Remembering

Yesterday I led a memorial service for the daughter of friends; friends who had been members of a church I once served. Doing such a service is both a professionally and emotionally complex thing for me. I won’t elaborate on that, though those of you who are retired ministers will know what I mean.

As we drove home after the service and the time of fellowship that followed — where genuine fellowship did take place — Linda said, “what good people,” referring not only to the parents of the woman who had died but to others, to their friends, who had come to comfort the grieving with their presence.

Her comment resonated as I read an essay this morning by Alan Jacobs, who teaches literature at Baylor. That essay, “Things They Carry” is about stocking “the carrier bags,” meaning the hearts and minds, of young people with those stories and words that will “help them live lives of quiet, durable wisdom even as the world swirls.” Life is difficult and our times are under deep shadow. Having an inner storehouse of “quiet and durable wisdom” is so necessary.

One of those stories, mentioned by Jacobs, is George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch. It contains, he notes, the “deeply moving commendation of those who ‘live faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’” While the people with whom we worshipped yesterday are quite alive, albeit moving slower than they once did, one way to describe their goodness is that they are those who “faithfully live a hidden life.” That is they are decent, kind, self-aware people who do good and brave things in the world on a daily basis, but without fanfare, acclaim or even notice.

We live now in what is described as “the attention economy.” It’s all about getting noticed, about gaining attention whether on social media or television or by turning yourself into a brand or becoming an on-line “influencer.” Personally, I prefer my “influencers” in person, in the flesh, not on-line.

In the attention economy, attention is measured (as is everything from your steps to time on-line). The more attention you garner, the more you matter. As well as the corollary. If you aren’t getting much attention, you must not matter much, maybe not at all. So we are regaled, really assaulted, by the tawdry and disgusting stories of the Kimberly Guilfoyles, Pete Hegseth’s and various Trumps . . . winners all in the attention economy.

George Eliot and Alan Jacobs remind us of different stories, the stories from great literature, but also from quiet lives all around us of those good people who “faithfully live a hidden life,” many who “rest in unvisited tombs.” So much of what makes life livable and bearable owes to such people.

While Jacobs does not make this point explicitly, to know these stories, to gain the capacity to see such lives, is one of the very best reasons to study the humanities, i.e. history, literature, art and religion. But these days the humanities are having a hard time garnering students. The humanities, you see, do not promise jobs, certainly not high-paying ones. They promise something else . . . humanity.

I’d add that this is another reason for being part of a church. I have never served nor been a part of a congregation where the weren’t people “faithfully living hidden lives.” Not true of every one in a church of course. There are some there to garner attention or notice. As Augustine reminded us, “There are some the church has that God does not have; and some God has that the church does not have.”

Moreover, we are all mixed bags. But there are always “good people,” to be found there in the church whose goodness lies at least in part in their awareness of their own faults or failures and their need of God’s grace.

As we are assaulted by the stories of faithless yet relentlessly publicized people, it is easy to get a skewed and despairing view of the world. We miss the quiet and hidden lives of goodness that are around us. But they are there. I’ve seen them. I was with some of them yesterday.

Another novelist E. M. Forester wrote, “Good people keep life from being a failure. Because their private goodness cannot be wholly transferred to public affairs, life is tragic.”

We live not just in tragic times, but in evil ones as evidenced by Hegseth’s plans for a public execution, Guilfoyle’s brazen influence peddling and Trump’s full embrace of Putin and the Russian talking points on its invasion of Ukraine. Thanks be to God that even now, and yes, all around us many people are “faithfully living hidden lives.”