In the years before I went off to seminary, I had a job that allowed me a lot of free time. Partly this was because my boss was incredibly disorganized, so you either had nothing to do or everything to do. So in these frequent times in which there was nothing to do I mainly looked at stuff on the Internet. Generally speaking my Internet use was not benign in nature instead I interacted like an outrage junkie in search of my next hit. What I mean by this is that I largely went searching for things that would make me mad and allow for me to get upset. Some of the outrage was about the Episcopal Church (at that time I was in the Diocese of the San Joaquin where anger at the Episcopal Church was an integral part of our spirituality) but I did not stop there. I was outraged by letters to the editor, the religion section of The Fresno Beeand people who did not think that the Steelers were awesome. Mainly though, I was outraged at politics – some at the State level (I mean Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor) but my usual focus was on the national level. I kept myself in a self-inflicted tizzy for much of the time. And then I went off to seminary and it all stopped. I would be lying if I said my outrage abated because I had a David like experience where a Nathaniel doppelganger told me that I was that man. My outrage abated largely because I did not have the free time to search for things about which to be outraged. It was sort of like going into rehab, the thing that caused the problem was largely removed. It was a while before I even noticed that it had happened and then I noticed something else. My life did not change. The grocery stores still had food, my dentist still told me that I should really floss and I still did not find soccer to be very interesting. There was no real connection between my outrage at this or that person, event or philosophy and how I lived my day to day life. And this was the beginning of something of a very obvious revelation for me. The people or things I encounter on a day to day basis not only continued to function without my outrage but they also were the things that have the most influence on me and I on them.
I bring this up today because we have just finished an election cycle that many have touted as the most important in a generation. I do not have an electrified election cycle importance measurer so I cannot attest to the validity of such claims, but I do have to say that my life looked no different the Tuesday of election day as it did on the following Wednesday. My local community was just the same. Those who wanted us to get worked up for the election promised that if the wrong party were elected we would be either journeying down the path of a Maoist Great Leap Forward or preparing for Kristallnacht II (this time with twice the Kristall). But none of that happened. The federal government will continue to spend money that it does not have and everyone will continue to be mad at the other side (even those whose side won).
But here is the thing that I would ask us to think about which has to do with where our energies can be of most use. As I said at the beginning I used to spend tremendous amounts of time and energy being upset with people who most likely did not know that I existed. What if I had spent that time and energy doing something that might actually make a difference to myself and others. What if I had visited my grandmother, volunteered at a shelter or weeded my garden. Certainly none of these things sound as grandiose as saving the country from eminent destruction, but they are things that I can actually do and things that will make a very small difference.
I remember years ago hearing one of the Apollo astronauts speak (I cannot remember who it was, maybe Pete Conrad). In talking he recounted an incident he had had as he was preparing to go to the moon. He was finishing up doing something on the Apollo rocket and he ran into an engineer who had designed one small part, I believe it was a switch. The man asked him how that switch was working. Conrad (if that is who it was) responded that it worked great. Afterward he said that he remembered thinking that this whole Apollo project was not going to fail because of the hard work that everyone put into even the smallest piece of the lunar rocket. Think about it the Apollo 12 rocket weighed 101,127 pounds and was 363 feet tall, a switch pales in comparison to the sum of the whole. But it was thousands of people making thousands of tiny things that gave us the whole. The Apollo project worked because everyone did their part. I think that is what we need to get back to, doing our small seemingly insignificant part. We have tried where all we do is worry and cajole about the big things and I don’t think it has worked all that well. Maybe it is time to get back to the small things that we can do something about - the things that in total make the larger much better. It may be counter intuitive but the more we focus on the small, the better we will make that which is large.