Author: Stephen Reno

The rain had been heavy through the night, but the morning dawned with brilliant sunshine, so I decided to have my morning meditation out on the porch. The breeze was light, just gently rustling the leaves, when a diamond caught my eye. Actually, it was a single leaf, wet from the rain, twinkling down at me from the tree opposite. It so arrested my attention that I marveled at the simplicity of its beauty and its mesmerizing effect on me. And then, I looked down to my meditation prompt, a poem titled “Presence,” by the Irish writer John O’Donohue. He’d written “Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention.” Clearly this little leaf was one of those quiet miracles, posing unwittingly as a diamond.

O’Donohue writes frequently about “wonder” and its power to take us out of ourselves and to lead us to frontiers of awareness. How rare such moments are in my own life, I realized with embarrassment. This experience of unexpected beauty stimulated so many related reactions. And then, from the other room, came the all-too-familiar sound from my smartphone that a text had arrived. It almost pulled me back into that world, but I resisted and stayed in my chair.

So much of the time, as O’Donohue notes, we run along the “rail tracks of purpose.” Routines and schedules, obligations, and responsibilities: These all cause us to be productive, no doubt, but perhaps they also keep us so directed that our sense of wonder — that capacity we see so much in young children — is frustrated.

So, then my meditation turned to the tension that exists between the openness to wonder and the distraction, the control imposed by the very technologies that purportedly make our lives better. Efficient? Yes. Richer? I doubt it. And now comes AI, with its great promises. No Luddite, I, but still I wonder, how wonder will survive. AI may be able eventually to replicate human reasoning, but I rather think the gift of wonder will always be uniquely our own.

Noah benShea wrote, “Eternity is any moment opened with patience.” Patience and wonder in tandem. Not a bad start to my day!

You can contact Steve Reno at [email protected].

Growing up in a small town in California, I learned early on there were two places where I was to be on my best behavior. One was our parish church and the other was the town library. Both were somewhat monumental structures in terms of their outward appearance: the former a red brick Gothic with a very tall steeple, and the other a granite classical Greek style building. Both were presided over by equally imposing and formidable people: the former by Monsignor Jacobs, and the latter by Miss Emily Richardson. In their own distinctive ways, these two exercised considerable influence over me and my contemporaries. In church, we learned religious teachings, ritual, music and a good smattering of Latin. At the library, we learned that information, and eventually knowledge, is acquired by hard work, persistence and curiosity.

Miss Richardson was a strict teacher, but one whose love for her profession came to the fore when she saw the expression of discovery on our faces after helping us find a reference or a book that took us to new places. Of course, we had to obey the rules: no unnecessary talking, never reshelve a book yourself, and never write on or in, other otherwise deface, any library materials. During our pre-teens, when the hormones were stirring, she would carefully monitor our visits to those stacks where there were to be found graphic anatomical illustrations, asking if there were a specific research paper we might be doing that required such materials. Shamefaced, we’d slide back to our chairs.

At the regular library board meetings, however, Miss Richardson was a completely different person. A passionate advocate for her collection to be as up-to-date as possible, she would forcefully rebut the objection of the occasional patron who expressed the view that Peyton Place or Lady Chatterley’s Lover should not be in our stacks. “Our library should be a place where the judgment of the librarian to select and the judgment of the reader to read can both be accommodated without conflict.” She once affirmed. That value stayed with me, and I’ll never forget how embarrassed I was when Miss Richardson, having read a book report I’d written for my freshman high school English class, commented, “Stephen. You should be reading better literature than this.”

My story harks back to a time when professional judgment was valued, and its exercise respected. That is in sharp contrast with the challenges of librarians today. A friend recently told me she had resigned from her town’s library board because she could not find a way to mediate the good-faith efforts of her librarian and the protests of concerned parents and even local legislators demanding the removal of certain books.

As I reflect on my early years, I appreciate the complementary of the First Amendment right to read and the First Amendment right to religion. It is a balance we must work harder to maintain.

You can contact Steve Reno at [email protected].

One of my favorite childhood memories is of those family Thanksgiving dinners when, after everyone had finished the meal, the adults sat around the table telling stories and just reminiscing. For some reason, I enjoyed especially hearing about family events that took place before I was born. After hearing such stories, I admit, I looked differently at my aunts and uncles as I now saw them as characters in a larger family drama that extended many years earlier. As I grew older, I often found an opportunity to ask them for further details. Taken together, these stories and their subsequent developments grounded me in a way I didn’t understand at the time.

Now fast forward many years and the young people are my own adult children. The same phenomenon seems to be repeating as they ask their mother and me about details of our childhood, college years, times before we met, and subsequent events before they were born. What has helped greatly in the occasional telling of our family story is the journal I’ve kept for more than 50 years. While not replete with details, it does record events large and small that complement my own memory of the past. And now, as I read back through them, I appreciate even more my record of some of those post-Thanksgiving dinner story sessions of my childhood and can share them. They help me satisfy what seems now to be an apparently inherited curiosity about our family’s past.

Across society these days, curiosity about family history takes many forms, from the popular PBS program Finding Our Roots and the NBC series Who Do You Think You Are? to such widely used genealogical tools as Ancestry.com or 23 and Me. Templates for making a family tree are plentiful and becoming easier to populate thanks to online access to a trove of databases. And if you think journaling is a quaint custom of earlier days, Google “journals” and you will find websites that will sell you a book in which to record your experiences or even how to get started. Storyworth, an online facility, sends the subscriber a prompt each week to write a family story and then collects and prints them in a book at the end of the year.

With the recent death of my last surviving uncle, I have now become the eldest of my family generation. So it is not surprising that now it is my turn to encourage the younger generation to begin adding to our family’s growing storybook.

Might it be your turn to do something similar?

You can contact Steve Reno at [email protected].

By the time you read this, December will have slipped into January and another year will have ended. A time of transition, this — new calendars, new dates on checks (if you still write them), a new tax year, and the passing of the shortest day of the year. As has been my custom for many years, I pull out my journal for the year just ending and read over the entries that range from a simple recounting of daily events to musings about family, work or national happenings. There are regular mentions of the books I am reading (or want to read), of conversations with friends and occasionally strangers met by chance. Some of the earliest entries record promises made to myself back in January that I’ll get more exercise, follow less news, FaceTime my children and grandchildren, meditate each morning and take walks with my wife.

In the back of the journal, however, there is a list of the names of relatives, friends and colleagues who have died that year. The list is much longer than a single year, however, as it is one to which names are added regularly and it stretches back five years to when I began so noting the deaths. Akin, I recognize, to the Litany of the Saints that was a liturgical practice in my Catholic youth, I read down that now very long list (more than 50) and softly speak the names. The very sound of a deceased’s name immediately brings to mind some memory of a time spent with them — an event, a snippet of conversation or an image of something they have done. While there is no “Ora pro nobis,” as in the liturgy of my past, there is my own silent expression of gratitude for the time I did have with them. Each name is a so very distinct person who entered my life and left an impression. At the end, the litany itself is a mosaic of vastly different individuals who, together, have enriched my life and to whom I owe great gratitude.

After the hustle and stress of preparations for Christmas, followed by the celebrations of the day itself, there comes each year a more quiet time. The daily emails are fewer, there are fewer appointments to be met, and even, on occasion, a day completely free and clear of obligations. These are truly sacred times in the sense that religions the world over built them into their calendars to give people time to reflect and resolve. They are like a “Sabbath” for the year, a time when we leave off ordinary responsibilities and pay attention to our inner selves as we reflect on the year passing, those we have lost, and begin to set a new course for the year ahead. Soon enough the routine will be reestablished and these treasured days will have passed. One solid resolution is to not lose them in the moment of their quietude and reflection.

As more than one observer has noted, most Americans behave with respect to political campaigns and elections as they do toward sports teams and competitions. They have their favorites and then generally sit back and watch. True, some go out and stump for their candidate (or put out lawn signs), but generally most of us just follow the contest by way of cable news or local TV channels. And what those bring us these days, especially in the closing hours before Election Day, is a constant stream of strident messaging that caricatures opposing candidates as irresponsible, incompetent, or perhaps even dangerous. What is especially common is the format of these ads, whether on TV or in other forms of the media. They typically feature an especially unfavorable black and white photo of the opponent, probably snapped at an off moment along the campaign trail, while the favored candidate, featured smiling and in a color-rich setting, is portrayed as trustworthy, honest and friendly.

By extension — and probably without our adverting to the fact — this caricaturing of political candidates can easily lead us to include in our opinion those who support candidates we oppose. In short — and how many times have we all heard this? — they simply become “those people.” It’s a short step, for example, from portraying a candidate who favors a woman’s right to free choice to viewing that candidate’s supporters as “baby killers.” The political ads are replete with such exaggerations; indeed, that is what gives them the desired impact.

In his book Faces of the Enemy: Reflection of the Hostile Imagination, the philosopher and social observer Sam Keen documents the many ways, over time, we tend to conceptualize those who are our opponents as less than ourselves. In the extreme cases of warfare, the dehumanized enemy is portrayed as just that, less than human, and therefore easier to destroy.

But even in the political sphere such characterization can lead to condescension, disregard or even disdain. The higher the moral stakes, the greater the danger of regarding “the others” as unworthy or dangerous. The polarization in our society today, with its attendant imaging, makes the point.

Can we, will we break through this barrier of prejudice and start to engage in civil conversation with those who hold views opposite to ours? We cannot change everything, but we can start by reaching out and seeking not to convince others but to understand how they take the positions they do. The danger of not trying is to further harden difference, and that makes working toward a common good impossible.

Over lunch a few years ago, a friend asked me a simple, but very direct question: “Steve: when you think of the Holocaust, what image comes to mind?” It caught me off guard as we had been talking about politics prior to the upcoming election. I paused, thought for a moment — my mind flashing through a series of recalled images — and replied: “The picture of an emancipated Elie Wiesel, in a prison suit, standing in a bunk room with similarly starved inmates. The other is the open pits with thousands of bones uncovered in the course of liberating the Nazi concentration camps.”

“Yes,” he said, but a fuller picture — an important additional facet — is an image of the German neighbors who peered from behind their lace curtains, watching, as the Gestapo dragged away their Jewish neighbors. Their silence, their inaction, to what was being done, while understandable given their concern for their own safety, over time, had allowed a totalitarian regime to take such measures without opposition.

That lunch conversation and its insights have stayed with me, deeply impressing on my conscience.

This month marks the appearance of Ken Burns’ new documentary, The Holocaust. While some of Ken’s films give us reason to celebrate the beauty, places and people of our country, this has a very different intention and impact. It is a historical documentary but also a cautionary tale.

A cautionary tale sets out a story, the roots of an event, the impact of an event, and the lessons to be drawn from it. It invites — nay, challenges us — to look around at our present situation and ask, “Could that happen here?” His film does and the answer is “yes.” But with a qualifier: “It is happening now.”

Institutions and movements have arisen since the Holocaust to amplify and instruct regarding the horrors and the lessons of that tragic time, but despite those, bigotry, racism, intolerance, extreme nationalism and supremacy have mushroomed in countries around the world. “Ethnic cleansing” — the term itself proclaiming that only one “pure race” can/should inhabit a country, has set tribalism against multiculturalism. “Difference” has become the criterion of choice, its impact felt in the political ads that blanket our state now in the days leading up to the midterm elections and likely to follow into the voting booths as well.

But we are a country of indigenous people and immigrants. Of the latter, no matter how long we have lived here, we came from someplace else, and we have made our way and enriched this country, this noble experiment in multicultural democracy. To honor our forebears and their epic journey — regardless of race, religion or culture — we must not wait till we can look out our windows to see what is happening. The time to resist is now. Otherwise, the option is complicity. And by now we should know where that can lead.