All the Lonely People

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"It is not good for the man to be alone." - Genesis 2:18

We like to think of the holidays as happy times when we gather to celebrate friends and family. Yet, for too many, the holidays are salt in the gaping wounds of loss and loneliness. This is borne out in a brief survey of today's headlines: "America's Loneliness Epidemic", "UK Appoints a Minister for Loneliness", "Public Health Relevance of Social Isolation and Loneliness". We have a problem. What we are intuiting and what our lived experience tells us is being acknowledged by governments, healthcare providers, and business leaders. We are lonely. And it's costing us.

There are so many factors that have contributed to this epidemic: our mobility (our lack of roots in a community), drastically shortened career life cycles, relationships based on utility or proximity (usually career) that end when we change jobs or move. Transitioning through life stages: student, career, single, married, parent, empty-nester, widowed/divorced, retired, and care-giver. All these stages are the realities of modern life. Transitioning between these stages disconnects us from others at the same stage. Establishing human connection at each successive transition is more difficult than the one preceding it.

In addition to transience, we have to recognize that modernity is mechanistic, i.e process oriented. Modernity rejects the spiritual, the metaphysical, the deus ex machina, i.e. it rejects any notion of non-material causality. Ironically though, modernity does have a deity: utility.

"Utility is the god of modernity"

― Esther Lightcap Meek  

Utility is the unseen medium through which we move. Every material thing, every occasion, every relationship is measured against it. Utility is the progenitor of work. We work to sustain ourselves and to give our lives a purpose. And certainly, our employer pays us for a purpose. But both employee and employer relate to one another out of utility. Once that utility ceases, so does our value to an employer. At that point, our employment relationship ends. In the 21st century world of work, our workflow can be so automated that we rarely interact with other humans. We report to a digital supervisor as automated systems call us to a shift or track our movements.

This bent toward utility extends beyond employment. It determines how much we will invest into maintaining friendships and family ties over over extended distances and through challenging circumstances. Marriage and significant-other relationships are no guarantee against loneliness, though our culture and technology pushes us to "pair up". Too often, we just end up being alone in pairs.

Whether we live by ourselves or with a significant-other, we will inevitably lose people in our lives. That being the case, we should always be open to establishing new connections. But, alas, we don't. There are many factors that may inhibit our ability to connect, but I will focus on this one:

"A national culture that promotes polite restraint, and which actively fends off and forestalls the forming of relationships between strangers, is one that might as well be inviting loneliness on its population." - Chris Bourn 

The author of this quote is speaking specifically about English culture, but I would suspect nearly all English-speaking countries have inherited this reserve as a cultural attribute. Because "utility is the god of modernity", we call on this god to justify (excuse) our breaking this boundary of reserve to establish a connection but only because something is needed or something must be done. We have forgotten how to connect with people for no other reason than they are people!

Another obvious but neglected connection is with our neighbors. Although I know my neighbors fairly well, I still have to resist the temptation to go buy a tool or contract a service when I could simply ask my neighbor to help me. "Sorry to bother you" is not simply a cliché or a movie title, but is too often our default to connecting with others. We need to view our need for help as an opportunity, not a liability.

Befriend your neighbors. When we truly know them, we are more willing to work for the common good. - Fr Richard Rohr

When we are friends with our neighbors and there is some degree of mutual reliance, it breaks the cycle of isolation. When my neighbor needs some staple item, she will knock on our door. It's happened a few times. One day, she stopped me to apologize for always asking for something. I replied, "No worries, what are neighbors for?" We have a long way to go to change our mindset.

To deal with the consequences of loneliness, many seek out the services of therapists. In this day and age, therapists provide an invaluable service to help us deal with loneliness. However, not everyone can afford therapy. Not to criticize therapy, but have we not commodified what used to be simple friendship? Have we not redefined a basic human need into into a pathology requiring a clinical solution? Yet:

"Healing and well-being are fundamentally political not clinical."
- Dr Shawn Ginwright

What Dr Ginwright is saying is that healing and well-being take place in the presence of others. But it's not enough to be in the presence of others. We have all experienced that feeling of being alone in a crowd. We must be seen and recognized by other people and we must recognize them. We must be open to it. It must be mutual. For that to happen, a mutually safe space must exist. Someone has to take the initiative by asking the other person about themselves. If there is one universal truth, it's that everyone loves to talk about themselves.  That opens up a space. That space has a name: hospitality. To be hospitable is to have a spirit that welcomes others into one's presence. A hospitable spirit is also open to the invitation of others.

In a hospitable space, we may be able to go deeper in sharing and connecting to that which makes us most deeply human:

"I have found that the very feeling which has seemed to me most private, most personal and hence most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others. " - Carl Rogers

If we are able to connect at that deepest level, it would heal our deepest wound, loneliness, the scab of which is alienation. Alienation, that sense of disconnection and distrust of others, is the dry tinder that fuels the wildfires of divisive politics. Alienation is the root of what ails us in the West. It makes us good consumers, compliant laborers, fearful citizens, and an apathetic electorate.

In the end, we must choose to reach out. That requires courage, sparked by the hope of connection, the hope that we are not alone, and faith in a better future. Our willingness to enter the world  of others, to connect with people, is an echo of the Nativity, where God entered our world to connect with us.

What is Truth?

"Pilate asked Jesus, 'What is Truth?' "  John 18:38

I have to admit that lately I have been perplexed and saddened by the amount of lying going on in the world around me. At the highest levels of government, lying is the order of the day. Not that lying politicians are anything new, but the brazenness with which they do it now is over the top. I think we are all reeling from the unprecedented levels of mendacity and corruption we are witnessing. As we are being constantly gas-lighted and worn down, we too slip into a denial (lying to ourselves) believing that this level of mendacity is benign as long as it doesn't affect our daily lives.

I have also observed that lying is quite common in everyday life. I do not limit lying to telling a falsehood. I also include the failure to fully disclose the truth. By failing to fully disclose a truth, we lead people to believe a false narrative about a situation, which reduces to a lie. Decisions are made based on this information, which may have some seed of truth, but because salient information is not disclosed, the situation implied is nowhere near the truth of it.

We expect that a lie is admitted when confronted by irrefutable evidence. Now the highest levels of government, lies exposed are answered with even bigger lies. Having to push so hard to get at the truth is exhausting. It wears us at down. It tempts us to accept the liar's narrative. The status-quo. But going along to get along eats our soul, one bite at a time.

"Mr. Trump eats your soul in small bites... It starts with your sitting silent while he lies, both in public and private, making you complicit by your silence. In meetings with him, his assertions about what “everyone thinks” and what is “obviously true” wash over you, unchallenged..." -James Comey

In the presence of a liar we may find moments of strength to say "We will not cover for you". Many more times we quietly go along with the bullshit. More typically we practice denial. We don't want to believe something, so we tell ourselves it isn't so. We don't want to believe someone is addicted, embezzling funds, take sexual liberties with someone in their charge, or cheating on their spouse. It's risky to the status quo, to our station in life, to challenge the lies. The cost to challenge a lie is high. But the cost of living with a lie is even higher.

Every lie told, every lie believed borrows from a future reality. Life has a way of being real. We can deny (lie) that the science of human-induced climate change is true, but mother nature is having none of it. We can see that with our own eyes. We are experiencing back-to-back weather extremes that should be once in a hundred or five hundred year events. Because we have been in denial, lied to ourselves for so long, we aren't prepared to respond to the immediate consequences of reality, much less mitigate it in the future.

So what are the cost of lies? Belief in others. Belief in ourselves. Belief in objective truth. A completely lost ability to recognize truth itself. Our brains rewire themselves into a state of cynical distrust. Distrust is the PTSD response of having been lied to. This leads to cynicism, the terminal stage of distrust. At that point, we trust no one and no thing.

We may try to maintain a cognitive dissonance that lying in a broader or higher context is benign. That the lying is so far out of our scope that it won't affect us. However life, being real, will smack us back to reality. Ask top career officials in government who thought they could ride out the Trump administration. They were hastily promoted to cabinet offices as their predecessors quit or were fired. They thought they could hide, but now they are exposed. They have to either have to live the lie to preserve their careers or resign to keep their integrity intact.

The truth is always dangerous because it challenges the status-quo.

"Our environment lacks truth. And when truth is spoken, it gives offense, and the voices that speak the truth are put to silence. " - St Oscar Romero

"No person is more hated than one who speaks the truth" - Plato

Yet the truth must be faced, accepted, and ultimately spoken. First, we have to speak the truth to ourselves. This risks the death of our ego. Speaking a truth to others can result in the death of a relationship or even, as in the case of Romero, actual death. But the alternative, though it seems safer and easier, is bleak. To continue living a lie borrows (or perhaps steals) truth and reality from the future. When we eventually arrive at the future, we find we have borrowed against what is true and real and now there is nothing left to live on.

So back to Pilate's question: What is truth?  The answer was standing in front of Pilate in the person of Jesus. Not only in a mystical, metaphysical way, although I'll leave space for that. Truth resided in the earthly person of Jesus because his life and his words were consistent in every context of his life. What you saw is what you got, no matter what the setting. He embodied truth because his life was fully integrated. There was no distance between his life and his words. Those in power recognized the threat Jesus posed. Here was a person of such impenetrable integrity, whose words, life, and being were so unified that no carrot or stick could corrupt him into complicity or silence. Jesus had to be eliminated. Jesus knew the cross was where this would end. That is the challenge and the model for us. 

The Church of St Elsewhere

Mont Saint Michel in Normandy is about as other-worldly as a church can get. It is an island in the sea, one kilometer from shore.  Mont Saint Michel is a monument to wars between kings, kingdoms, and religions. It is a crumbling fortress against the outside world that must constantly be shored up against rising tides (and sea levels).

Mont Saint Michel is among the great church buildings of the world I hope to see: Notre Dame in Paris (though now all that remains are the stone walls), Westminster Abbey in London, and St. Peter's in Rome. For some reason I have a fascination with centuries old church buildings. It would seem to be an odd fascination since I rarely attend a church service these days.

Maintaining these physical structures of the church is a never-ending battle against time, nature, and changing human sensibilities. Hundreds of years ago, wealthy noblemen and kings commissioned the building of these structures to the "Glory of God". Artisans and laborers devoted their energies to buildings that would inspire wonder and awe from both  inside and out. Perhaps this is the all too human response to our mortality. We want to build something that will outlive us, though Jesus warned us, "Not one stone will be left upon another."

We humans are not satisfied with physical structures. We want organizational structure. Jesus exhorted us to gather for fellowship at the table, but we want to know which end of the table is the head. In the Gospel of Mark, James and John decided they want to be in charge. Not only did they want to form a hierarchy, they wanted to be the head of it!

Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. “Teacher,” they said, “we want you to do for us whatever we ask.” “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked. They replied, “Let one of us sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” “You don’t know what you are asking,” Jesus said. “Can you drink the cup I drink or be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with?” “We can,” they answered. Jesus said to them, “You will drink the cup I drink and be baptized with the baptism I am baptized with, but to sit at my right or left is not for me to grant. These places belong to those for whom they have been prepared.” When the ten heard about this, they became indignant with James and John. Jesus called them together and said, “You know that those who are regarded as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their high officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Mark 10:35-43

Although Jesus told his disciples that  to "lord over" and to "exercise authority over" others was not to be the pattern for his followers, they began to adopt the world's structures of hierarchy. Most of the centuries of church conflict and turmoil was not so much about what the belief was as who was in charge.

A few centuries after Jesus had left this earth, the Roman model of diocese and archdiocese had been fully integrated into church governance, with bishops and archbishops as the heads. In the centuries which followed, the line between government and church were indistinguishable. The combination grew increasingly powerful, leading to the Crusades in the eleventh century. Over time, as nation-states formed, the influence of the church waned, but never completely abated.

Whatever its degree of influence on temporal affairs, the church knew that it was operating against the explicit direction of its Master.  Allowing space for monastic orders was a tacit admission of this truth. Most of the saints designated by the church, were either from monastic orders, founded orders, or otherwise operated at the fringes of the church. It was necessary to put some distance from the structures of power for people to even attempt to follow Jesus.

Jesus never left explicit directions on how to organize the nascent group of believers he was leaving behind, but he was very explicit about what structures and behaviors to avoid. Throughout history, Jesus' wisdom on these matters had to be rediscovered:

“the "small goodness" from one person to his fellowman is lost and deformed as soon as it seeks organization and universality and system, as soon as it opts for doctrine, a treatise of politics and theology, a party, a state, and even a church. Yet it remains the sole refuge of the good in being. ”― Emmanuel Levinas

This is why attempts to evangelize the world end up being an evangelization of the structures of power. The most notable example is the Roman Catholic church and its "Doctrine of Discovery." This gave European colonialists the moral cover to displace and enslave indigenous peoples. A number of non-denominational American churches have picked up on this as they setup satellite churches under the administration of one senior pastor. But truth is not found at the centers of power:

"If you really want truth, you need to escape the black hole of power and allow yourself to waste a lot of time wandering here and there on the periphery. Revolutionary knowledge rarely makes it to the center, because the center is based on existing knowledge. The guardians of the old order usually determine who gets to reach centers of power, and they tend to filter out carriers of disturbing, unconventional ideas." ―Yuval Noah Harari

Centralized power was always going to be a problem for the church. It's a place to hide all sorts of evil. It's why Jesus operated at the periphery. The margins are where he built his church. Father Oscar Romero realized this in the most trying of places, El Salvador in the late nineteen seventies.

Oscar Romero was appointed and installed as the Archbishop of El Salvador in 1977. He was placed as the head of the Catholic church in El Salvador. His position naturally overlapped with the centers of power at the time, the wealthy landowners and the government. A number of events, culminating with the assassination of his friend, Father Rutilio Grande, changed his perspective about the center of power and moved him to the periphery, the poor laborers of El Salvador. He began to voice the sufferings of the poor and painted a vision of what the Church could be:

"God wants to save us as a people. He does not want to save us in isolation. That is why the church today, more than ever before emphasizes what it means to be a 'people'. And that is why the church experiences conflicts: the church does not want just crowds; she wants a people. A crowd is a bunch of individuals, and the more lethargic they are, the better; the more conformist they are, the better." - St. Oscar Romero 

The "church" Romero speaks of, the communion of life, the church which forms a people, is alien to the concept of "church" in middle America. I have read many of  Romero's words. As I did so, I was saddened by the vast gulf, a great chasm, between the Church Romero speaks of and the church we have today. Romero was martyred as he tried to live out this vision of what the church could be.

Yet I remain hopeful. I see stirrings among the people who want to follow Jesus, who see the truth of his life and teachings. They are tired of living a lie, of putting on a smiling face when inside they are grieving. I am one of those people. I know there are others. Perhaps you are one of them. We can all lament and grieve the state of the church and we probably need to do that. But we also need to realize that the baton has been dropped in front of us. At some point we are going to have to pick it up and "run the race set before us" (Heb 12:1). We cannot run this race alone. We must nurture a hopeful expectancy to find others on the same journey, those who are heading in the same direction. We must learn to recognize the presence of God in people and places where we did not expect to find him. Quite often those places are at the margins of society. We should try to be more spiritually aware, living with a Jesuit expectancy to look for "God in all things." Let us try to learn from those times when we look back, kick ourselves and say "God was in this place and I did not realize it!" (Gen 28:16).

The church we seek, the people that follow Jesus, is the fellowship of saints and the body of Christ. It does not necessarily meet in a building, although it sometimes does. It is a people who will live and speak the truth, however imperfectly. It is a people who have come to terms with their own mistakes, sufferings, denials, and sins. It is a place where people can rejoice, but also grieve together. It is a place where people will bear with one another in all their frail humanity.

It meets at the Church of St. Elsewhere. Service times to be announced.

The Space to be Human

Weedpatch Migrant Camp - Photo by Bobak Ha'Eri Wikimedia

I never read The Grapes of Wrath in high school or college. Recently, I decided to dive into this quintessentially American classic. John Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath" was published in 1939 and yet as I read it, I found the story profoundly relevant.

(Spoilers Ahead)

The Grapes of Wrath is the story of a family displaced by natural disaster and the relentless math of capitalism. We encounter the Joad family after they have been reduced to tenant farmers on what had once been their own land. They had mortgaged their land to cover losses from past years' crop failures. The drought continued, the crops failed again, and the Joads, along with their neighbors, were in default:

"A man can hold the land if he can just eat and pay taxes. Yes, he can do that until his crops fail one day and he has to borrow money from the bank. But you see, a bank can't do that... They breathe profits, they eat the interest on money. If they don't get it, they die..".

Now the days of reckoning were at hand.  The land owners ("owner men") have come to evict them off the land. The mathematics of finance, banking, and money-lending created an unseen force that drove them away:

"All of them [owner men] were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provide a refuge from thought and from feeling."

The Joads loaded everything they owned into a truck and began living as nomads. Then, as now, people resorted to living in their vehicles and encampments. In today's parlance, they were homeless. Steinbeck takes us on their journey to California as they burn through cash and fall into increasingly desperate straights. They wander around the state believing that a good-paying job is just around the corner, but there are no good-paying jobs. All the while their economic reality became bleaker. The locals treat them as pariahs. Law officers force them to move from their encampments. They hurry to arrive at orchards and fields only to find out that they can't, as an entire family, pick enough to feed themselves for a day.

You cannot read this book and fail to see today's economic refugees, sleeping in cars, in parks or under bridges, driving ride-shares as second (and possibly third) gigs, trying to survive on stagnant wages as gentrification raises rents and drives people to living on the streets.

The unseen force was mathematics, the equations of finance and capitalism. Mathematics played an important role, and now technology amplifies the power of mathematics a thousand-fold. Scheduling software has wrung out all the "wasted time" out of human labor. Service and retail jobs are scheduled on-demand. Employees are required to drop everything, come to work, or risk losing their job. Second jobs or educational pursuits are put on hold because, on a moments' notice, you can be called in and you dare not refuse.

Employees who are lucky enough to find full or near full-time employment are subject to "strict performance" (KPI) metrics. The relentless math of waste reduction squeezes out the last seconds of idle time in a workers life. In factories and warehouses employees are tracked. In an effort to prevent employee illness from dehydration, urine color charts are conveniently posted in restrooms.  Delivery vehicles are tracked as well as delivery drivers. I've seen delivery persons sprint from their trucks to front doors and back. In the end, desperate employees relieve themselves in bottles or in hidden corners to avoid being penalized for not making quota.

Service clerks are graded by their survey results. Many clerks look at me desperately. "Will you please fill out this survey?" they ask. Now that I am more aware of the possible effects on their employment, I take the time to fill them out. Ride-share apps require you to "grade your driver" on safety, cleanliness, and conversation. I once had a Lyft driver preface his answer to my question about the city with: "I won't answer unless you promise to give me a good grade on my conversation".

I was lucky enough to have a "white collar" office job. Towards the end I noticed the annual reviews were getting harsher. If you fell into the bottom third of rankings, you were out, no matter how long you had been at the company. I watched colleagues fired because they had the lowest ranking.

In all this, what is being squeezed out? The time and space to be human.

We need time and space to live beyond service to employers. "Full Employment" simply means we can obtain the 16 hours of work per day to subsist. Do that for six or seven days, and the other requirements of life (sleeping, eating) are cut to a barest minimum. That bit of left-over time at the end of the day leaves little room for relationships, family life, or parenting.

The relentless math of extraction at every level concentrates the wealth from productivity gains into the hands of a small group of capital owners:

The scenario set in Steinbeck's novel is being repeated today. We have again come to a point of precarity teetering on desperation. Today, the total of what many people can earn in a day is not enough to shelter and feed themselves and their families. At a time of record low unemployment, people are defaulting on car loans, falling behind in their student loan payments, and losing their domiciles at an increasing rate. What will happen in the inevitable downturn comes?

What is needed is a morality to balance out the mathematics. A morality that says we will not tolerate that people being homeless, children starving, or the sick dying for lack of funds as an acceptable price of American capitalism. As a society, as an electorate, we need to call in the debt of those who have prospered so much at the expense of everyone else. A debt is owed to society, to all of us who maintain society: the rule of law, the roads and highways, the power grid, communications, who care for our sick and injured. We owe a debt to those who fought for our nations’ survival and those who protect us every day. How is it that those who have risen in power and wealth in this country seem to think they owe nothing to anyone?

Progressive taxation was the norm during the post-WWII golden age that actually had a middle class. The Interstate highway system, Medicare, and Medicaid made life better for most Americans. A successful public space program put men on the moon. Now our roads and water systems are crumbling, healthcare for the aged and poor is under attack, and space exploration is the playground of a few wealthy billionaires. What we are doing now is not sustainable. Every day more people find themselves in precarity, on the edge of an abyss. Just enough crumbs are falling off the edge of the tables of capitalism for people to survive, but just barely. What will happen when the economy contracts? There will be:

"... in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

---

The Fourteenth Station

One day I chanced to hear about an exhibit at a church I passed by regularly. It was titled "Migration: Stations of the Cross". The intersection of the "Stations of the Cross" and "Migration" resonated with my Catholic upbringing and my immigrant heritage. I had to check it out. Moreover, I lamented the President's harsh treatment of migrants and immigrants, I was hoping to understand these things in a new light.

I was on my way home from the office so I decided to stop by the church. It was a large building, so I asked a lady who happened to be standing in the hallway for directions to the exhibit, and she graciously pointed me in the right direction. I entered a large room that looked to be a meeting room, which was empty except for displays around the perimeter. Each display highlighted an aspect of human migration and matched it with Jesus' journey of suffering, the "Stations of the Cross". At the Fourteenth Station, where "Jesus Died", was a prayer written by a prisoner of the Ravensbrück concentration camp:

“Oh Lord, remember not only the men and women of goodwill, but also those of ill will. But do not remember only the suffering they have inflicted on us; remember too the fruits we brought forth thanks to this suffering-our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all of this. And when they come to judgment, let all the fruits which we have borne be their forgiveness.”

I read it and I remained there, transfixed. Tears welled up in my eyes. I thought about the context in which these words were written, a concentration camp. The summation of every evil humanity was capable of was distilled in that one place. How someone subjected to cruelties of that space could pen such words and pray such a prayer was beyond me. It was akin to the words Jesus prayed when he was being crucified:

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." (Luke 23:34)

It seems only a saint or superhuman could utter a prayer like that. Or perhaps it is the quintessentially human thing to do. Only a human has the possibility of rising above the fight-or-flight response, the "lizard brain" if you will. It would seem the advice given to Job in his suffering, "curse God and die", is more along the lines of what we would expect in this situation.

Though I didn't fathom the depths of forgiveness required to pray a prayer like that, I knew I had read words of transformation. I feared losing these words, so  I took a picture with my phone. From time to time, I look at these words. It is my recurring devotional. It seems that if one could pray this prayer, even in the face of harsh realities and vicious evil, one could be healed of anger and bitterness.  However, this prayer also raises some hard questions.

Was this a prayer of reconciliation? Certainly. But reconciliation requires confession and mutual understanding. The perpetrator and the victim must face the truth together. But at moment this was written, the perpetrators were quite busy with their their murderous work, eliminating what they saw as sub-human vermin. The victims had no way of knowing if the cosmic scales of justice would ever be balanced.

Does this prayer give evil a pass because the victims forgave their tormentors? Even if that were so, does that balance the scales for all of humanity?

“When history looks back, I want people to know that the Nazis could not kill millions of people with impunity." Simon Wiesenthal

In passing judgement on all the perpetrators of the Nazi extermination program during the trials at Nuremberg and Jerusalem, humanity established that mass murder is evil and those who participate in it must be called to account. 

Nevertheless, we remain with the challenge and question of how to make sense, or better yet, meaning, out of the evils and tragedies of life that we have experienced personally. The challenge is to choose what our response will be:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. - Viktor Frankl

Ultimately, there are the questions of forgiveness and redemption. The author of the prayer chose to forgive and redeem. It was a response in the face of an evil that could not be undone:

“The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility - of being unable to undo what one has done - is the faculty of forgiving. The remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. Both faculties depend upon plurality, on the presence and acting of others, for no man can forgive himself and no one can be bound by a promise made only to himself.” - Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

If all the evil that was perpetrated and all the lives that were lost were to have any meaning, somehow it must all be redeemed from the past for the present and the future. For the past up to the present, all we can do is to come to terms with the evil done against us, by forgiving:

"Forgiveness is giving up all hope for a better past."  Gerald G. Jampolsky

Forgiveness is not passivity. Forgiveness is a response to the truth of evil and the harm it has done. It is also a decision not to let evil adhere to our souls.

For the future we must promise to respond to evil and not to passively look away. A promise not to forget how the evil took root and manifested itself. And a promise not to let it gain a foothold in the future. 

As Hannah Arendt points out, these acts of forgiveness and promise are meaningless in isolation. The commitment of forgiveness and the commitment of promise must be made in the presence of others. The fruits of forgiveness and promise can only take root in the fertile soil of community as it did that day in Ravensbrück.