slow-motion destruction of the Palestinian people in Gaza.  However, we must not give up hope and let despair win. 

So, I will leave you with the questions I began with: What is filling you with despair? And what is giving you hope?  

  

The Beauty of Paradox

Recently, I revisited an episode of On Being on NPR radio.  The program was an interview with physicist Frank Wilczek and was entitled, Why Is the World So Beautiful?  The conversation began with an exploration of truth but turned to beauty which lies beneath the surface of things.  This is not surprising given the traditional connection between beauty and truth. 

The interviewer Krista Tippett quotes Wilczek back to him, “you say that ‘In ordinary reality and ordinary time and space, the opposite of a truth is a falsehood.’ But, you say, ‘Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface.’ This is so interesting. You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”  

Here we are dealing with paradox which is, for me, a hallmark of truth.  The technical definition of paradox is, “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but, in reality, expresses a possible truth.” Wilczek uses the classic example in quantum physics of light being both a particle and a wave.  Both ways of looking at it are correct.  Sometimes under observation it behaves as a particle and sometimes it behaves as a wave. 

Paradox is central to the Christian story.  We worship a God who humbled himself and became human.  That fact for us is the strength of what on the surface is a really crazy act.  We worship not a God of power but one who gave up his power to become a creature; one who gave up immortality to become mortal; a God who was powerless on the cross.  And yet. God was born again to immortality and will return to rule this world.

Wilczek notes, “Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface. You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”

I believe that much of the problems that develop in religious doctrine come about by the belief that there is only one way of looking at things.  I have the truth and you don’t or my way of understanding this event of passage is the correct and only way.  It may very well be correct but there may be a different way which is also correct even though it seems contradictory.  There is beneath both a deeper truth which is reflected in part in the truth of both or many ways of looking at it.

The idea of paradox is an insult to our rational minds.  We want to believe desperately that our understanding of the world can only be either/or.  It must be either black or white.  We do accept that there may be shades in between but basically, they are one way or the other.  Things cannot be both.  That is why the Newtonian Universe is still the way that we understand the universe.  Quantum Physics turned that on its head but has not sunk into the foundation of our existence.  We look at the light and see only the object illuminated but not the shadow that is behind the object. 

We Christian often behave as if we do not truly believe that God could have chosen to become human and be born as a helpless baby in a lowly stable.  It fits into the romantic ideal of Christmas but we do not truly believe in the consequences of that action.  We do not truly believe that Jesus did not go to the cross without an internal struggle.  We do not truly accept the truly radical nature of a God willingly dying on the cross.  We cannot truly accept the implication of the paradox of the cross.  We do not believe that there is true power in the weakness of Jesus' surrender to the will of Father and the submission to the cruelty of the cross.  That perhaps is the ultimate paradox of where true power lies.  If we Christians truly believed that the Christian Church would be very different.

Blessings on the journey and try and embrace the paradox.

Are You Lonesome Tonight

The title I have chosen for today’s missive comes from a popular song written by Roy Turk and Lou Handman in 1926.  It was recorded by Elvis Presley and was well known as a result.  This evocative title gets to the nub of the topic I want to explore today – are you lonely if you are alone.  Conversely, can you be lonely in the midst of people?  What does it mean to be lonely and is this something we should be concerned about?

I was inspired to write about this by two events in the last few days.  One was an episode of the CBC program Wiretap that was broadcast Sunday night.  The other was an episode of On Being hosted by Krista Tippett on NPR.  The Wiretap episode explored the idea that Hell is other people.  It used a plot outline of the Jean Paul Sartre Play, No Exit to introduce the episode.  Here is the plot summary is taken from the entry on Wikipedia:

The play begins with three characters who find themselves waiting in a mysterious room. It is a depiction of the afterlife in which three deceased characters are punished by being locked into a room together for eternity. It is the source of Sartre's especially famous phrase "L'enfer, c'est les autres" or "Hell is other people", a reference to Sartre's ideas about the look and the perpetual ontological struggle of being caused to see oneself as an object from the view of another consciousness.

The three souls find that they are in hell or in Hell because they can’t stand the personality traits of the other people they are stuck with.  But as it was noted on Wiretap, when given an opportunity to leave they decided to stay where they were.  We are left, perhaps, to conclude that this may not be hell.  Rather it is purgatory i.e., God’s waiting room where the people are being purged of their sins in preparation for entering Paradise. 

The On Being episode was an interview with Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States entitled, To Be a Healer.  The episode can be found here https://onbeing.org/programs/vivek-murthy-to-be-a-healer/?utm_source=pause&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=OBKTS1.

He holds that loneliness can be positive in the short term but in the long term it can be harmful:

In the short term, the stress of loneliness serves as a natural signal that nudges us to seek out social connection — just as hunger and thirst remind us to eat and drink. But when loneliness lasts for a long time, it can become harmful by placing us in a state of chronic stress.” And then that has all this cascade of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual ripple effects. But you also offered four strategies in that article that anybody could do that move us individually towards this social reality.

The four steps which should be possible for everyone, “and they are four simple steps, because it turns out that because we are hardwired for connection, even just a little bit of time and a little bit of investment in human connection goes a long way toward making us better.”

Here are the four steps:

1.       spend 15 minutes a day connecting with somebody you care about.

2.       give people your full attention when you talk to them.

3.       find opportunities to serve others.

4.       Find time for solitude

Murthy notes that we need to understand the difference between loneliness and solitude:

loneliness is not so much about how many people you have around you. It’s about whether you feel like you belong. It’s about whether you truly know your own value and feel like you are connected to other people. It’s about the quality of your relationships with others and yourself. The solitude is important because it’s in moments of solitude, when we allow the noise around us to settle, that we can truly reflect, that we can find moments in our life to be grateful for.

As an introvert, I have had a challenge in my life to differentiate my desire for solitude and my need to be alone to avoid the challenges of engaging people and my innate desire to avoid conflict.  I have had to learn to discern when I am spending time in my small corner to recharge my introverted nature and when it is out of avoidance.  This remains a bit of a challenge for me and I find it easy to retreat to my small corner.

May you be blessed to find solitude and connection on your journey.

 

Far From the Madding Crowd

Sunday marked the Sunday of the Passion with the Liturgy of the Palms.  This was what used to be Palm Sunday when I was growing up.  Certainly, the entry in Jerusalem to the adulation of the crowd and the shouts of Hosanna in the Highest was important enough to have its own day in the church year.  The Passion was marked on Good Friday as it also is with our present liturgy and we will share in that story this coming Friday.  I have had difficulty with the combination of these two significant parts of the story of Jesus Christ.  I believe that each should be marked on their own as significant times in the Church year.   

However, there is value to marking both events.  An important part of both events in the life of Jesus, is the reaction of the crowd.  On Palm Sunday, the crowd is upholding and celebrating Jesus as the Messiah, the new king who was going to re-establish the glory of King David’s Kingdom of earth.  Good Friday shows the dark side of the crowd when they call for his execution.

Both of these events illustrate the danger of the crowd or the masses.  This was addressed in an interview with Eugene Peterson, the author/translator of the popular Message Bible.  The interview was an rebroadcast of an episode of On Being on NPR with Krista Tippett https://onbeing.org/programs/eugene-peterson-answering-god/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=6470d2a3-3ab7-498a-b281-88aaee187cde:

You wrote in The Pastor, your new memoir, I think you spoke to the phenomenon I’m talking about, which — we’re talking about how the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible bring every human aspect into the light, even the worst. And so that is a way of — you talk about crowds. And you said, “Classically, there are three ways in which humans try to find transcendence … through the ecstasy of alcohol and drugs” — chemically induced transcendence — and “recreational sex, and through the ecstasy of crowds.” And you said, “Church leaders frequently warn against the drugs and the sex, but, at least in America, almost never against the crowds.” And there’s something about the moment we inhabit, I think even globally, that that feels very resonant and psychologically astute.

This raises the issue of the danger of crowds.  When someone is part of a crowd, they are not themselves.  They are taken over by the identity of the crowd.  There is little of no consciousness by people who are part of a crowd.  I recall reading somewhere year ago that the average IQ of people who are part of a crowd decreases significantly.  Crowd psychology has been studied by many with the conclusion as noted in Wikipedia, “Crowd behavior is heavily influenced by the loss of responsibility of the individual and the impression of universality of behavior, both of which increase with crowd size.” 

This behaviour is very clearly evident in the violent storming of the United States Capital in January 6, 2021 because of an unfounded belief that the Presidential election was stolen, as well as the occupation of Ottawa in Canada by the so-called Freedom Convoy by individuals who believed that freedom not to be vaccinated or wear a mask trumped all other freedoms of the people in Ottawa if not Canada. 

So, in the Christian year we have crowds in both these significant events demonstrating the sin of crowd psychology where we are no longer the individuals that God created us to be.  The irony is that Jesus Christ was demonstrating that his relationship with his heavenly Father was a unique one which so frequently went against the popular way of acting and being.  He was often followed by crowds such as at the sermon on the mount or when he pissed off the crowd at the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth.  Jesus frequently angered the Pharisees by doing things such as healing people on the Sabbath.  He finally pissed off the authorities - both sacred and secular, which resulted in his execution.  Jesus called his followers to pick up their crosses can follow him.  This cannot be done as part of a crowd.  We each have our unique crosses to bear as Christians and we must find what it means to follow Jesus Christ.  We can only do that if we follow him consciously being aware of what we are called to do.

As Christians begin their journey with Jesus to the agony of the cross and the glory of the Resurrection, may each of you be blessed to know the path you are called to follow.

Advent 1: Hope Reconsidered

Last Sunday was the first Sunday in Advent.  Yes, this is the season of the church year which prepares for Christmas and does not actually jump right into the secular Christmas season after Thanksgiving- the American, or worse yet, the Canadian.  That mini-rant aside, we lit the first Advent Candle on the Advent wreath which is the candle for Hope. 

Hope seems to be something that we can always use more of – particularly in these times when we begin to see the light at the end of the COVID tunnel and another variant raises its ugly head and throws up more tunnel.  This time, it is the Omicron Variant which looms large in the COVID scene with possible threats of being more transmissible and perhaps being vaccine resistant.  But we live in hope that all will be well and all manner of things will be well in God’s time if not ours.

However, is there perhaps a less positive aspect to hope?  I am a strong believer that in most things there is a negative as well as a positive.  So, is there an aspect of hope that we should reconsider and not embrace fully - an aspect of hope that is not what God intends?  I was led to this cautionary thought when I tuned into an episode of On Being on National Public Radio in the United States.  The episode is entitled the Future of Hope https://onbeing.org/programs/pico-iyer-and-elizabeth-gilbert-the-future-of-hope-3/. 

The program is a wonderful exploration of the possibilities of hope – both positive and negative.  The thing that resonated with me the most listening to the program, was that living in hope can lead us to not living in the present.  The example that was used in the program was the experience of the interviewee, Elizabeth Gilbert, who was not as fully present to her loved one who was dying.  Rather than being fully present she was living in hope for a miraculous healing.  This idea was summed up in a poem by T S Eliot which was quoted by Gilbert:

“I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So, the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.”  ― T.S. Eliot

This does not mean that we give up on hope.  I believe that we do still need to live in hope.  The challenge for me is to hope for the right thing.  In Advent we live in the hope that the Prince of Peace will be born in us and to the world.  We can hope for peace by doing things small and large to bring peace rather than hate into our lives and the lives of those around us.  And we will live in the knowledge that in  the words of Julien of Norwich, “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”

May you be blessed this Advent to have hope for the right things on your journey.

Teach Me To Pray

As an Anglican, I have the consolation of many prayers which are prescribed in our prayer books and elsewhere.  I find this comforting as it is a challenge for me to pray extemporaneously.  However, it is also restrictive as I am often not challenged to explore the possibilities of prayer that come from within as well as other places.  In this, I can relate to the disciples who asked, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”  This raises an interesting question about how John taught his disciples as was raised recently, however, that is a question for another time.  

The question I want to explore is how we pray?  Jesus provided us the well-known answer in what is known as the Lord’s prayer which is undoubtedly the best-known prayer―at least in the Christian world.  Even this is presented to us in different forms and languages which we can draw on and learn from.  I recently drew on the form from the New Zealand church which I find resonates with me.  That gives some hints at how we can learn to pray.  What speaks to you and gives you words that resonate with you at a deep level.  It also tells us that we need to have experience of prayer in many different forms to receive more possibilities of how we can pray. 

I recently listened to the program On Being on National Public Radio which had an interview with Elie Wiesel https://onbeing.org/programs/evil-forgiveness-prayer-elie-wiesel-2/#transcript.  This was a rebroadcast from  a program on the occasion of Wiesel’s death in 2016.  Wiesel was a holocaust survivor and renowned author.  In the interview, he prayed a prayer that was from his book One Generation After:

I no longer ask You for either happiness or paradise; all I ask of You is to listen and let me be aware and worthy of Your listening. I no longer ask You to resolve my questions, only to receive them and make them part of You. I no longer ask You for either rest or wisdom, I only ask You not to close me to gratitude, be it of the most trivial kind, or to surprise and friendship. Love? Love is not Yours to give.

As for my enemies, I do not ask You to punish them or even to enlighten them; I only ask You not to lend them Your mask and Your powers. If You must relinquish one or the other, give them Your powers, but not Your countenance.

They are modest, my prayers, and humble. I ask You what I might ask a stranger met by chance at twilight in a barren land. I ask You, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to enable me to pronounce these words without betraying the child that transmitted them to me. God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, enable me to forgive You and enable the child I once was to forgive me too. I no longer ask You for the life of that child, nor even for his faith. I only implore You to listen to him and act in such a way that You and I can listen to him together.

There is so much of Elie Wiesel and of God packed into that prayer that you could spend many days or weeks or a life time exploring.  That is truly what prayer is about―to explore your relationship with God and with life and with yourself.

Blessings on you journey.

Achieving Disagreement

Last Sunday was the second Sunday of Advent.  We lit the candle for peace.  Perhaps this was done with a something of futility and perhaps despair.  As the carol says:

And in despair I bowed my head
There is no peace on earth I said
For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men

(I heard the Bells on Christmas Day)

I believe that we can be excused from falling into despair (the opposite of Hope which is the first Advent candle.  We have examples of totalitarian governments springing up in countries that are democracies. Perhaps springing up is the wrong word―infecting would be better.  The Brexit foolishness is slouching towards its inexorable uncertain conclusion.  Our American neighbours seem also to be inexorably split into two divides separated by an ever-widening chasm between red and blue.  Signs of peace seem to be few and far between even as we prepare for the birth of the Prince of Peace.

I was reading an article in the New York Times, After Bush, Obituary Wars, by Frank Bruni which addressed the reaction to the eulogizing of George H. W. Bush.  commentator on the left were scathing in their reaction to uncritical assessment of his life that was put forward by many.  As Bruni said, there was much to criticize in a man who “leaned on the despicable Willie Horton ad, who nominated Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, who did little in the face of AIDS.”  However, there was much to eulogize in a man who was basically a good and honourable man.  As the column noted, we have the need to see our villains without redemption and our heroes without blemish.  It is comfortable to see things in black and white.  We don’t have to make the effort to deal with the subtleties of the grays in the world.  Our prejudices are affirmed and confirmed. 

One way to address this was presented in an On Being program, The Future of Marriage https://onbeing.org/programs/david-blankenhorn-and-jonathan-rauch-the-future-of-marriage/ .  The program was a discussion by two men who have been on opposite side of the same-sex marriage debate.  It is not my desire to get into this mine field (at least at this time).  What I want to uphold is the approach that they used in discussing this rather fraught issue for different perspectives.  They proposed that what people would aim for when they are on opposite sides of an issue is “achieving disagreement”.   The goal is not to come to a point where both parties come to the same position.  Rather it is to understand and accept that people can have different positions which can still allow us to respect the other party.  As they note, “being right is not as important as making a pact with my fellow Americans on the other side so that we can live together.”

Living together perhaps does not seem like a high ideal to aim for, especially at this time of year.  However, if we can learn to live with one another and accept each other as human beings, worthy of respect we will have achieved a great deal.  From a Christian perspective it is seeing each other as Children of God and we can begin to strive for peace on earth and goodwill to all.

The carol does not end in despair.  Rather, it ends in hope; hope for peace on earth:

Then rang the bells more loud and deep
God is not dead, nor does he sleep
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail
With peace on earth, good will to men

Blessings on your journey.  

The Beauty of Paradox

Recently I listened to an episode of On Being on NPR radio.  The program was an interview with physicist Frank Wilczek and was entitled, Why Is the World So Beautiful?  The conversation began with an exploration of truth but turned to beauty which lies beneath the surface of things.  This is not surprizing given the traditional connection between beauty and truth. 

The interviewer Krista Tippett quotes Wilczek back to him, “you say is that “In ordinary reality and ordinary time and space, the opposite of a truth is a falsehood.” But, you say, “Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface.” This is so interesting. “You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”  

Here we are dealing with paradox which is, for me, is a hallmark of truth.  THE technical definition of paradox is, “a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but, in reality, expresses a possible truth.” Wilczek uses the classic example in quantum physics of light being both a particle and a wave.  Both ways of looking at it are correct.  Sometimes under observation it behaves as a particle and sometimes is behaves as a wave. 

Paradox is central to the Christian story.  We worship a God who humbled himself and became human.  That fact for us is the strength of what on the surface is a really crazy act.  We worship and are followers not a God of power but one who gave up his power to become a creature; one who gave up immortality to become mortal; a God who was powerless on the cross.  And yet the God was born again to immortality and is returning to rule this world.Wilczek notes, “Deep propositions have a meaning that goes beyond their surface. You can recognize a deep truth by the feature that its opposite is also a deep truth.”

I believe that much of the problems that develop in religious doctrine come about by the belief that there is only one way of looking at things.  I have the truth and you don’t or my way of understanding this event of passage is the correct and only way.  It may very well be correct but there may be a different way which is also correct even though it seems contradictory.  There is beneath both a deeper truth which is reflected in part in the truth of both or many ways of looking at it.

The idea of paradox is an insult to our rational minds.  We want to believe desperately that our understanding of the world can only be either/or.  It must be either black or white.  We do accept that their may be shades in between but basically, they are one way or the other.  Things cannot be both.  That is why the Newtonian Universe is still the way that we understand the universe.  Quantum Physics turned that on it head but has not sunk into the foundation of our existence.  We look at the light and see only the object illuminated but not the shadow that is behind the object. 

We Christian do not truly believe that God could have chosen to become human and be born as a helpless baby in a lowly stable.  It fits into the romantic ideal of Christmas but we do not truly believe in the consequences of that action.  We do not truly believe that Jesus did not go to the cross without an internal struggle.  We do not truly accept the truly radical nature of a God willingly dying on the cross.  We cannot truly accept the implication of the paradox of the cross.  We do not believe that there is true power in the weakness of Jesus surrender to the will of Father and the submission to the cruelty of the cross.  That perhaps is the ultimate paradox of where true power lies.  If we Christians truly believed that the Christian Church would be very different.

Blessings on the journey and try and embrace the paradox.

Don’t Confuse Me With Facts.’

I want to explore facts this morning.   

The idea of fake news and the apparent disregard for the truth in the recent politics of the United States has been rather perplexing to me.  It has been very apparent that facts do not matter in changing people’s minds and convincing them—at least it has a much more limited role that I would have expected. It appears that many of the supporters of Donald Trump are not interested in the facts or truth that their leaders are offering.  It would appear that many of Trump’s supporters have lost their secure position in life and they believe that it is because of the leadership—the political elite generally— and Free Trade and illegal immigration which they have introduced specifically.  Donald Trump was able to tap into that belief and has connected with their discontent.  He has given them the hope that he is the one that can “drain the swamp” and “build the wall” (and make Mexico pay for it) and put things right i.e. return them to a golden age in which they had a secure job and a secure future for themselves and their children.

A poignant example of this was an interview with prominent supporter of Trump—I believe it was Rudy Giuliani.  In the interview he was speaking about the current rate of violent crime being the highest in history.  The interviewer corrected him with facts stating that the crime rate was the lowest it had been in years.  Giuliani responded that it feels like it is so that is the reality.  In effect, that is the way people feel so that is their reality and don’t confuse them with facts.  At the time I was shocked at this view but on reflection I believe he was exactly right.  It is the “reality for the lives of many who live in fear. 

Facts do matter, of course.  There is global warming and we need to address it for our benefit and the benefit of the world.  But there are people who do not believe it is a fact or do not believe it is caused by human activity.  No amount of ‘facts’ are going to change their mind.  Similarly, I’m not sure what it would take to change my mind that global warming is a fact. 

What is at play here is what Carl Jung calls the ‘feeling value”.  Jung does not use feeling to mean emotions such as fear or sadness.  Rather feeling is an orientation that gives value to something.  He addresses this in discussing what is required to engage with the unconscious forces at work within us, “The feeling-value is a very important criterion which psychology cannot do without, because it determines in large measure the role which the content will play in the psychic economy.”

So, if facts and information do not have the primary position in influencing much of our actions, what then can we turn to?  The answer is, at least in part, story.  In two occasions this week I have encountered people who have addressed the need for story to enable people to engage one another when we are not on the same wave-length.  The first is one of the Daily Meditations by Richard Rohr, an American Franciscan Priest:

I am convinced that many, if not most, modern neuroses are a direct result of the lack of a common, shared story under which our individual stories are written. As a result, our tiny lives lack a transcendent referent, a larger significance, a universal meaning. Our common life is a “dis-aster,” literally disconnected from the cosmic “stars.” We are lost in insignificance.

The other was an interview with Lyndsey Stonebridge who is a scholar on the life and works of   the philosopher Hannah Arendt.  Arendt is best known for coining the phase ‘the banality of evil’ in her study of Adolf Eichmann. The interview was an episode of the NPR program On Being, where she was interviews by the host, Krista Tippett.  Below is an excerpt from the transcript of the interview:

Thinking and Friendship in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt for Now

Ms. Stonebridge: Testimony.

Ms. Tippett: It needs experience. It needs human experience around it. Yeah.

Ms. Stonebridge: Yeah. And so I think she — that was why testimony was important to her. It’s why history and the sense of a myth were all important to her because it’s what makes truth meaningful to people together in a community. If you want a culture that’s going to take on fake news, and the political lie, I say as someone who teaches literature and history, what you need is a culture of the arts and humanity. What you need is more storytelling. What you need is more discourse. What you need is more imagination. What you need is more creation in that way, and more of a sense of what it is that ties us to those words and ties us to those stories.

Ms. Tippett: Yeah. We need three dimensional — we need stories and facts and conversations between people and all of that working together.

Both of these excerpts point to the same place i.e. that we need to have shared stories that enable us to relate to one another and to the larger world.  We need to be able to discern how our stories, individually and collectively, fit into the meta-stories of our world.  That is how we know that our lives have value and we are valued.  That is where and how we will find meaning. 

Blessings on your journey to discover your story and the stories of others.