Running From

“Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.”

― Jonathan Haidt, “The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion”

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Dear Alex,

Why do we keep running from ourselves?

I awoke this morning with a running spree of headlines sent to my email by subscription:

Pfizer Seeks Full FDA Approval for Its Vaccine

‘Belonging is More Important than Facts’: the Age of Misinformation

The Second Life of Yi Lei’s Poetry

On the Border, Two Versions of One Immigration Reality

Behind the bold fonts, a track of stories follow our curiosity, being followed by our preferences. What I choose to read at breakfast, the news which I care more about and cater mostly to my feeds, has little to do with the headlines on print. In private, are we reading for drama or perspective? Are you running to your habitual storyline of reasoning and strife? Am I running out of time?

For what and who are we running to and from in the clocking of hands to hearts?

Reversing to our last headline above, we trail to its original report about migrants from Guatemala seeking asylum at the US-Mexico divide mended by the flow of the Rio Grande or the “Fierce River of the North” as named by the Spanish explorers. The last passage tells:

“After many of the children had waited more than three hours, a Border Patrol agent asked them to gather around. None of them had been fed, and there were no bathrooms nearby... As the group marched toward a large white van, a girl in the back who didn’t look older than five pulled her older sister’s arm with seemingly all her strength. The younger girl untucked her shirt from her pants and bent her knees to relieve herself, tilting her head up so as not to lose sight of the group. Moments later, as she struggled to button her pants, the older girl frantically grabbed her hand in one swift movement - the rest of the children were getting farther and farther away, and they could not risk staying behind.”

No names noted, the girls are tucked away and ever ticking in our visual fields, streaming in us the tinge of “vibe” you won’t be lulling to on TikTok 60-second videos.

For many pandemic months now, the Women’s Connect on Saturday night fellowship at Zoom has been practicing a question:

Where do you find Jesus in this headline, this one and that one?

We stumped ourselves, stupefied by big bad news, with bite-sized challenges. What can we do about it? Is there room to silence our denials and distractions - a reason to keep running for something bigger than our uni-verse?

For this coming weekend, your wife will lead us, ladies, in conversation about our afterthoughts of counterfeit idols. She e-mailed the group two weeks ago with an intrigue: How has your day been?

Our days are thin with meaning, a running maze more likely, wheels off course and deflated from clarity. I look forward to this day, a morning light to touch, clownish and curious, yours to run.

Yours,

Kate