We Have an Announcement to Make

Archangel Gabriel, 1130 - 1200 AD

A little over two thousand years ago, an Angel delivered a message to a young woman. Most of us know the content of his announcement: You will conceive and bear a son… the child to be born will be holy and will be called the Son of God. Most of us also know how Mary responded to this message, with a phrase that expresses the summit of human freedom: yes. 

Today each of us will receive many proposals, messages, and announcements. In all their variety, perplexity, and cacophony, they will each convey the exact same tidings: 

You – who sit at your desk, or on your couch, or cross-legged on your yoga mat, or in the front seat of your car – you will conceive and bear – in your thoughts and in your words, in what you do and in what you decide not to do…

•  in the spreadsheet you fill out, 

• in the diaper you change,

•  in the weeds you pull up, 

• in the teen you teach to drive, 

• in each vaccination you give, 

• during each audition, 

• as you scrub the bathroom tiles, 

• with each stamp you affix, 

• with each stroke on your keyboard, 

• and in all the memos you read 

– a son… the Son of God.

You and I gain nothing from Mary’s yes unless we each begin to seek out and recognize and affirm the incarnate body of eternal Love in the fragile and fleeting stuff of our own daily existence. If only it were enough to say yes once a day, or once weekly, when we respond amen to the body of infinite Good on earth! Unfortunately, one daily amen is worth less than none at all if it betrays a lie at the heart of our lives: that we say yes with our lips, while our hearts, at every other moment, are far from him. 

Christ is present in the feet of the person who delivers the mail, the emails of my accountant, the eyes of the barista, the hands of my daughter, the voice of my boss, the heart of the person I like least... 

But, but, but… my postman is incompetent, the accountant misses deadlines, the barista is surly, my daughter slapped me, the boss just fired me, my neighbor gossiped about me, and everyone believed her. 

Nonetheless, Gabriel announces to you, and to me, that the Holy Spirit intends to overshadow each of these circumstances and that Christ will be born in them, whether we find them convenient or destructive.  

Some might say that Mary’s own immaculate conception conferred on her a strength that allowed her earthly life to manifest a continuous fiat, while we, poor slobs, are incapable of becoming a walking talking yes. But let’s not fool ourselves; once baptized, you and I can repeat, with King David, there is no thing I lack… We might tremble at these words  because of all the responsibility they imply. 

Responsibility: the urgency to respond. 

When the mail carrier drops a letter into a puddle, or delivers a package for someone who moved out over a decade ago, or feeds your ebay purchase to the neighbor’s dog, saying yes to Christ’s concrete and fleshly presence in your interaction with him does not mean endorsing incompetence. 

Instead, we’re invited to recognize and affirm every slightest and most ephemeral spark of Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Justice, and Love that waits, with divine patience, to be born in us, given to us. 

These glints require kindling before they can burst into a conflagration: I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already aflame! 

How will you respond?

May We Be as Free as Simeon and Anna

Ring Around the Rosie, by Edward Henry Potthast

By Suzanne M. Lewis

Step into any Catholic church, early on a weekday morning, and you will observe a ragtag contingent of volunteers reporting for duty. Many of these, with gray heads and bent backs, will shuffle or limp, often with the help of a cane. Their presence is easy to overlook in the Sunday crowd, who arrive to fulfill an obligation; but at daily Mass we can clearly see the faces of the free men and women in our midst. And most of those faces are wrinkled.

If God were to come to earth and mix his life into ours, according to a schedule, at precise addresses in every city and town across America, could you imagine any appointment more important for you to keep? Could you imagine wanting anything more than to show up each day for this stupendous, recurring miracle?

* * *

When my Grandma was in her eighties, one of her daughters noticed dust bunnies lurking in the corners of her house. In a shaming tone, my aunt said, "Mom, I remember when you used to get down on your hands and knees to scrub the baseboards with a toothbrush! Now look at what's become of your home. How could you let it get like this?" Grandma replied, "Did it ever occur to you that I was out of my mind when I did that?" Then she broke into gales of laughter at the very thought of her past lunacy.

* * *

As I grow older, I'm struck by the elderly people who play a part in the stories surrounding Jesus's birth and earliest life: Elizabeth and Zechariah, Gaspard (the grizzled magus), and then Simeon and Anna. A long established tradition in the Church also imagines St. Joseph as an old man.

These Gospel figures remind us of Abraham and Sarah, who followed God's challenge to "count the stars," while each† laughed in delighted wonder at the astonishment of an "impossible" child.

Simeon and Anna bear a gift for the rest of us. When given a choice between the busyness and demands of ordinary life, they each chose instead, day in and day out, to keep their appointment with wonder. We can follow their example. This is freedom.

* * *

One morning, as our motley band filed out after daily Mass, some small children noticed that it had rained while we were inside. My friend Wayne, who was 93, stopped dead in his tracks as the kids ran past him to jump in the puddles. Wayne stood and stared, his mouth open with surprise and his eyes full of joy as the happy children stomped and splashed water with abandon. He stayed like that until the game was over and the kids had been bundled away to their car. Then he turned to me, laughed, and said, "God must feel as delighted when he looks at us as I feel when I see those children play in the puddles! He loves us and enjoys us so much!"

* * *

February 2, 2021 marks the five year anniversary of 501(c)3 nonprofit status for Revolution of Tenderness. On this day, we renew our pledge to take up God's challenge to count the stars, and we are dead earnest in our commitment to laugh at the wonder of new life and light that Christ constantly pours out and leaves puddled everywhere around us.

Most of all, we promise never to let dust bunnies disturb our sanity.

† Please see: Genesis 17:17: "Then Abraham fell on his face and laughed..." and also Genesis 21:6: “Then Sarah said, 'God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.'"

Your One Wild and Precious Life: End of Year Campaign

Our theme for Festival of Friendship 2021
Photo courtesy of: Sister Thea Bowman Cause for Canonization

by Suzanne M. Lewis

We are full of wonder and gratitude to announce that, due to the generosity of our most committed donors, we have already received over $8,000 in gifts; this brings us more than halfway to our end of year campaign goal of $14,000. We need you to join us in fostering dialogue and healing in the public sphere. Your contribution makes you a standard-bearer in the cause to build a culture of encounter and mutual respect.

We have found that the best tools for fostering true dialogue and effecting real healing within our broken culture are humanities education and free cultural events.

Humanities Education

Despite an overall increase of 29% in bachelor’s degrees awarded over the ten-year period ending in 2016, the steady decline in the number of humanities degrees conferred has only accelerated. In 1967, 17.2% of all degrees conferred were in the humanities. By 2014, that figure was down to 6.1%. Why should this precipitous drop concern us?

The very name “humanities” provides the answer: the various subjects that make up the humanities provide a curriculum for becoming more human. The more we lose touch with the humanities, the more we lose access to certain dimensions of our own humanity.

“Where scientific observation addresses all phenomena existing in the real world, scientific experimentation addresses all possible real worlds, and scientific theory addresses all conceivable real worlds, the humanities encompass all three of these levels and one more, the infinity of all [imaginable] worlds.” ― biologist, Edward O. Wilson

The humanities teach us how to extract and absorb facts from a document, how to interpret data, particularly in relation to the whole field of knowledge, and how to evaluate whether a claim is true or false; they also show us how to formulate an argument and find evidence to support our own claims; most importantly, they put us in conversation with others who grapple with the same human questions that preoccupy us, expose us to other perspectives, and open us to continuous learning – even teaching us how to learn from those with whom we disagree.

A quick visit to a handful of social media platforms, or a cursory scan of the headlines for competing news outlets, provides overwhelming evidence of how the tragic decrease in humanities education has had devastating effects on our public discourse.

“Depth of understanding involves something which is more than merely a matter of deconstructive alertness; it involves a measure of interpretative charity and at least the beginnings of a wide responsiveness.” ― English literature scholar, Stefan Collini

With these considerations in mind, Revolution of Tenderness has founded Convivium: A Journal of Arts, Culture, and Testimony, Convivium Press, and the Festival of Friendship. Each of these initiatives provides educational tools and programming to introduce humanities education into the public sphere. We sell our journal, and all other educational resources, at cost so that they may be accessible to the greatest number of people. Our free cultural programming offers content from pre-eminent scholars and experts while modeling the practice of respectful dialogue.

Free Cultural Events

The annual Festival of Friendship, our largest free and open cultural event, contributes a celebratory dimension to our educational work. This year, though we had to move the Festival online, we had nearly 1,300 attendees, a new record for us!

While our printed texts, videos, and other materials provide crucial substance, our events confer a body with living, human features. Without this living body, learning becomes a dry and toilsome duty, a “prize” to capture and use, or a meaningless intellectual exercise. Instead, our free events serve as life-giving feasts for the human heart and mind.

Our next exciting project will involve a commission for a new piece of music from composer Richard Danielpour, who spoke at the Festival of Friendship last month. The projected performance will take place in early 2021. We’ll provide further details as they become available.

Our working hypothesis, that “all things cry out in unison for one thing: Love” (13th Century friar and poet, Jacopone da Todi), allows us to “assume an extended shared world” (Stefan Collini) and meet anyone and everyone with curiosity and an embrace. Our festive gatherings serve as laboratories, where speakers and performers present their findings and launch new experiments in human flourishing.

Your generous support for Revolution of Tenderness makes you a creative protagonist who generates a culture of dialogue in the public arena. Please contribute to our end of year campaign today. Revolution of Tenderness is a 501(c)3 nonprofit. All donations are tax-deductible.