North of Normal

So I'm reading about St. Symeon Stylites this weekend, an account of his life written by a man who knew him. It says that Symeon “told how he heard the Gospel utterance which declares blessed those who weep and mourn.”

History is made and changed by people. Sometimes great, sometimes terrible, sometimes they surprise you, most of the time they don't. We lose sight of that, I think. Events are done things to us, over and unchanging. We look at the world actors and see them as objects. They are static now because they have done already. We study what they did and forget that once they were alive, and once they were doing. They had choices, options that they had to weigh and consider. We know what they chose, and many times we know why (or think we do), so maybe it's not so important to look at the roads not taken.

Every day, we've got a trillion decisions to make. And that's just on ground level. There's a presidential race coming up, a chance to change history, and according to this morning's polls, the outcome isn't quite certain. It could be thrilling, historic. But today, Truman over Dewey isn't a breathtaking upset, it's a fact. We've seen the picture a thousand times, gotten a little chuckle at the irony, and missed the point. We think it was inevitable that he'd win, because he won. It wasn't. People did that, ordinary folks. A guy in a fedora who wished he looked more like Gary Cooper; a woman who still feels a little bit brazen in the voting booth, doing something that was once forbidden.

But I'm at the ground level again, and that's not entirely my point. Truman was just a guy, too. Waiting for returns, he probably paced back and forth, snapping at Bess in his tension. And that was just election night, something out of his hands. He was just a guy, a person with choices to make, when they told him about the Manhattan project. Your textbook gives you so little: he didn't know about it, they told him, in no time at all he had to make a decision. Did it keep him up at night? Did he get mad at Franklin for leaving him this mess? Did he wish for a moment that he could have consulted his own father? Whatever you would have done, know that Truman did just that, because he was just a guy, just like you.

That gets lost when we study history sometimes. He made his decision, and it was the right one because it worked, and it must have been easy because he made it in less than two sentences. At least, it reads that way. We get the facts, the influences, but we lose the man. And Truman becomes a statue, an automaton. Like Jefferson and Adams and Washington before him. Like Elizabeth I and Henry VIII and William the Conqueror before them. Like Constantine, like Socrates, like Tutankhamen. We know who they were and what they did, but we don't know them. They were people. They had personalities, and all the faults and virtues and foibles that come with that have been washed out by time.

Except—and this is the best part about studying history—it doesn't always work. The soul of a person is a sparkling gem, set in gold. There's only so much you can wash out, cover up, ignore. It will shine through the clouds of time, a glint of someone real out of the past. In a letter, Ben Franklin described George Washington at the Continental Congress, cracking walnuts in his bare hands—can’t you just see that? Ill-fitting dentures and an itchy wig and sometimes, things are so much easier on a battlefield then in a stuffy room in Philadelphia. And in that moment, you see him, George, the general and the man, someone more real than a face on a dollar bill.

St. Symeon read that blessed are they who morn and it moved him. To terrifying and demented lengths, if you read the rest of his story, but still. It's a common passage. Lots of people have heard it. Lots of people have been moved by it. I have been. I parse the words, and pick them apart: To be blessed is to be in the presence of the divine. When you mourn, you are blessed. God is with you in your sorrow. It's a comfort to me, because it means that I am not alone. And Symeon, out there on the plain minding his shepherdy business, heard those words. Who knows what he was mourning, or even if he was. Maybe it was just the idea that there is a God who will bless your tears that caught his attention. Whatever the case, he was motivated. He spent years trying to perfect himself through pain and isolation to get closer to this God—to put himself into a kind of perpetual mourning, to be then ever blessed?

Part of me, and not a part I particularly am proud of, wants to dismiss Symeon as a generic nut. I try to get all Psych 101 on him and wonder why he felt the need to punish himself like he did. I want to think that God wants you to help people, not paste yourself into a mud hut with no food—what good could that do? I want to roll my eyes and shake my head. But Symeon heard that blessed are those who mourn. I've read that, too. As have you, and a hundred million other people in between Symeon and I. Through that we are linked, a chain of people, just folks, all over time and the world, who mourn and are blessed.

And that's what I love about history.