Guidelines for Life

          I follow pretty closely the writings of my friend and Franciscan priest, Dan Horan, offers.  Dan is a well-educated, significantly younger public figure in religion.  He has a radiant personality and an engaging spirit.  When Dan comes into a room, it lights up.  Soon conversation with him right in the middle ensues and laughter breaks out.  Everyone seems to be having fun.  If you did not know, you would not pick him out of a crowd as one who lives like a monk.  But that says more about my own stereotyping than anything else.

    Dan reminds me that being spiritual does not have to be a dour choice in the way folks live life.  For me Dan models the way I would like to picture how Jesus was than many of those stuffy nineteenth century Quaker guys in portraits hanging in too many Quaker meetinghouses I visited over my lifetime.  I can’t imagine any young person taking a look at one of those guys and saying, “I want to be just like him!”  I think Jesus had an infectious personality, just like Dan does. 

     Recently Dan offered some thoughts about life in the post-pandemic period.  Anyone who has lived through the 2020-2022 period of infection, masks, lockdowns, etc. breathe a sigh of relief that the worst of those days seem to be over.  But like most post-fear situations, one never feels quite sure.  There is a remnant wariness that another phase can pop up at any time.  We all know that our present and futures are built on what has happened to us in the past.  The past does not have to be predestination---dictating what life to come will be.  But the past does provide a destiny that necessarily is incorporated into our present moments.

    Dan entitles his little essay, “5 Christian virtues to help us learn to live in a ‘new normal.’”  I don’t disagree that many folks would agree that the five things he offers are virtues.  But I have written a fair amount on the virtues and my list is a bit different than Dan’s list.  So I am simply going to call them “guidelines.’  They are very important and I know not everyone is going to read Dan’s words.  Hence, I am introducing them into this piece which will be shared with a different audience than his.

    Dan opens with these words that I believe are accurate: “The expression "new normal" has increasingly felt like a meaningless phrase.”  Whatever we call normal varies and it often changes even for one individual.  Normal is different for me as an older guy than it was when I was younger.  What the pandemic did was to change suddenly and dramatically what all of us would have said was our normal lives. 

    As a college professor, immediately, I left teaching in person and was offering everything online.  The word, zoom, acquired a whole new meaning for most of us.  I can still click the zoom a text to make it smaller or bigger.  But I also have a zoom icon which I click and can be on a conference call with folks from around the world.  This has become normal and I doubt will change except as new technology displaces it. 

     Let’s look at the five guidelines for life my friend, Dan Horan, gives to us.  His first one is patience.  Basically, patience helps us to kind and understanding to others as they try to continue with life in a way that makes sense.  Things have changed and we need to be patient with each other.  For example, folks on a college campus know there seems to be more mental health issues than ever.  These are real.  Veterans like me need to be patient and understand that “kids aren’t soft” and, in turn, become pains ourselves.  So be patient, not a pain---in the butt!

    I knew Dan’s second guideline would be on the list: humility.  Anyone knows that someone who is arrogant is surely a pain in the butt.  Dan puts it well when he quips, “It is OK to do less, to take one's time, to recognize that just as it was not easy to stop the whole world in March 2020, it is not easy to restart it now.”  This ties naturally into the third guideline, empathy.  Empathy is more than just being nice.  Empathy is a word rooted in love.  Empathy is my willingness to put myself in your place.  In many cases I know I cannot change your situation, but I can empathize.  And I can offer it to myself and accept it from others.

    Dan’s fourth guideline is one I do consider to be a virtue, namely, trust.  All around us we have seen the breakdown of trust.  The fight over vaccines, politicians being jerks and the like tempt all of us to a cynical mistrust of everyone and everything not like us.  Dan is absolutely correct when he observes, “in order for us to move toward a better way of living and being in the world, we need to build back our sense of trust.”  It is important that he said “build” back our trust.  Trust is not like a light switch that we simply hit and it works.  Trust is incremental and developmental.  For good reason, we talk about levels of trust.  The first step for some folks is learning to trust themselves.

     His final guideline is flexibility.  This also is not surprising.  Everyone has learned how necessary lifelong learning is.  All of us know the trust of Dan’s statement, “The luxury of sure plans and inflexible schedules is a thing of the past (if they ever existed).”  As a person of routine, I appreciate the opportunities that being flexible offers.  Saying this suggests these five guidelines are more like a circle than a linear development.  Flexibility is easier if I am humble and so on.

Live with these guidelines and life will be better.  Add them to your spiritual life and it will deepen.