Manso

The Good Part

Before I write this, I feel like I have to explain that I’m agnostic. That is, I don’t claim to know anything about the existence of god. More specifically, I don’t care about the existence of god. I don’t go to church, and it doesn’t matter to me if you do or don’t.

This – of course – doesn’t exclude me from wanting to make the world a better place. It also doesn’t mean I can’t use a story from the New Testament to explain how I feel. I’m going to talk about Jesus.

Luke 10:38-42 tells the story of when Jesus went to visit his friends, Martha and Mary. He arrived at their place, and while Martha got busy cleaning up and making food (or something like that), Mary sat with Jesus and talked to him. Martha complained that Mary wasn’t helping her and Jesus told her something along the lines of “you’re worrying about the wrong things. Mary is doing the one thing that I came here for: being with me. That’s all that matters. It’s what we’ll remember from this visit.”

That’s my own paraphrasing. The language of the King James Bible has its own beauty: “Mary hath chosen that good part” (emphasis mine).

Among the miracles and admonishments of the New Testament, there’s this gentle lesson: be with the people in your life. Stop worrying about impressing them and give them your attention. Give them your time. It will make the world – theirs and yours – better. It’s the good part.

For the past several years, I’ve had the same resolutions, including “listen more” and “live in the present.” Those resolutions won’t change. I’ll keep making them.

Now that Shannon and I have our baby Cate, I want to make these resolutions more than ever. I want them to be with me, and I want to be with them. So we will.

Merry Christmas!

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.

If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future.

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

Making the decision to have a child – it is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.

Evil can kill a person but it cannot kill a people.

We will punish the guilty. The punishment will be more generosity, more tolerance, more democracy.