Joan and I went on vacation this past week, meeting up with our son Sam and his family in Grand Lake, Colorado just outside the Rocky Mountain National Park, where I was subjected to daily death marches up and down the mountainsides. It wasn’t even pretty, because in 2020 the second largest wildfire in Colorado’s history, the East Troublesome Fire, burned 200,000 acres of forest to a crisp, so it was like a dystopian slog through the mountains, the charred remains of trees lying in blackened heaps. But I couldn’t complain because everyone else kept talking about how pretty everything was. It reminded me of attending a Quaker conference right after Vladimir Putin had invaded Ukraine and all those Quakers were talking about solving the problem peacefully and how even Vladimir Putin had the light of God within him, which theologically I believed, and still believe, but what I also believed was that Vladimir Putin needed punched in the nose. But I couldn’t say that in front of Quakers, just like I couldn’t say the mountains were not particularly beautiful after a forest fire in front of my family. So whenever anyone said how pretty it was, I just smiled as if in agreement.
At one point, my daughter-in-law Kelsea said, “Look how the sunlight glimmers on burnt tree trunks. Isn’t it beautiful?” to which I said, “Yes, it’s lovely. I’ve never seen anything so pretty.” My daughter-in-law doesn’t know it yet, but she’s destined to end up a Quaker. I can see it coming a mile away.
Well, haven’t we had some beauty this morning? After a gorgeous week of weather, and stunning music this morning, isn’t it easy to be an optimist, to believe in the ultimate triumph of goodness and beauty?
These past couple of months we’ve been thinking about things the early Quakers got just right. Let’s add to that list the early Friend’s conviction in the triumph of good, expressed by our founder George Fox, who wrote of a vision he had, “I saw that there was an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness.” Too often, religions see only the ocean of darkness and death and nothing beyond it. Religion’s tendency toward the dark side was observed by the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal, who said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
A few weeks ago, I was doing a memorial service here at the meetinghouse and the family of the woman who died asked if we could play a recording of Elvis Presley singing How Great Thou Art.I told them that was fine by me. So we played it and while we were listening to it, I had this epiphany. I realized that over the years I’ve come to feel the exact same way about Elvis and Jesus. I love both of them, but their fan clubs creep me out. And one of the things that creep me out about so many of Jesus’s fan clubs is their gleeful pessimism. Their gleeful pessimism. You would think gleeful pessimism is a contradiction in terms, but it isn’t. And that’s the only way to describe it.
Gleeful pessimism. Because I’ve met some of Jesus’s fans who simply can’t wait for Jesus to descend on the clouds and start killing folks off, who seem positively giddy at the prospect, who pray daily for it to happen. Dear God, let this be the day. Quakers never believed that. Now to be sure, we did believe there was joy to be had in living in the Light of Christ, but we were never so grim and severe to believe God had it in for those who didn’t. We believed the Light of God was just as present in them as in us. We believed in the triumph of good over evil, that evil would not be destroyed through wrath, but transformed through love. Does this happen instantly? No, it takes time. I’ve been watching the political conventions these past several weeks and while there are vast differences in the aims and objectives of the parties, they both assure us that if voted into power, Americans will awaken to a new and better nation. America will be great again on November 6th. Or come November 6th, Americans will once again be free. But don’t be misled. Enduring, redemptive transformation takes time.
So there we were hiking through the burned-out forest and every now and then there’d be a clutch of flowers or a six-inch sprout of a Ponderosa pine poking up through the ashes. Life always wins out, maybe not today, but always tomorrow. Life always wins out. I kept wishing I could return to that forest in 30 years and see the transformation. I’ll be gone by then, but my son won’t, and maybe he’ll bring his son back and say, “When you were 2 years-old we brought you here and it was all burnt up but look at it now.”
Maybe my grandson will be feeling right then that his life is charred and burnt over, and he’ll see the triumph of beauty, the positive persistence of life in what was once a graveyard of ruins, and it will inspire him to go on.
Those old Quakers got it exactly right–that there is an ocean of darkness and death, but an infinite ocean of light and love, which flows over the ocean of darkness.
During one of our hikes, we came across a group of college students splitting granite boulders into square blocks, by hand, to make terraced steps to prevent erosion. I stopped to chat with them, which I’m sure they appreciated, an old white guy waxing philosophical, but they were polite and told me where they were from and what they were studying. I said to one of them, “One day, fifty years now, you’ll bring your grandchildren here and show them the work you did.” And he smiled and said, “That’s the plan.”
That’s the plan. That’s the plan. Friends, believe in the long view, believe that the gesture of love today will pay enduring dividends tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, then next year, or the year after that. The long view. We saw it here this morning, when one woman who picked up a violin at the age of 18 months, alongside another who took her first piano lesson at the age of 7, became living, breathing testimonies to the triumph of beauty and the positive persistence of good.