Susan Gregory Thomas wrote the story of her experience in approaching marriage, family, division, and divorce – in her book: In Spite of Everything: A Memoir. She recited the deplorable situation for her and her brother after the divorce of her parents, especially their decline into drugs, and rebellion. Her brother died from the excesses at about thirty years of age. The story is dismal and tragic. She was determined to have a solid marriage, and to care for her children in a way that was denied to her in her childhood years. She documented the significant differences between the times of her childhood and that of her children. The differences were dramatic, but the end was similar – divorce. The evidence for success or failure was known but garbled. She and her friend lived together for some years even though warned of the failure of marriages for couples following casual friendship to marriage. Other warnings were also disregarded. Both persons were decent but gradually moved away from each other, and divorced leaving behind some of the same failures they found in their childhood experiences. Thomas sees the similarities but comes up with an odd statement about divorces in two generations: We can only hope that in this, we have done it differently in a right way. There is no weaseling out of mistakes by making others more wrong.
For myself, I am struck by the differences in evaluating generations. Tom Brokaw called Thomas’s deplored generation (above) the Greatest Generation but his context was different than hers. Great in some factors it was a dismal failure in others. The generation so honored by Brokaw is found greatly wanting by Thomas. It has always been so. Mankind, reserving life unto the human context alone, will always have difficulty. Putting out fires on the right, another breaks out on the left. That makes up the human irrepressible conflict. We are always fighting our own fires and sometimes they engulf us. The human being is not a piece of machinery, but a container of life that somewhere reflects the image of God. That is to say life is the evidence of God in a great silent cosmos of space, planets, stars, and cosmic debris. God gave life to one we know about, offered solutions for the cultivation of that life in the womb of nature, so to prepare for another kingdom. We fail because of arrogance, pride, rebellion, folly – all that is foreign to the nature of God and the life he emanates in holiness and effort to care for the creation. This is summarized in a three letter word – sin. The prophets of God believe he will start it all again in a way that will sustain it as originally designed. It is likely that he will use those in that creation who lived to fulfill his creation in this so that his will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Hallowed is his name. Here we want to read aloud the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7, ending it in The Lord’s Prayer – taken from it.
Christians are delivered from despair in the cultures and machinations of mankind and nations through prayer, faith, Scripture, hope, the Holy Spirit and love. There is the promise that warfare will end, and that God will be victorious. In the interim to the great parousia, life can be beautiful as it is for the bird in the cleft of the rock. The storm is fierce, the winds at tornado force, but the eagle settles down in the cleft of the shielding and immovable rock. Perhaps the eagle knows the only continuing enemy is mankind. Storms come and go. They abate until another emerges. Evidence sends the bird to the cleft of the rock for safety. There is no rebellion, no loss to the storm. In fact the storm opens hitherto hidden nourishment in the trees, coves and ground cover. We seek to inform ourselves about what is right, what works, what makes life a progressive thing of wonder and growth. For some it is real, and followed with devotion: for others it is superstition to be resisted because it doesn’t complete itself in nature. The choices are mankind alone and resigned or mankind with God for new life and new beginnings. Jesus gave the narrative to old and young, to rich and poor, to men and women, to powerful and weak, to buyer and seller, to king and peasant – to all. He still does. It is not easy because it means surrender in the irrepressible conflict of life, but the surrender is to the creator of all, the possessor of all, the sustainer of all, the final answer to the questions, the conundrums of our lives. Living long in that context, when the person is old and possessing sound wits there is a sense of divine presence – forevermore. We resist any darkness attending us. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020