American Spirit

 

I

In the summer of 1864, during the American Civil War, Walt Whitman, arguably our country’s greatest poet, bought gallons of ice cream and walked it through all fifteen wards of a makeshift military hospital in Washington D.C., giving out scoops to wounded and dying soldiers. “Quite a number of western country boys,” Whitman wrote, “had never tasted ice cream before.”

A known force in America at the time, a force known in part for his opposition to slavery and his empathy for the enslaved, Walt Whitman befriended and tended Union and Confederate soldiers alike for roughly three years. He took dictation and composed letters for them (“The above letter is written by Walt Whitman, a visitor to the hospitals”); raised money for them (of one young man, Whitman lamented to his sister: “He seemed to have entirely give [sic] up, and lost heart—he had not a cent of money—not a friend or acquaintance.”); fed them (peeling fruit, spooning ice cream); read to them (news, reports from the battlefield, Shakespeare, Homer); attended their operations; cleaned and dressed their wounds (some of which were maggoty); gave them gifts (biscuits, cookies, peaches, oysters, beef, wines, tea, envelopes, stamps); and sat with them as they suffered and sometimes died.

“The doctors tell me I supply the patients with a medicine which all their drugs & bottles & powders are helpless to yield,” the forty-three-year-old poet wrote. Elsewhere he wrote that he treated the soldiers as if they were his own children or younger brothers.

“Whitman was a maternal man,” writes Lewis Hyde in his book The Gift, “a person, that is, who cares for and protects life—and the hospitals afforded him a chance to live out his maternalism.” And Whitman did this work bravely, deliberately tending the worst wounds and illnesses, exposing himself to pneumonia, typhoid, malaria, diarrhea (a serious ailment then), and highly contagious smallpox victims. “I go,” he wrote, where “nobody else goes.”

He visited the hospitals twice a day, six or seven days a week. “Many of them [the soldiers] have come to depend on seeing me,” Whitman said, “and having me sit by them a few minutes, as if for their lives.” Sometimes Whitman stayed in the hospital for days on end. Frequently, he sat up all night for “dear or critical cases.”

There were forty such makeshift military hospitals in our capital at the time and Whitman apparently visited them all. William O’Connor, another Whitman biographer, wrote: “For his daily occupation, he goes from ward to ward, doing all he can to revive the spirits of the sufferers, and keep the balance in favor of their recovery… His theory is that these men, far from home, lonely, sick at heart, need more than any thing some practical token that they are not forsaken, that someone feels a fatherly or brotherly interest in them.”

D. Willard Bliss—described by Whitman biographer Jerome Loving as “the heroic surgeon at the Armory-Square Hospital”—said that “no one person who assisted in the hospitals during the war accomplished so much good to the soldiers and for the Government as Mr. Whitman.”

So moved were some soldiers by Whitman’s care that they gave him credit for bringing them back to life. Others named their children after him. According to biographer Justin Kaplan, Whitman in some degree tended to nearly a hundred thousand of the wounded and sick during the Civil War.

“People used to say to me,” Whitman recalled, “Walt, you are doing miracles for those fellows in the hospitals. I wasn’t. I was…doing miracles for myself.” Elsewhere, he wrote: “I have never been happier than in some of these hospital ministering hours.” And elsewhere: “Those three years I consider the greatest privilege…and, of course, the most profound lesson of my life.”

Walt Whitman’s three years caring for these soldiers is, I believe, one of the more moving and meaningful chapters in our country’s history—and it’s a chapter we’ve almost totally skipped.

Yet how relevant this chapter is today. For today it can seem our country is a large makeshift hospital, full of the wounded and the sick. The body politic is ailing. The system often appears to be breaking down. It’s hard to shake the sense that we’re living in a time of hurtling internal decay as history seems to be accelerating.

What is the nature of our woundedness, our sickness, our decay? And how serious is it? Are we unusually unwell? Are these the death throes?

We might look for possible answers to such questions in Patrick Lawrence’s book Time No Longer, published in 2013. One of today’s finest journalists, Lawrence—in this hard-boiled but humane work—calls for an act of collective self-awareness, a diagnosis in effect. Our overweening, morally questionable mythology (City Upon the Hill, Manifest Destiny, The Indispensable Nation); the wicked union of imperialism and the military industrial complex (often disguised as a force of worldwide democratization and liberation); our solipsistic acquisitiveness; and our idolatry of science, technology, and the material are, Lawrence spells out, a source of misery for us and the world. “To recognize this will be, for many Americans, a great dis-illusioning. This is a positive prospect.”

No sanctimoniously dour “declinist” relishing his own grim assessment, though awake to endings (and awake to incipience, too), Lawrence asks us to outgrow our hubristic exceptionalism and other harmful ideas of ourselves and work toward an “extensively reorganized society,” enjoining us to be a “nation among other nations,” rather than a blundering, self-innocent, self-important, macho one. “Americans must determine anew their individual and national identities.”

And the magnitude of the task, Lawrence informs us, does not excuse us from undertaking it. “Much that is now accepted as fated and beyond our capacity to change must be understood otherwise.” We have it in our power to begin the world over again—or at least acknowledge our collective shadow, work to disenthrall ourselves from certain damaging assumptions, and help our country not finish the job or become great again but come of age.

Further, Lawrence inconveniently reminds us that we can no longer afford to think that history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. (In other words, our vestigial world power, our frenzied pace, and our stuporous distractions do not render us magically immune to history’s dream-strange irruptions when all is changed utterly.)

By my lights (though I suspect Lawrence feels similarly), our current condition is not due to any one party or politician. This, I believe, is a fundamental delusion that needs to be confronted, a collective piety that needs to be flayed. I say this not to gloss over certain disturbing decisions made by the new administration, especially regarding foreign policy, immigration, and the environment. Our country’s continued (and bipartisan) complicity in the destruction of Gazans and Gaza; our country’s demonization and mistreatment of immigrants; and the government-corporate corruption assaulting our sacred land, water, and air—these problems should be immediately addressed. But these and other major problems are profounder than we’re led to believe and, I hazard, implicate all of us. I doff my hat to Mark Twain who once quipped, during another sickly stretch, “The present era of incredible rottenness is not Democratic, it is not Republican, it is national.” Put differently, we need to address both symptoms and underlying root causes—and the root causes are national. To not address root causes is to worsen the rot.

What I would add to Lawrence’s diagnosis (an addition that I will partly explore in this essay) is the problem of our growing political hate: the violence of heart, the society-sponsored prejudice, that is so commonplace, so normalized, so thoroughgoing, and so politically correct (on all sides) as to often be invisible.

Where do we see symptoms of this violence of heart? We see symptoms in our radio talk shows, in our podcasts, in our jokes, at parties, at work, coming from our own mouths. We see it in newspapers, books, in our public discourse—in the trash-talking, the trolling, in the endless upping-the-ante of outrage. And we encounter symptoms in our progressively outlandish bumper-stickers (recently I saw one bracing uplifter that said Fuck Your Feelings).

The following statistics are revealing. According to the recent “Stress in America” poll conducted by the American Psychological Association, half of American adults (50%) said tension around social and political topics makes them less likely to “connect with people in general”; and, according to a paper published in January of 2019 (“Lethal Mass Partisanship”), “15 percent of Republicans and 20 percent of Democrats agreed that the country would be better off if large numbers of opposing partisans in the public today ‘just died.’” (And if you drifted off reading those figures—we’re all so info-glutted and numbers-numb—please consider reading them again.)

What social thinker Charles Eisenstein calls othering seems now to be our collective stock-in-trade. Eisenstein defines othering as a worldview in which self and other are fundamentally separate and different—a worldview conducive to cruelty to so-called others and the slashing apart of our social fabric.

Here is Parker Palmer in his inspired 2011 book Healing the Heart of Democracy on the possible implications of such a crimped-hearted worldview:

If American democracy fails, the ultimate cause will not be a foreign invasion or the power of big money or the greed and dishonesty of some elected officials or a military coup or the internal communist/socialist/fascist takeover that keeps some Americans awake at night. It will happen because we—you and I—became so fearful of each other, of our differences and of the future, that we unravelled the civic community on which democracy depends.

In Time No Longer, Patrick Lawrence calls for “the rediscovery of certain parts of the American self that have been obscured” in order for our nation to heal.

The rediscovery of certain parts of the American self that have been obscured.

What could those parts be? What forgotten American humanity can we now recall, especially insofar as the widespread othering, the growing political hate? Which American, living or dead, offers us “the challenge of example”?

When I think of obscured parts of the American self that warrant rediscovery, I think of Walt Whitman serving the hospitalized country boys of the Civil War globs of sweet ice cream.

I think of Whitman sitting on the beds of soldiers of both sides, soldiers asking for their mothers through the mosquito netting as they face another night of shaking and fever; as they can’t sleep because of pain and fear of pain; as they soil themselves; as they thrash about after waking up to a mutilated face or no legs; as what we call “life” slips from their bodies on a humid summer night.

II

It is no secret that Walt Whitman knew the insoluble mystery of being alive. Few American poets so vividly sing stark awe, bare worship. Few American poets have been blessed with such a susceptibility to the actual. Whitman spoke of “plain divine facts”; called reality “the costless average, divine, original concrete”; and wrote: “You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.” Here are other fragments of his pick that broke against a wall of diamond:

…I say the whole earth, and all the stars in the sky, are for religion’s sake,
I say no man has ever yet been half devout enough…

And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all 
times.

I hear and behold God in every object, yet I understand God not in the least.

…considering a curl of smoke or a hair on the back of my hand is curious as any 
revelation.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars…

And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

To be in any form, what is that?

I and this mystery here we stand.

And it is no secret that Whitman was a man of scrupulous, promiscuous, defenseless, and indomitable tenderness. He is our great poet of the compassionate imagination:

I have loved the earth, sun, animals—I have despised riches, 
I have given alms to every one that ask’d, stood up for the stupid 
          and crazy, devoted my income and labor to others…

I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs…

The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her children 
     gazing on, 
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence, blowing, cover’d with 
     sweat, 
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous buckshot and 
     the bullets, 
All these I feel or am.

And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral, dressed 
          in his shroud…

I embody all presences outlawed or suffering, 
And see myself in prison shaped like another man, 
And feel the dull intermittent pain.

Agonies are one of my changes of garments, 
I do not ask the wounded person how he feels…I myself become the wounded 
        person…

I am he attesting sympathy…

He judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing.

We live our lives according to the ideas we have about who we are and how we relate to the rest of humanity and to the cosmos. In light of Whitman’s ideas about who he was and how he was related to humanity and the cosmos, it is no surprise that he spent three years befriending and tending wounded and sick soldiers during the Civil War.

For Walt Whitman—who might be viewed not only as one of our best writers but one of America’s Founding Spiritual Fathers—the surpassing mystic value of everyone—and everything—was basic. And for Whitman this apprehension of mystic value seemed to place on him a binding obligation to care. “He is a born exalte,” a friend said of him, “his religious sentiment…pervades and dominates his life.” In his prose work Democratic Vistas, Whitman celebrates “all-penetrating religiousness” and a “sane and pervading religiousness.”

What are our ideas now about who we are as Americans? How do we understand how we relate to each other and to the cosmos? Do we have an understanding that we’re all in this together? Do we believe that we belong to each other? Do we believe, like some of the wise do, that we actually are each other? Do we see holiness as basic? Do we view life as a sacred mystery?

Many Americans, I know, do not have time for such inquiry. For they are stooped under burdens. And many Americans are too overfull with distraction upon distraction upon distraction to care about such inquiry.

And many Americans—perhaps astutely, perhaps rightly—are suspicious of such inquiry. For how can one sensitively discuss—not to mention love, care for, and belong to—this large, various group of people called America? How does one, with any kind of edifying accuracy, generalize about an entire country, about a large modern nation state, about a “national character,” about what Patick Lawrence calls “the American self”? Isn’t such inquiry foolishly reductive? Isn’t such big-scale abstract talk little more than vapid dithering pseudo-responsibility? And isn’t the beauty of America that we can believe whatever the hell we damn please?

And many Americans, I suspect, are not only suspicious of such inquiry but repulsed by it. Belong to each other? Holiness? Spare me the sweaty-palmed piety and motheaten cliches. And what do you mean by that soft-centered, willful word we? There is no we, and there is no America. E Pluribus Unum is a maudlin myth. Talking about America is pissing in the wind.

III

Walt Whitman traveled to the front to find his brother George, a Union soldier.

Based on hearsay, Whitman was fearful George had recently died in battle. On his way, while changing trains in Philadelphia, Whitman was robbed of all his money. So he arrived in D.C. without a cent for food or transportation. Once in D.C., Whitman walked all day and all night, scouring the many makeshift hospitals. He spent three days searching in high distress—“about three days of the greatest suffering I ever experienced in my life.” Finally, two acquaintances aided Whitman by giving him money and giving him a military pass, which allowed Whitman to travel to Falmouth, Virginia where George’s battered regiment was regrouping.

One of the first scenes Whitman encountered in Falmouth, he wrote to his mother, “was a heap of feet, arms, legs, &c. under a tree in front of a hospital.” Imagine him beholding this after days of searching for a brother whose arms and legs could’ve been in that pile. “When I found dear brother George,” Whitman wrote to his mother, “and found that he was alive and well, O you may imagine how trifling all my little cares and difficulties seemed—they vanished into nothing.” Whitman ended up staying in the area to help the soldiers, drawn there by “a profound conviction of necessity, affinity.”

IV

What does the word politics mean? Do we have a shared clear sense of that word? By my lights, when we invoke the word politics, we often seem to be referring—in a facilely knowing and broad-brush way—to the goings-on of fake, avaricious, power-hungry sorts nominally tasked with the running of our country (or city, county, or state). To Ralph Waldo Emerson, there was no “satire on government” with more “severity of censure” than the fact that the adjective “politic” signified “cunning.” Senator Kennedy from Louisiana recently hilariously drawled: “I know many people in Washington, D.C. that would unplug your life support to charge their cell phone.”

But viewing politics this way, though understandable, is perhaps arguably one of the bigger problems of our day. One, it’s throwing stones from glass houses (aren’t we all, at least in some measure, fake, avaricious, power-hungry, and cunning?). Two, this understanding fosters the “apartheid of the good,” making us wary of entering the fray because of its reported extreme toxicity, thereby undermining the promised—and supposedly special—self-governance of our participatory democracy. (E.J. Dionne Jr., soberingly: “A nation that hates politics will not long thrive as a democracy.”) Three, this understanding is simply too narrow, leaving out aspects of “politics” we would be well served to remember.

In short, to see politics as the purview of morally grotesque elected officials seems a great way to invite even more sickness and decay.

In a 2015 interview with The American Conservative, Wendell Berry defines political thought as “a continuous asking how best to conduct oneself as a member of a community or a polity.” This, I believe, is an enriching statement. (In the same interview, Berry contrasts this definition with, according to him, the more widespread but ignobler understanding of political thought, which he describes as “how to get elected or how to get power.”)

While thinking about Berry’s nobler definition of political thought, I wondered about Walt Whitman. I reckon the poet of America, the bard of “the great Idea,” of Democracy with a capital D, asked himself a tough question or three about how best to conduct oneself as a member of our polity. I also minded how broadening Berry’s vision of political thought is.

Politics is not, suggests Berry, a well-delineated sphere of action under the direction of the life-support unpluggers. Politics is not, in other words, merely the domain of our “officials,” our institutions, not merely the realm of Caesar and his tax collectors. It is a continuous asking how best to conduct oneself as a member of a community or a polity. It is, in other words, all of us.

What Berry suggests is that we are all politicians somewhat; that politics—like everything else—is not a place apart; that politics—like everything else—is not outside God’s household. (“I don’t think I can isolate my political thought, imperfect and incomplete as I’m sure it is,” Berry said in the same interview, “from my thoughts that are not political.”)

“What are many little lives if the life of those lives be gone?” asked Black Elk, hauntingly, as he underwent the demolition of his Lakota people and their world. Politics, one might say, is the eternal, unavoidable work of crafting and tending the life of our lives. And that work, one could argue, asks something of everyone.

And much of this unavoidable—and invariably messy and unscientific—work happens in what we awkwardly call our “inner world”: our hearts, our souls, our spirituality—the place where we ask ourselves tough questions about our conduct in our community and polity.

In Healing the Heart of Democracy, Parker Palmer plainly and profoundly writes: “Everything human can be found in the heart as both cause and effect of what happens in the external world.” In the same book Palmer also explores what he calls the inward and invisible infrastructure of democracy, the collective habits of heart that act as an intangible but crucial foundation for our country.

But what happens when we no longer tend our inner worlds?

What happens to a polity that doesn’t believe such an inward and invisible infrastructure even exists?

V

It’s easy to think Walt Whitman’s life—at its best at least—circled around another way of knowing, another source of valuation, another measure of morality than our own—or at least what is privileged today. His center of gravity seemed to be awareness of the holy. What was a sin to Whitman? To not see. To be blind to the wonder, to the fugitive miracle of existence, to the native inextinguishable sanctity of everyone, no exceptions (and Whitman would include non-human creatures here, too). Whitman’s most elemental political principle seemed to be the reality of the divine.

Aware of the divisiveness and desacralization-of-the-other that can follow a cut-and-dried identity, Walt Whitman wanted little to do with what Franciscan priest Richard Rohr calls “security systems” and “security camps.” Put in the terms of American politics, Whitman understood the perils of “the spirit of party.” Phrased differently yet, Whitman didn’t clingingly hold on to the shore of identity but rather pushed himself off into the middle of the river. “Who,” he once wonderfully and strangely asked, “be afraid of the merge?”

The example of Whitman, one could say, points to a current lack. Presently, we seem to be afflicted—to use Jacob Needleman’s words—by “the crisis of cutting one’s inner life off from a universal force that the human self is intended to receive and manifest in action.”

What is that force? Whitman sometimes called it God, aware of the elaborate inadequacy of that word. In his prose work Democratic Vistas, Whitman spoke of the “Miracle of miracles, beyond statement…yet hardest, basic fact, and only entrance to all facts.”

For Walt Whitman—at least at his best (as he was fallible and fell asleep as we all do)—awareness of the “Miracle of miracles” was the ideal entrance to all facts and situations and relationships. As a result of such an orientation, Whitman could spend three years befriending and tending human beings he didn’t know, some of whom were the so-called enemy, an act which was immoral to many, unforgivable, traitorous. As a result of such an orientation, “the world of predictable good guys and always-awful bad guys”—and these words are Richard Rohr’s—“collapses into God’s unfathomable grace.”

If politics does indeed rely on a continuous asking how best to conduct oneself as a member of a community or a polity, I believe that Walt Whitman deserves our careful attention. On the page and off the page, he gives flesh to the words of writer Randolph Severson: Health is to belong, but we can only belong by giving ourselves to something greater.

What is that “something greater”?

Early Christian wisdom (in words that sound like Whitman’s) defines it thus: “Have you seen your Sister, your Brother? You have your God.”

On the page and off the page, Whitman seems to tell us that we need to recollect a religious spirit to renew our country, to renew our politics, to craft and tend the life of our lives.

I said earlier that Whitman might be understood as one of the Founding Spiritual Fathers of our country. But that is not quite right: for a Founding Spiritual Father is by nature a Founding Political Father, too. If we see things holistically, as we must, spirit and polity cannot be neatly split. How could they be?

I recognize the statements above might sound like an attempt to bring down the wall separating church and state, to somehow encourage theocracy. That is decidedly not my intention. Nor was it ever Whitman’s (who often expressed skepticism of churches and churchliness).

What I am writing about here has little to do with belonging to a particular religion. And Whitman, who was called by one great literary critic “the most comprehensive soul” of American poets, not only admitted to “atheistical” moments, but was seemingly an omnist of sorts, a lover of all religions, and likely admired this jewel from his acquaintance Henry David Thoreau: “This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one centre.”

That Whitman could orient himself (imperfectly, fallibly) to the divine center while also remaining committed to “the blessings of liberty”—of worship, of speech, et cetera—is an important part of his paradoxical, relevant legacy to us. That is the point I am trying to make here.

Though we must continue to separate church and state, Whitman might’ve said, we can’t continue to separate America and Spirit. If our country is founded on contradiction, he might have added, so be it.

I say that the real and permanent grandeur of these States must be their religion….

VI

Recently, I stumbled upon a snippet of a conversation that I recorded in a notebook, a conversation I had with my youngest daughter two years ago:

Dad?
Yes.
Sometimes when I see someone cough, I want to hug them. Even if it’s a stranger.

I wrote this snippet down, I remember, because I was made raw by it. I recall that when Tomasa shared these words with me, she was embarrassed. The subtext seemed to be: Is it normal to feel this way? I assured her that it was normal to feel this way, which I know to be true, even if it’s a seed in our collective consciousness that we don’t sufficiently water.

Whenever I hear an elected politician speak today, it’s almost always with language unable to transcend itself—language that’s hedging, language that’s cutting a deal, language unable to shake off its factional filter, its partisan winking and othering, its calculation. Whenever I hear an elected politician speak, there’s rarely a higher horizon of being. When will our elected politicians unscrew the locks from the doors and unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs? When will they attempt to speak not to the in-crowd but to a category larger than party allegiance? When will they practice what Australian poet Les Murray calls wholespeak, not what he calls narrowspeak? When will our elected politicians acknowledge the common ground of our shared aliveness? (And when will our elected politicians extend that acknowledgement to the whole community of life, including all fellow creatures?) When will they disarm themselves like America’s ten-year-old daughters?

May we all rejoice when that day comes.

(But it seems I’m perhaps asking for the cart before the horse. For such language to be possible we Americans must also live in a way that makes for such language. Such language can’t merely be a campaign strategy, can’t be “tactical.” Without integrity the words are merely “politic.”)

VII

Elected politicians can access a higher horizon of being. Such magnanimity can happen. Elected politicians can defy their perception managers, ditch their scripts, forget about message discipline, polling data, elections, and the possible disfavor of the crowd, and collapse into God’s unfathomable grace. And then, come hell or high water, do their best to stay there. Once, for example, in the midst of a civil war, one notably decent American politician said: With malice toward none, with charity toward all.

Have we ever really heard those queer, anomalous, awful words? Has any American ever really heard them?

If we were to really hear these words today, what would happen?

If we were to really hear these words today, we would have to radically change the way politics is viewed and conducted. Malice toward none, charity toward all—now that is an “all-penetrating religiousness.” That is a religion that re-links, that re-ligaments.

And please don’t think such “all-penetrating religiousness” is synonymous with overlooking hardheartedness, stupidity, harm, and injustice—with compliance, passivity, with anything goes. No. The politician who uttered the strange words above, as you know, did more than most to end slavery in our country. Prying open the third eye doesn’t mean shutting the other two. One can fiercely oppose someone (or something) while still remaining magnanimous. Would it be too sermonish to suggest that in the tension of that paradox some of the greatest characters are forged?

(And President Lincoln spent time in makeshift Civil War hospitals, too. And he, too, remarkably, befriended and tended soldiers of both sides.)

“If there is such a thing as salvation,” writes Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, “then we are not saved until everyone is saved; our dignity and liberation are bound together.”

For those words to fulfill their own beauty, they must not only cut across lines of race, sex, creed, and class but politics, too. The broken-open heart of Whitman, Lincoln, Dr. King, Abraham Heschel, Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, of you and me, is the heart that invites everyone out of exile. To invite everyone out of exile means risking a promiscuous compassion—a socially incorrect compassion, a politically incorrect compassion. “I can say that in my ministerings,” Whitman wrote, “I comprehended all, whoever came in my way, northern or southern, and slighted none.”

In other words, “the Light that lighteth everyone” actually lights everyone—Reds and Blues both. In other words, if Christ plays in ten thousand places, one of those places is in the group—or politician—you baroquely hate.

VIII

Some might be understandably wondering: “What’s the point of trying to heal America in its current form? Our country is not only ill but the case is terminal. The system is broken. The Powers That Be have usurped We the People. We are likely beyond reformation. Plus, politics on such a large scale—regardless of the system—can never really be human.”

In an interview with Krista Tippett, writer and Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast speaks to similar concerns. Memorably, Steindl-Rast said our future is not in a “new, big tower of power” but the “network.” “Our hope in the future,” he elaborated evocatively, quoting Raimon Panikkar, is the “hope into ‘well-trodden paths from house to house,’ these well-trodden paths from house to house. That is the image that holds a lot of promise for our future.”

If Steindl-Rast is onto something here (and I believe he is), how might this poetic insight be integrated into the hardball world of institutional politics and into the broader vision of politics that Wendell Berry and Parker Palmer describe?

I know Walt Whitman had his questions about America, too. He was no starry-eyed naif, despite what some might say. I know that he too wondered with bewilderment and foreboding about our country.

Imagine, for example, arriving in Washington, D.C. in the middle of an internecine war. There are impromptu hospitals in government buildings, in tents in open spaces, in churches (built on platforms atop the pews), and these hospitals are full of wounded and dying Americans. At night you see the fires of soldiers burning across the river. To make matters worse, to make things eerier and more apocalyptic, you’re looking for your kid brother. You’re hoping George is alive, but you’re pessimistic. Recently, he was in a grim battle. You search the makeshift hospitals for days. You encounter such carnage in these hospitals that you’re careful where you put your eyes. You’re alone. You’ve been robbed of your money. You walk during the day and walk throughout the night. At one point, you come upon a heap of human body parts under a tree. At another point, you find your brother, who is upright and clear-limbed with eyes full of perception.

And then what do you do afterwards? You celebrate with George and go home, right? You go back to New York City, relieved George is alive. You go back to New York City where there is no war, where your friends and family are. You get the hell out of Washington, D.C. No. Despite your fears about the unfolding war, your country, and your own well-being, you go further in. You go further into the crush, into the rank vulnerability. Into God in his most distressing disguise. A profound conviction of necessity, of affinity, draws you in. You stay three years.

IX

Who among us today meets the challenge of Walt Whitman’s example? Who acts like Whitman did during the Civil War? What elected politician? What religious leader? What social thinker? What talking head? What artist? What writer? What neighbor? What family member? What friend?

Where do we see the breakthrough of the human? Who among us cultivates the compassion that attempts to exile no one? Who among us tends the altar—the altar that is everywhere?

I know such people exist. Perhaps we will hear more from them in the days to come.

X

In his prose work Specimen Days, Whitman tells of a wounded soldier from Pennsylvania he often visited in the “Patent-Office Hospital” (a makeshift hospital in the U.S. Patent Office building, now the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery). This soldier was shot in the leg on a Saturday in mid-December and was unable to flee the scene. His company ended up leaving him behind; and for fifty hours, a little more than two days and two nights, the soldier lay helpless in a field. (Can you imagine it?) And because of his inability to move, the soldier unfortunately lay with his head downhill. Whitman asked the Union soldier how the nearby Rebels treated him as he lay immobilized. Did they abuse you? The soldier answered that a couple Rebels came over to him where he lay and “spoke roughly and sarcastically”; but another, a middle-aged man “moving around the field, among the dead and wounded, for benevolent purposes” approached the soldier in a different way, a way the soldier would never forget.

This man treated the soldier kindly, “bound up his wounds, cheer’d him, gave him a couple of biscuits and a drink of whiskey and water; asked him if he could eat some beef.” And this man wisely knew not to change the soldier’s position, even as it was painfully awkward, as the man supposed it might cause the wound in the soldier’s leg to burst. (The soldier ended up being helped off the battlefield and taken to the military hospital to be tended by Whitman and others.)

This nameless Confederate man is another part of the American self that has been obscured and begs for rediscovery; he is another challenge of example: this human (can you see him?) moving around the field, among the dead and the wounded, for benevolent purposes, binding wounds.

Image via pexels.