Easter Monday

 A quarter after eight on a bright sunny Monday morning on the ASU campus. I sit at a metal table on the terrace outside the front of the Student Union looking across at the Hayden Library, the entrance to which is prominent through the shade structure in between. I learned that these shade structures, which are topped with moveable photovoltaic cells to generate power, go by the name PowerParasol (link) and were installed ten years ago. The outdoor spaces they create are among the most appealing spaces I have ever found on a college campus.

As I sip the coffee I just bought inside the union. I remark on how empty the campus feels. When they hired me, they made a big point of saying how ASU is the largest university system in the country, with over 150,000 students in all. Many of these are online. As I look at the plaza in front of me I wonder if they are all online. 

Not that I haven't seen it more crowded, but I have noticed on Mondays and Fridays, the place feels particularly deserted. Only a few students are visible, and I know from my walk in from the parking lot that many are high schoolers here for a spring orientation, some with their parents. 

Maybe I just misremembering how campuses are. When I was an undergraduate, eight a.m. seemed a very early time for a class. The only course I ever took at that hour in Salem was the university choir, which for my first three semesters there was a great way to get me out of bed and on campus at a reasonable hour. It was the best time of day to sing, if you were a bass like me. Sopranos needed the most warming up.

I have seen the ASU campus crowded but it seems unpredictable when everyone is here. For the moment it seems like a ghost town even though the term is still going on. Graduation is not until May, although I do see many students in their cap and gown taking early pictures. The ASU school colors are exactly the same as my undergraduate Alma Mater. There is is always a fleeting smack of recognition in my memory that stirs up a cocktail of emotions. 

Like most young people, I felt every emotion so strongly then. The stakes of everything felt so high, and yet I had the blasé attitude about time that young people have, that the days and years of one's life ahead seem without bound. 

Now I know the stakes of my life are higher in the sense that I recognize the finiteness of the time ahead of me, especially of the good years during which I can still pretend to be in my prime. Yet I have the perspective of knowing that life goes on despite my missteps, and that in some sense it doesn't matter much at all, and certainly my own life has been, in my mind, of such little consequence to the world. Such large-scale philosophic issues of my life were a big deal to me when I was young, when I saw life as a giant romantic epic. Now, feeling much smaller, I fall back on faith, letting God decide big issues for me, and trying to do His will one day at a time, which means loving Him and attempting to love every single person who crosses my path. Through my youth, God was certainly patient with me while I went through years thinking God was remote and unknowable, and that I could design my own rules for the universe. 

Thinking about this I reflected on how one of the big cultural divides of our time, that underlies much of politics and ideology structures, is the degree to which the moral laws of the universe are fixed or if they are changeable, even to the point of humans being able to mold and craft them. I certainly don't know the answer to this question, but I believe I could explain both points of view to each side in a way that they would agree is accurate.

This last issue---being able to describe both sides of a position in a way that adherents would agree is accurate---is something I strive for. To me, these are the real "two sides". Can you understand this concept I just said, and could you execute it?  I thought everyone would understand this principle, but I have learned they don't. I have been told many times by people, usually in exasperation and anger, "Well, this is what you believe..." followed by a list of things that I don't believe at all. Yet I know why they say these things. I have been told "there are not two sides, there is just one side---reality. Everything else is insanity." OK. I understand. I respect your point of view.

You could spend hours with me and never know who I voted for, even if we discussed politics. I have always been this way, even as my politics has radically changed over the years such that I have completely flipped sides on some issues.  It's hard for me to relate to people whose politics are the same as decades ago. 

Yet I am also of the conceit that my values have not changed, even if my surface politics have changed. I was thinking about this over the weekend while we were in Silver City, New Mexico, which is a place that wears its politics on its sleeve, so to speak, given the bumper stickers and posters we saw. 

On the one hand, it feels very comfortable to me. Culturally I still feel at home in the milieu of Boulder in 1978, which felt like a wonderland to me. On the surface, Silver City would seem to be a continuation of that, yet I don't feel the same spirit. Back then in 1978 it felt to me about being free-spirited, non-judgmental of others, and anti-authoritarian. Now I see the same surface but it feels to me to be anything but what I just described. I don't feel "welcomed". It feels like a purity test to me, that one must pass on every issue or be labeled or be "canceled" as the youngsters say.  I am now the problem. I am the exception to tolerance. Love is love, but we must hate the hateful. My opinions are dangerous to others. My speech is violence. I am the one who must be purged from society so it can transform to the beautiful future. That is not what it felt like in Boulder in 1978, at least to me.

Yet in many ways, I am even more "left wing" than I was then. 

Nevertheless I love all the people I saw in Silver City. They have their perspective and I have mine, and of course I put thoughts into people's heads that may not be accurate at all. Surprises lurk at every turn, even as some people live up to the stereotype. I am judging others, I tell myself.

So I try my best, when I remind myself, to treat everyone as a brother or sister, all the way failing at that.. The Catholic Church tradition going back to Thomas Aquinas teaches that to love someone is to "will the good of that person." (link) There is hardly a person alive I cannot apply that to, so I have no excuse not to love someone, even if they wish to silence and destroy me. To love my neighbor means to actively apply that to every person whose path I cross, even if they are screaming at me in rage.

OK, time to head off to the lab. Maybe AI will sort this all sort.

 (link) I remember the day when I first heard love defined. It was in my moral theology class, and the professor said very matter-of-factly: “Of course, for Aquinas to love means to consistently will and choose the good of the other. To love neighbor as self means seeing their sharing in the good as constitutive of your own sharing in the good. To love God, whose good we cannot will strictly speaking — as He is purely actualized good itself — is to love what God loves, which, of course, is the neighbor’s good. So we come full circle.” I was ecstatic. It suddenly made sense of the interrelationship between the “two loves” and helped me see love’s link to the moral law, which specifies both what “the good” is and how one must choose in relation to the good in a manner that brings God-designed fulfillment. But my professor went even further and added, “The Second Vatican Council, under the influence of Karol Wojtyła [later Pope John Paul II], further enriched this definition of love by linking the willing of another’s good to an additional and necessary gift that must accompany that willing.: the gift of self.”