The phrase “mission creep” crept into business parlance in the early nineties, when your scribe, for his sins, was learning the ABC’s of business management. I remember dropping the phrase like a shiny coin into conversation – clink! – how cool.
Just now the phrase returned, as I reflected on the evolution of these missives over their eleven years – only in reverse. These daily howdies began with no mission except to advise my chums during a business crisis. When the crisis passed, the missives continued, because writer and readers enjoyed this chance to chat.
As our audience grew – and nation sank – a persistent theme of these howdies gradually hardened into purpose. A mission crept toward me, like a cat stalking a bird. Something was wrong with our American soul. We were grim when we should be glad, cruel when we should be kind, greedy when we should be gracious. Our practical missteps arose from our spiritual confusion. Soul is the hazy realm of poet and preacher, not journalist or expert, impossible to track or study with clarity. But we know it is there – in person and nation – that invisible but convincing conviction “who we are” – what nineteenth-century German scholars (who labeled everything) labeled the Weltanschauung.
What was wrong with us? My prose flailed and will continue to, for the soul, like the pileated woodpecker, while much heard is seldom glimpsed. But in a word, we had forgotten how to love.
Any sane person knows that love is the only persuasive reason for being. We exist for others, strive for others, make for others, behave for others. We mean our lives (whether we use such language) to be a blessing to others. We hope to be remembered favorably. Living solely for oneself – one’s comfort, wealth, power, glory – is a sorry road to nowhere. Literature is rife with stories about sad souls yearning and sometimes learning to love.
What set America and much of the civilized world slipping into selfish solipsism isn’t obvious, but slipping we surely were, from the audacious optimism of JFK’s Inaugural Address to Reagan’s “Are YOU better off” to the Nameless One’s ruthless relentless flouting of any decent norm. We were becoming people we would not want to know and a nation we’d loathe if it wasn’t our own. Our sickness was reflected in mistakes – political choices, justice, foreign relations, science, health, education, history – in any direction one looked. We the people were going down the tubes – and some of us, maybe many, opposed this, but we were scattered, and to exert influence needed to coalesce. This transformed me and others into preachers, each with our emphasis, but together reiterating, To save ourselves we must learn again to love.
Love, here, is a not squishy, smiley Easter bunny, but a hard and constant striving to bring our conduct and community closer to the principles embodied in the Sermon on the Mount, the Golden Rule, our Constitution, the Gettysburg Address. It is to live our lives for WE not ME, to defy tyranny with poetry, to reprove and remove the purveyors of evil among us. It is to remind ourselves constantly of our calling and goad our reluctant bodies to battle. Mission crept as our congregation swelled. Willy-nilly, I had become a secular preacher, no superstitious mumbo-jumbo (at least most of the time), because Love is not a nice-to-have, not decorative, but essential to our survival and success as human beings. We must love or die.
No matter whether I persuade, I must preach this creed, for our need is desperate and will not abate. Love leaves me no choice.