My page stares back at me. Much might be said, but what’s worth saying? What benefit in one more despondent voice?

I am not a journalist, conveying information. Others do that with more knowledge and skill. Bless them. My beat is how to respond. How do we adjust our thoughts, hopes, consciousness, behavior to our changed conditions? What are we to make of the news? What is the news making of us?

What might these events mean? Mean is one of those words, like love, which, while difficult to define, is readily understood. It measures spiritual impact. Say “this means a lot to me,” I’ll know what you mean, though please don’t press me to explain.

That we are living through a meaningful hour any who think would agree. Wars, thefts, assassinations, violence on the streets, lies, vile and violent rhetoric make this moment unprecedented in living experience. We grope for analogies – Rome invaded by barbarians, the French Revolution, Hitler’s Germany – to fix ourselves in history, but these are states of mind, not states we’ve occupied. For my seventy-three years, the future of America was never in more than momentary doubt. Our spectacular achievement as a nation confirmed the promise of our Constitution. We had our quarrels, shortcomings, but “we the people” was our rallying cry or (a similar idea) e pluribus unum, “out of many one.” The decency of the majority could be relied on: in a dire moment, we’d “do the right thing,” we always had. But now? Have we the people, seemingly overnight, turned loathsome hate-mongers, plundering from the underprivileged to pamper privilege, embracing dictators, waging war against fellow citizens, prevaricating to prevail, gleefully espousing cruelty, trampling freedoms like thugs? Is the house afire we believed would last forever. Does America have a future we can look forward to? Do we deserve one?

It’s impossible to derive a story’s moral without knowing how it ends. Imagine if the Christ’s story ended on Good Friday, not Easter Sunday: not much uplift there! The unraveling of America, if it’s not reversed, might supply another sad chapter in the thick book of imperial catastrophes. The Etruscans, Greeks, Romans, Mongols, Chinese, Russians, Venetians, Dutch, French, British, they all go down to the dust who, just yesterday, imagined themselves invulnerable and supreme. It’s as if the divine were a sadistic joker:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedAs flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.They kill us for their sport. (King Lear)

Or might we the people rekindle our courage and coalesce around old notions of justice, equality, compassion, generosity, peace, and truth? We are being bad just now – bad beyond our most nightmarish expectations – but mightn’t this be a fever from which we wake? Am I really one of this despicable tribe? What a blow to my hopes! What a sinker to my pride!

Each life is a morality tale, the moral of which can’t be guessed till the tale’s told. America dangles between horror and greatness. Will we commit suicide or recover our senses? Might we reillumine that shining city on the hill?

We wait. Like T.S. Eliot’s fearful women of Canterbury,

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published We wait, we waitAnd the saints and martyrs wait, for those who shall be martyrs and saints…Destiny waits in the hand of God, not in the hands of statesmen…

I can’t help hoping. But then I check my hopes, lest disappointment undo me. I open the morning’s headlines with eager dread – eager for crumbs of encouragement, dreading what I’ll find.

What’s worth saying in such an hour? Nothing. Yet we must say.

To remind ourselves we are not alone.