Ponder: capable of imagining the loves of strangers

All these cases are illustrations of the central, familiar, moral insight of the book.  "If you can learn a simple trick, Scout," Atticus advises his daughter, "you'll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks.  You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view...-until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

For Lee, this point demands more than observation.  By actively treating people as individuals, they can respond with unexpected virtue.  In the book, Walter Cunningham is part of a lynch mob.  When Scout causes Cunningham to recall that he is a father, he walks away from violence.  Men and women can be better than the mob, when they remember their hidden dignity, their secret honor.  Lee defends the possibility of the awakened conscience.

Right now, the world of adults seems increasingly like Lee's Maycomb, with a tiny religious minority stigmatized and targeted for exclusion, and another minority being accused of being criminals and rapists, demonstrating the strangely sexual content of bigotry.  And though we now it is not quite right, there are few who can manage tears.  

Once again--maybe always--there is a great drama in what Lee called "the secret courts of men's hearts."  Let us hope with Lee that people are better than the mob and capable of imagining the loves of strangers.  And whatever the outcome, Atticus--more real than any living politician--urges us to see it through.

Michael Gerson, "Timely Insights from 'Mockingbird'" The Washington Post 23 Feb 2016, A17

Burdens, Freedom and the Heart of the Law

‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.”  St. Mark 7:6

When I noticed that today’s Gospel lesson was about burdensome laws, I had to smile.  Because for the last month, my life has been dominated by one particular burdensome law—Virginia Civil Code 46.2-1177.  That’s the law that requires that all Fairfax County vehicles pass an emissions test prior to registration.  Now, in principle, I think it’s a very good law.  I think we have a responsibility to limit carbon emissions, and I want my kids to breathe clean air, and I’m sure that auto mechanics do work that contributes to the common good.  But in practice—well let’s just say I’ve made eight trips to Sunset Hills Automotive, and we haven’t passed yet.  I’m on a first name basis with everyone in the shop.

 I drive a big old car, which I inherited from my grandfather.  He always liked a pretty car and this one was his last one and his favorite.  Sometimes, when I climb into it, I can still smell my grandmother’s perfume.  I love the leather seats and the leg room, but the car has reached a certain age, and apparently its valves, sensors and gas cap appear to be hurtling down the “way of all flesh.”  Over at Sunset Hills, they test it, and when it fails, they find something wrong and fix that.  Then I have to drive it for fifty miles at varying speeds to reset the monitor and first thing in the morning, they will test it again.  And the process repeats, and the repair bills rise, and I’m left a rather less enthusiastic environmentalist than I was when I first moved to Virginia.  All those trips back and forth to the mechanic’s, all that steam being released from my ears—when you stack up those emissions against the ones escaping from the minuscule gaps around the sides of my gas cap, I just wonder how that computes.