On the Banks

Christmas in the Darkness

 

 

 

It feels hard to get into the Christmas spirit this year. It did last year too. In fact I’m starting to think that unless you are a small child, getting into the Christmas spirit is not an easy thing to do, and that it only gets harder with time. This year seems especially dark. In my own circle of friends, family and acquaintances, I can’t even count the number of losses and other tragedies that people are going through in this season.

I know many people who have lost a parent or even a child during the past year. A friend on FaceBook is watching his father die; another came home on Christmas Eve to find that his wife had left him, taking their children with her; a cousin who suffers from PTSD from years of service as an EMT first responder may face jail time because he waved a gun in the air at someone trying to cut him off on the freeway; and only two days ago parents of a young woman with our daughter’s genetic condition lost her to seizures and other complications. I can’t even imagine how that family is going to get through today.

I do remember our own terrible Christmas, only two months after we had lost our baby son at 39 weeks, one week before he was due, to a cord accident. I felt smashed into a million pieces, barely even present, held together only by the people around me. The thing is though, it wasn’t a terrible Christmas. We spent it at my sister’s B&B in Minnesota, our whole family, and it was actually a fun time. It was the year my husband wrote The Rules of Christmas and to this day I am astounded that he had both the presence of mind and the good humor to write it. But he did, and I somehow had the presence of mind and good humor to find it hilarious. I still look back at that Christmas with happy memories. It was a bright spot in a very dark time.

And I kind of think that’s what Christmas is about. Whether you celebrate it as a Christian or as a pagan (I’ll leave other traditions to those more familiar with them), what we are celebrating is not the fact that we have perfect lives in a flawless world and we couldn’t ask for more. What we are celebrating is the bits of light, wherever they are and however small, in a world that we know is filled with much darkness. For Christians, that “light” is the birth of Jesus and the promise of eternal salvation. But as an outsider looking in, I also believe that it is the promise of achieving the kingdom of heaven here on earth and in that sense is not so far removed from the pagan celebration of light in the material world.

Maybe, as we become adults, and as we become more intensely aware of the suffering, the loss, and the evil in the world, it does become harder to celebrate Christmas. That doesn’t make it less important to celebrate it though. It makes it more important. One of the only ways we have to fight the darkness is to recognize the light, celebrate it, and do what we can to encourage it. The light may come in the form of a massive sunburst or it may be a tiny pinpoint. This morning, for me, it was the video of another young girl with our daughter’s condition, defying the predictions of experts from long ago and reading aloud from a book.

The relentless brutality of the world isn’t going to stop for our celebrations, yet we still celebrate. That’s the whole point.

 

 

 

 

Remembering Ralph Raico

 

I met Ralph Raico at an Institute for Humane Studies conference in 1985. He took me and another student, Annie, out to lunch on the first day of the conference, before everyone else had arrived. Annie was a nurse, working in a mental hospital, and we talked about her work over lunch, and about the writing of Dr. Thomas Szasz who Professor Raico knew well.

At one point in the conversation, Annie said something about patients being wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia, and I asked her what, exactly, schizophrenia actually meant. She gave some sort of answer that wasn’t at all satisfying and I was prepared to let it go because that’s what polite people do. But Ralph Raico wasn’t polite. He wasn’t rude or ill-mannered, certainly not to sweet young Annie. But he said, very clearly (and in fact very politely) “that’s not what she asked.”

And everything changed. When you live in a world of murky communication, of saying what seems polite, or what the other people you identify with are saying, you may not be aware of the murkiness until someone shines a light on it. That’s what Ralph did. Until that moment, I really had not been around people who cared about truth, or about clarity. That one statement, and his insistence on answering the question I had asked, opened up for me a whole new world of communication and learning, and it was beautiful.

I think he was the first person I ever heard use the term “intellectual integrity” and mean it. His worldview - and by that I mean not so much his commitment to liberty, as his commitment to truth and to clear and honest communication, his utter intolerance for bullshit - was inspiring to me. It made me believe that the world was much bigger than I knew: that it was full of people like this, people who cared about the important things, people with whom one could have challenging and enlivening discussions. He inspired me to go out and seek this world.

The restaurant where we had lunch was Chinese, and I remember being embarrassed that I couldn’t use chopsticks well. At some point, the topic of Hong Kong came up, and I was intrigued by the idea of this tiny bastion of free enterprise. A few months later, I would make the decision to spend my junior year in college there, and I ultimately ended up living there for seven years. Of course the big wide world wasn’t all I expected it to be. There was plenty of murkiness, plenty of bullshit to wade through, including a lot of my own. And the people who cared about the important things weren’t that easy to find. But I can’t imagine what my life would be like without those experiences and I am eternally grateful for the inspiration that set me off on that journey.

I met Professor Raico a few more times over the years at conferences, and in the past few years he has written to me twice to commend me for articles I have written. I will never delete those emails.

I’m sure I am not the only person to have been inspired by who he was. It was many years before I realized it, but he had a profound influence on the direction of my life and on the values I have come to embrace. I’m sure there are many others who can say the same. I know that others will remember him for his scholarship, for his unyielding defense of liberty, for his intellect and for his biting wit. I will remember him as someone who shone a light of clarity through a world swimming in bullshit. And in doing so, he showed me that clarity, intellectual honesty and the pursuit of truth were all possible. He helped to show me a world bigger than I had imagined before, and inspired me to seek out more of it.

Tonight, it feels like that world just got a little bit smaller.

Rest in peace, Professor Raico.