It was an old farmhouse, probably from the early 19th century, the road it was set upon then somewhat busier, yet still maintaining a relative quiet. It was there that I would visit one of our oldest church members.
We’d sit in his living room, its furnishings largely untouched for 50 years or so. There he’d talk about olden times, not in a breathless, impatient fashion, but thoughtfully and perceptively. All of life’s bumps and rough edges had been smoothed over by the ensuing years, replaced by perspective, the calm inscrutable wisdom born of time.
When my wife and I first met, we discovered we had something a bit unusual in common. We both were drawn to older people. When I was a kid, in fact, and at a social gathering, I’d invariably find myself talking to the older folk. Linda said she’d done the same thing as a child.
I’ve always thought this attraction is because older people are far less apt to play games. They have nothing to prove. They don’t need to show off or command anybody’s attention. They’ve seen life in all its varying forms. Nothing is wholly new. They are witness to the vast expanse of life. In essence, they’ve leaned to simply be.
I have fond memories of another man I used to visit. What made him especially interesting was that he was a great storyteller. His name was Joe Gallant. When he died, his wife gave me one of his wood carvings, a man with mutton chops and a walking stick (pictured above). I have treasured it for over 25 years, not only because of its remarkable beauty and intricate detail, but because it reminds me of the time Joe and I spent together. It’s one of my most prized possessions.
Joe would routinely regale me with his life’s story, though not in a labored or egoistic way. He would tell me of the time he almost went bankrupt during the Great Depression. He talked about his time in the service. And he’d share the love story between him and his unusually devoted wife, Dorothy.
What characterized his stories perhaps most was not just how he could paint a verbal picture so that you felt you were there, but his good humor and kindly nature. After a particularly involved, yet typically entertaining story, I remarked on how detailed his memory was. “Well, yes” he said, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I can lead you into some real back alleys,” the comment betraying both his characteristic self-effacement and unalterable grace.
Perhaps the attraction for me also had something to do with the general absence of ‘the things of permanence’ in our hyperactive age. Years ago, in referencing New York, the French existentialist Jean Paul Sartre remarked, “The only constant there is the vanishing point.” Change marks our age.
It’s not that change should be eschewed. It’s just that today it too often requires we jettison the past and renounce the things of permanence. Too often contemporary notions of change are animated by conceit, by the impatient, all-consuming demand for perfection. It’s not for nothing that the word “utopia” comes from the ancient Greek meaning “nowhere.”
Perfection exists precisely nowhere – on this side of heaven at least. And that’s because we live in a fallen world. Not to mention we’re created beings with inborn limitations, ones impossible to overcome. Besides, there’s an inherent structure to creation preordained by the God who made it. Any change that rubs against the grain of this underlying structure is, by definition, doomed to failure.
Rejecting the “savage God of [modern] ideology,” Russell Kirk once described the value of things permanent: “From relevation,” he writes, “from right reason, from poetic vision, from much study, from the experience of the species…we humans have learned certain ways and principles of order. Were we lacking these, we would lie at the mercy of will and appetite – in private life, in public concerns. It is this order, this old safeguard against private and public anarchy, which…refuses to surrender to the evangels of Progress.”
By way of contrast, he describes two types of New England intellects. The first he likens to the mind of Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is “fond of alteration and tinkering, convinced of the inevitability of beneficent progress, unable to credit the reality of sin, inclined toward leveling, contemptuous of the past, and bent upon dissenting from all things established.”
The other principle type, he says, hews closer to the mind of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which is “suspicious of change, skeptical of Progress, convinced of the terrible power of sin, in favor of human nature (flawed though it is) in its present state rather than some radical revision of human character upon a Utopian design; it is reverent toward the past, mindful of the universe as a realm of mystery, and cognizant that proliferating variety is the mark of a healthful society, while uniformity is decadence.”
Having dispensed with the eternal verities of God and religion, modern ideas of progress and change seek to replace these permanent truths, culled by succeeding generations, with newly discovered ones born of the immediacy of “private judgment.” Heaven must be built here on earth. And now. Yet how such efforts have failed us, not least in our increasing alienation from one another, the loss of community replaced by deadening uniformity.
In 1630, John Winthrop, on the deck of the Arabella, halfway between England and Cape Cod, preached a lay sermon to remind his fellow voyagers how they had made a covenant with God:
“We must delight in each other, make others’ conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together,” Winthrop said, “always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body. So shall we keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace, the Lord will be our God and delight to dwell among us, as His own people, and will command a blessing upon us in all our ways, so that we shall see much more of His wisdom, power, goodness, and truth than formerly we have been acquainted with.
“We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when He shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantation, ‘The Lord make it like that of New England.’ For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world; we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God and all professors for God’s sake; we shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us, till we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.”